Bilingual Books: Parallel Read

What Bilingual Books: Parallel Read is for

Bilingual Books: Parallel Read is an ebook reader for people who want to learn a language by reading books. According to the listing, published by Stanislau Kurs, it works as both a bilingual ebook reader and a dual language reader. Each page shows the original text beside its translation.

The developer aims the app at learners who would rather read a novel or short story than work through exercises. Its library includes books in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, each with a translation.

The app also suits readers who already own books. It opens FB2, EPUB and TXT files, so a book from another source can be loaded and read in parallel.

Reading original and translated text in parallel

The reader lays the original text and its translation out in parallel, so each sentence can be checked against its equivalent. The listing says translations are shown for every word in context.

Subtitles can be read the same way. The app can import .srt subtitle files as parallel text, which puts each subtitle line next to its translation.

Books in the built-in library are bilingual stories, so the parallel layout is already in place when they are opened.

Looking up words and saving them for review

Tapping any word while reading brings up a translation without leaving the page. The listing names nine services that lookups can use: Google Translate, DeepL, Reverso, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Yandex, NLP and ColorDict.

Some of those services are AI assistants. The listing says they can explain a word's meaning, its grammar and its synonyms inside the reader. Native speaker audio is also available for listening practice.

Words can be saved to a bilingual library in the app. The developer says saved words can be exported to Anki or ReWord, with spaced repetition used for review.

Built-in bilingual library and supported languages

The app includes a free library of bilingual stories and classic novels. Titles are grouped by language, with English, Spanish, French, German and Italian listed as the main sections.

English titles include classic novels with translations. The listing also names Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, with books in those languages available with translations.

According to the developer, the library grows weekly with new bilingual stories.

Reading offline

Offline mode is listed as a separate feature. It lets bilingual books be read with no internet connection.

The listing presents offline reading alongside the reader, the lookups and the library, rather than as a separate tool.