Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2021-12-22, at 18:50, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:
>
>> On 2021-12-21, at 18:41, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
>>> <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> At first, personally, I would have started from a large number of
>>>> existing features that I could have reused.
>>>>
>>>> For the design, I would rather point towards XLIFF 2 [2], precisely
>>>> because fundamental ideas have already been formulated and implemented.
>>>
>>> Part of the problem is that "translation" ends up meaning very different
>>> things in different contexts. I mostly translate fiction or other long
>>> chunks of prose, but occasionally film scripts and subtitles. The
>>
>> Out of curiosity: what tools do you use?  (I translate subtitles a lot,
>> and I used subed-mode and mpv.)
>
> When I do subtitles it's pretty much always for a film production
> company, which you'd think would mean latest technologies and industry
> standards, exciting stuff, but in fact means they email me a Word
> document, and expect me to email them a Word document back :(

Ouch.

> If I'm lucky, I then get a round of editing with them, but that means
> going into the studio and sitting behind the editor and saying "that one
> goes by too fast". :( :(

That's pretty bad.  It means that I'm lucky (well, my translation
project is a non-commercial, hobby one done in spare time...).

> Then another minor mode for linking and following source and
> translation, as you say, but not tied to Org. org-translate dumps
> segmentation control characters into the files, an approach which I
> guess is still usable for any plain-text file format. Maybe there are
> better ways, though. I don't know how you would manage correspondences
> between a PDF and text file, for instance.
>
> Lastly, if I ever magically become a better programmer than I am, I
> would like a minor mode that keeps the translation in a VC repository,
> and lets me do multiple drafts of various sections, keeping those drafts
> in version control branches. Then there's a visual indicator in the
> buffer that this paragraph has multiple versions, a command to display
> all those versions side-by-side, and something to choose one of them
> eventually (merging the draft branch to master under the hood).

That surely sounds interesting.  If only I had time to play around with
these ideas...

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl