Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>

[...]

>>> 2. Link terms in the translation to a glossary pulled from the original.
>>> This would be character names, places, special terms, etc. They might
>>> not always be translated the same way, but I need to know how I've
>>> handled them earlier in the document. Glossary terms would be
>>> highlighted in the source text, and when you came to the equivalent
>>> spot in the translation, you'd use a command like
>>> insert-translation-term that would prompt for the translation,
>>> offering completion on earlier translations, and then insert that
>>> term into the translated text with a link to the original in the
>>> glossary. There would also be two multi-occur commands: one that
>>> prompted for a translation and showed all the places in the source
>>> text where it came from, and another that did the opposite: prompted
>>> for an original glossary term and showed all the places in the
>>> translation where it was translated.
>>
>> Very nice ideas.
>
> Maybe this will inspire me to write some code! The nice thing about the
> glossary is that it wouldn't have to just be vocabulary. You could just
> as easily use it for "every time the car crash is referenced", or
> something like that. You'd just have to manually mark the passage in the
> original, rather than automated marking by text search.

Okay, I've finally implemented this, and pushed a version 0 of a package
called org-translate to ELPA. You can see the code here:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=emacs/elpa.git;a=blob_plain;f=packages/org-translate/org-translate.el;hb=HEAD

I'm going to fool with it a bit longer, then make a real release.

It basically does what I was describing up-thread: basic segmentation,
tracking of correspondences between source and translation text, and
maintenance of a glossary for automatic translation.

Comments very welcome! I hope it will eventually be used by more people
than just me :)

Eric