In the realm of bilingual print books, there are many "side-by-side" story books in which one page tells a story in one language, and the facing page tells the same story in another language. This allows language students to quickly glance from one page to the other when they are struggling to understand the story.
I'm trying to work out the best way to replicate this in a Kindle book. Ideally, I'd like a way to show both languages on the same "page" of the kindle reader, so that regardless of screen size, sentences that mean the same thing both appear on the screen at the same time.
Thus on a small screen, perhaps three sentences of English would appear, and then below them, three corresponding sentences of Spanish. And on a bigger screen, five sentences of English followed by five sentences of Spanish.
I haven't been able to find a way to do this, however. Thus I'm wondering if the best options available are:
- Heavy footnote use, where secondary language sentence appears in a footnote following every sentence of the primary language,
- Separate by chapters – primary language chapter followed by secondary language chapter.
Option #1 is cumbersome to build but potentially more useful to the language student than #2, because of the difficulty of navigating back and forth between chapters.
Perhaps there's some other option that I'm missing?
