Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-01, at 10:51, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text 
editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>>> Can't you do ecat-highlight-next-sentence and
>>> ecat-highlight-previous-sentence by just moving
>>> point to the next sentence and then do
>>> ecat-highlight-this-sentence? Feels more
>>> natural...
>>
>> That would completely defeat the purpose. All CAT
>> stuff (as many people already told) is about
>> efficiency. One of the main points of my (very
>> simple) code is that I do not have to move
>> point anywhere.
>
> Because its inefficient? ... you are a fast
> translator :)

It's not the question of speed, but of distractions.  Annoying workflow
full of distractions (like moving the point in the other window
manually) is very inefficient.

> but ... OK.
>
> Only it still looks wierd with the same code two
> extra times.
>
>> Well, you already got your answers, but let me
>> stress that one of the important points is
>> extracting text from some strange formats and
>> putting the translation back into it. Think Word
>> documents with complex formatting, or HTML with
>> many tags/attributes. If you are to translate
>> things like
>>
>> <p class="important-instruction">Click the <span
>> class="dancing-elephants">big red button</span> to
>> launch the nuke</p>
>>
>> and all the markup has to be there in the
>> translation, you really don't want to type it by
>> hand - it's time-consuming and error-prone.
>
> Well, that's a task for a parser rather to convert
> between one format to another... very mechanical
> and easy.

Have you ever done a real-world translation like this...?

>
>>> Some idiomatic phrases are pitfalls tho.
>>> For example the English "more or less" looks like
>>> the Swedish "mer eller mindre" (which means
>>> "correct but with room for fine details") but the
>>> way native speakers use it seems to be more (?)
>>> "både och" which means discussion can go both
>>> (disparate) ways and BOTH are correct! So perhaps
>>> one could have a list of these "trap phrases" so
>>> when they turn up in the text, they are
>>> highlighted to indicate "watch out! we are not
>>> just piling words here!" Who'd compile that list
>>> is another matter...
>>
>> I guess this is a very minor problem...
>
> It depends how many there are... should be systemized
> just as everything unusual is in any trade.
> Easy thing to do with huge gain and possible to build
> on and extend...

As I said - you're right, but this is definitely not a major issue.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl