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I need a Wikipedia app that shows articles in both Japanese and French at the same time.

I know that many Wikipedia reading apps (including the official app) allow switching between languages, but it is not enough: I need to see both at the same time.

Requirements:

  • It must be an app, not a webapp.
  • It must run on Android.
  • Any budget/license.

Example usage:

Bonus:

  • Bonus if it can be used offline (like Kiwix)
  • Bonus it is trilingual (3 columns shown side-by-side, doable on the tablet in landscape mode)
  • Bonus if open source

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  • Oh, that will be interesting. No such app in my list, not that I'm aware of (though I might have missed that feature). Please let me know should any be found!
    – Izzy
    Commented May 16, 2020 at 12:50

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Currently, No Such App Exists If I am understanding your question correctly, what you are asking for does not exist. You are asking for a program that will display, for example, the English Wikipedia entry for a specific word on the left side of the screen and then will display the wikipedia entry for the same word in a different language on the right side of the screen.

Reason Why No App Exists The problem with your request is that each entry in Wikipedia in a specific language is independent from a Wikipedia entry in another language. So, there wouldn't be any common use for such an app. Each language has an independent entry because there is no translation software that will correctly translate written text to another language. If there is an entry that is exactly the same, a person fluent in both languages would have had to tediously translate the text directly.

Current Leader in Translation is Google I did quite a bit of research in finding a tranlation app and I learned that Google Translate is the best app. They try to translate one language to another and giving the best translation results relative to other apps but the results are still pretty mediocre. There are actually many companies vigorously researching on how to translate written text or the spoken word but none have published anything significant as of yet.

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  • Hi John! I agree with you except the second paragraph. Think of any dish or historical person, go to their Wikipedia article (for instance en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_cake) and you will notice that the article is actually available in several other languages (23 languages for my example). Cheers!
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Commented Jun 25, 2020 at 8:28
  • Not to be too disagreeable but I did say common use. You stated one specific use - recipes. Also, don't you agree that this specific use is one of the easiest written texts to translate from one language to another, no?
    – QuietInMontana
    Commented Jun 27, 2020 at 21:45
  • Food is just one example, my point applies to any topic. Bilingual people keep jumping from one version of Wikipedia to another, because for the same topic one language may have more info than the other. Example: The Japanese article ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/雨氷 has much better information than the same article in English en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freezing_rain. Just try to use Google translation on that article, it produces horrible results.
    – Nicolas Raoul ♦
    Commented Jun 28, 2020 at 1:06

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