Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 29, 2020, at 15:57, Jean-Christophe Helary 
> <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org> wrote:
> 
> Marcin,
> 
>> On May 29, 2020, at 14:55, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> does anyone here perform translations within Emacs?
> 
> Yes, sometimes.
> 
>> Do you know of any
>> tools facilitating that?  There exist a few CATs, or Computer Aided
>> Translation systems, but - AFAIK - they are all proprietary and closed
>> source.
> 
> No. OmegaT is very much GPL and is listed in the Free Software directory. 
> Java based and has recently shifted from using Oracle to AdoptOpenJDK 11.

In fact, the reason why I came (back) to emacs in the first place is, OmegaT...

I love OmegaT. I created the user support list in 2004 and I've been involved 
with it since 2002.

But I thought that instead of having a translation memory system in which 
editor functions were added, maybe having a text editor to which translation 
memory matching was added would be more efficient. That was my pipe dream them.

So, all that happened in 2003-2004 with the big Common Lisp revival, when Peter 
Seibel published Practical Common Lisp, when Slime was all over the place, when 
Bill Clementson had his amazing blog on what could be done with emacs / common 
lisp and slime, etc.

And I thought to myself that since emacs was a lisp environment, why not see 
what it's all about ? (There was also a Mac application, Alpaca I think, that 
was basically a text editor with CL inside).

Notice that in 15 years I have not made 1 inch of progress (or maybe just one, 
I can understand what goes wrong in my init file :). But at least I'm still 
around and I like it :)

OmegaT has evolved so much now that it has become one of the mainstream CAT 
tools (even if "market share" is not high at all). It is used in the EU 
Translation Bureau. It serves in universities to teach students basic CAT 
concepts, and it also works well with the Okapi Framework tools that are also 
Java based. And has a very friendly *multilingual* community available in 
pretty much all the time zones.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
http://mac4translators.blogspot.com