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Handling sounds and video in a concordance

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The point of it

Suppose you do a concordance of "elephant" and want to hear how the word is actually spoken in context. Is the last vowel /ə/ or /ᴂ/? Does the second vowel sound like "i" or "e" or "u" or a schwa?

 

How to do it...

If you have defined tags which refer to multimedia files, and if there are any such tags in the "tag-context" of a given concordance line, you can hear or see the source multimedia. The tag will be parsed to identify the file needed, if necessary downloading it from a web address, and then played.  

For TED talks, use the srt_video.tag file supplied with WordSmith.

 

Video files play if the free VLC Media Player is installed (see http://www.vlcapp.com/). The next screenshot below shows a concordance line with, in the Tag column, the mark-up saying that the source text and the video file have the same file-name (except that the latter ends .AVI and the former .TXT). A double-click on the Tag (yellow highlighted cell) brought up the video screen you can see below,

 

video_display

and that has now played to the tenth second, then paused. You can see in the case of this particular video that there is a sub-title with the same words that are in the concordance above (though there is no guarantee you will see sub-titles for all videos).

 

If you build up a collection of TED talks like these where the same video in English has transcripts in several languages,

 

SRT files converted

you can get to see the different translations:

 

translation transcripts of a video file

by choosing View | Show related txts in the menu.

 

show related txts menu

 

Note: If you want to see the whole text of a given line, double-click it and the relevant translation text file will open in Notepad.

 

You can also play video files in Aligner and can do parallel concordancing (where you see a word in one language and its translations in others).

 

 

See also: Multi-media Tag syntax, Playing the video, Obtaining Sound and Video files, Handling Tags, Making a Tag File, Showing Nearest Tags in Concord, Tag Concordancing, Types of Tag, Viewing the Tags, Using Tags as Text Selectors, Tags in WordList