The Origin Story

I have a confession: I have always avoided reading things I didn't enjoy. This is a survival mechanism, I'm sure. But it becomes a problem when you move to Switzerland and suddenly your mailbox is full of very important-looking letters written in German.

For years, my workflow was simple: Open letter → Panic → Scan to PDF → Copy text → Paste into Google Translate → Read → Forget immediately. Zero learning. Total avoidance. Maximum efficiency in staying ignorant.

I tried to learn properly. I really did. I bought the textbooks, downloaded the apps, and watched the YouTube videos. But I hated them all. Except for one thing: Parallel Text Books.

There was something magical about having the original text on the left and the translation on the right. I could read a real story, get stuck, glance to the right, understand, and keep going. No dictionary, no friction. I read a few of these before bed and actually felt like I was learning.

But there was a catch. The available books were either:

• Painfully simple children's stories about a cat named Hans who likes milk.
• Overly complex 19th-century literature that felt like punishment.

I dreamed of taking any article, story, or book I actually liked and turning it into a parallel text instantly. I wanted to read sci-fi, tech news, or even those terrifying tax letters in a way that didn't make me want to cry.

But I was too lazy to manually copy-paste paragraphs into a document side-by-side. Even thinking about the formatting nightmare made me tired.

Eventually, I gave up waiting for someone else to build it. I said, "Fine. I'll build the tool myself... and maybe other language learners who want to read real content will benefit too."

So here is DuoText. It's not perfect, and the AI translation costs me money (hence the credits), but it does exactly what I wanted: it makes reading in a foreign language comfortable.

Thank you for trying it out. If you find it useful, maybe buy some credits so I can keep the servers running. If not, that's okay too. At least I can finally read my mail.

Enjoy — and may your next German letter actually make sense.