Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Giovanni Bono]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2020-05-29, at 17:02, Giovanni Bono <giovanni.bono@unimi.it> wrote:
>
>> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> does anyone here perform translations within Emacs?  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.  Emacs seems capable of implementing at least a simple CAT, but
>>> I could not find any existing solutions for that.  (I skimmed through
>>> the answers here:
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/a35bs2/emacs_for_translations/,
>>> but did not find anything useful.)
>>>
>>> The first thing I would need is a way to highlight the "currently
>>> translated sentence" in the other window, where I would keep the
>>> original text, with an easy way to highlight the next/previous one -
>>> this seems very easy to do, but did anyone actually code anything like
>>> this?
>>>
>>> TIA,
>>
>> hello Marcin,
>>
>> I translated a few books, a few years ago, using Emacs as a simple CAT.
>> Here is a screenshot of the last iteration:
>>
>>
>> On the left there are three windows with translated, current, an next
>> sentences from the source text.  Central windows are for translated and
>> current sentences, and the bottom central window is for current word.
>> The right window is for statistics, and (not shown here) Wordnet
>> (/usr/bin/wn) lookup.
>>
>> The idea is to have some words (in bold in the sreenshot) that are
>> controlled, so that while translating them you can keep trace of all
>> other occurencies and prior translations.  So every word in the source
>> material need to be indexed and referenced to a (possibly empty) word in
>> the ongoing translation.
>>
>> Work happens in the very central frame, where words are presented
>> untranslated at first, and you can move them around or substitute them
>> with prior or new (including empty) translations.  After a while, it
>> gets fast.
>>
>> I am attaching the code.  Most of it is a painful and messy tratment of
>> the publisher markup, and all of it is intended for personal use and for
>> the particular book I was translating.  But maybe you can adapt some of
>> it to your needs.  Regards,
>
> Thanks a lot!  This looks pretty impressive.  If only I had time to
> analyze yor code ATM...
>
> I'll look into it one day, though!
>
> Best,

Sure!  If you want to try it instead, I could send you the data (the
manuscript) off list.  Then it is just a matter of loading the file (it
works on a recent Emacs), typing ‘M-x gi/roth/startup’ and trying the
keybindings (commented in the code).  For that you would need a large
enough frame (240 columns x 60 rows), cause unfortunately windows
splitting is hardcoded.  Regards,

  Giovanni