Emacs as a translator's tool

Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

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,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[stardiviner]

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Hash: SHA256


If you're using Org Mode, then I'm trying to write an extension based on Org
Babel and google-translate to generate translated results.

Here is my ob-translate repo: https://github.com/stardiviner/ob-translate

Also, some links which might helpful for you.

- - https://github.com/atykhonov/google-translate
- - http://github.com/juergenhoetzel/babel
- - https://github.com/liShiZhensPi/baidu-translate
- - https://github.com/jcs-elpa/define-it

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,


- -- 
[ stardiviner ]
       I try to make every word tell the meaning that I want to express.

       Blog: https://stardiviner.github.io/
       IRC(freenode): stardiviner, Matrix: stardiviner
       GPG: F09F650D7D674819892591401B5DF1C95AE89AC3
      
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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-05-29, at 07:55, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:

> 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?

OK, so I assumed nobody did it, so here's my take.  Probably not
extremely well-done, but I just coded it in 15 minutes, so there you go.
Comments welcome.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(defface ecat-highlight-face '((t :background "#e7ede7"))
  "Face for highlighting the currently translated sentence.")

(defvar ecat-sentence-overlay nil
  "The overlay to highlight the currently translated sentence.")

(defun ecat-highlight-this-sentence ()
  "Highlight the sentence at point using an overlay."
  (interactive)
  (delete-overlay ecat-sentence-overlay)
  (save-excursion
    (let ((sentence-end (progn (forward-sentence)
			       (point)))
	  (sentence-beginning (progn (backward-sentence)
				     (point))))
      (setq ecat-sentence-overlay
	    (make-overlay sentence-beginning sentence-end))))
  (overlay-put ecat-sentence-overlay 'face 'ecat-highlight-face))

(defun ecat-highlight-next-sentence ()
  "Move the highlight to the next sentence."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (set-buffer (overlay-buffer ecat-sentence-overlay))
    (goto-char (overlay-end ecat-sentence-overlay))
    (let ((sentence-end (progn (forward-sentence)
			       (point)))
	  (sentence-beginning (progn (backward-sentence)
				     (point))))
      (move-overlay ecat-sentence-overlay sentence-beginning sentence-end))))

(defun ecat-highlight-previous-sentence ()
  "Move the highlight to the previous sentence."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (set-buffer (overlay-buffer ecat-sentence-overlay))
    (goto-char (overlay-start ecat-sentence-overlay))
    (let ((sentence-beginning (progn (backward-sentence)
				     (point)))
	  (sentence-end (progn (forward-sentence)
			       (point))))
      (move-overlay ecat-sentence-overlay sentence-beginning sentence-end))))

(defun ecat-disable-sentence-highlighting ()
  "Disable sentence highlighting."
  (interactive)
  (delete-overlay ecat-sentence-overlay))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> OK, so I assumed nobody did it, so here's my take.
> Probably not extremely well-done, but I just coded
> it in 15 minutes, so there you go.
> Comments welcome.

Byte-compile is your first stop for code comments:

  Warning: defface for ‘ecat-highlight-face’ fails
  to specify containing group

  Warning: Use ‘with-current-buffer’ rather than
  save-excursion+set-buffer

> (defun ecat-highlight-this-sentence () [...]
> (defun ecat-highlight-next-sentence () [...]
> (defun ecat-highlight-previous-sentence ()

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...

Anyway, what other features do the proprietary
CATs have?

I always thought translation was just a matter of
reading one thing and then typing what it means,
looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
idiomatic equivalent.

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...

Good idea BTW :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Yuri Khan]

On Fri, 29 May 2020 at 15:14, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU
Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Anyway, what other features do the proprietary
> CATs have?
>
> I always thought translation was just a matter of
> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
> idiomatic equivalent.

I have not used any professional CATs, but one important function is
having a vocabulary (also called translation memory).

Imagine translating a novel. When a new character is introduced, you
have to decide how his/her name is translated and spelled. You need to
record it so that you’re consistent. Same goes for any names, not just
of people.

If the translation is a joint effort, that vocabulary needs to be
shared so that the whole team calls characters the same names.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Yuri Khan wrote:

>> Anyway, what other features do the proprietary
>> CATs have? I always thought translation was just
>> a matter of reading one thing and then typing what
>> it means, looking up the occasional word or phrase
>> for the idiomatic equivalent.
>
> I have not used any professional CATs, but one
> important function is having a vocabulary (also
> called translation memory).
>
> Imagine translating a novel. When a new character
> is introduced, you have to decide how his/her name
> is translated and spelled. You need to record it so
> that you’re consistent. Same goes for any names,
> not just of people.

Wait, don't tell me... let's use... A TEXT FILE?!?

  Rivendell  Vattnadal
  Shire      Fylke
  Strider    Vidstige

> If the translation is a joint effort, that
> vocabulary needs to be shared [...]

The Internet. Good enough for government work :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 10:35:09AM +0200, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:

[...]

> Wait, don't tell me... let's use... A TEXT FILE?!?
> 
>   Rivendell  Vattnadal
>   Shire      Fylke
>   Strider    Vidstige

How do you capture context?

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

tomas wrote:

>> Wait, don't tell me... let's use... A TEXT FILE?!?
>> 
>>   Rivendell Vattnadal
>>   Shire Fylke
>>   Strider Vidstige
>
> How do you capture context?

I don't know, a header?

"LOTR characters and place names"

Maybe the file name can also be something
descriptive, e.g. lotr-swedish.txt

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 12:44:18PM +0200, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:
> tomas wrote:
> 
> >> Wait, don't tell me... let's use... A TEXT FILE?!?
> >> 
> >>   Rivendell Vattnadal
> >>   Shire Fylke
> >>   Strider Vidstige
> >
> > How do you capture context?
> 
> I don't know, a header?
> 
> "LOTR characters and place names"
> 
> Maybe the file name can also be something
> descriptive, e.g. lotr-swedish.txt

"time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like banana"

(1) Translate this phrase into Swedish
(2a) How would you characterize the context of the first 'like'
   above? Of the second one?
(2b) Write a short Emacs Lisp program which can distinguish
   between both
(3) Do the same as (2a) and (2b) for both terms 'flies'

Enjoy ;-P

(Human languages are... interesting)

-- tomás

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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

tomas wrote:

> "time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like
> banana"
> (1) Translate this phrase into Swedish

That's impossible in a meaningful way if all that is
to be included as here time PASSES BY (går), it
doesn't fly. So maybe "Tiden springer iväg som
långdistanslöpare", as time can here can also "run
away"...

Obviously, every single expressions can't be
translated and still have every word translated to
its exact translation!

Emacs can't do that, CATs can't, no one can in a way
that makes sense.

Here, we care about what CAT _can_ do. Keep a list of
LOTR characters in a text file, send it by mail to
fellow translators in ~/.mailrc, and expand abbrevs
and snippet templates Emacs can already do, sorry.

> (2a) How would you characterize the context of the
>      first 'like' above? Of the second one?

That's right, because I didn't know translating
fiction, non-fiction, and manuals involved solving
linguistic-logical puzzles from Chomsky's "Best Of"
multimedia CD-ROM...

Try this:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-sensitive_language

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

>> (2a) How would you characterize the context of the
>>     first 'like' above? Of the second one?
> 
> That's right, because I didn't know translating
> fiction, non-fiction, and manuals involved solving
> linguistic-logical puzzles from Chomsky's "Best Of"
> multimedia CD-ROM...

Indeed :) It's not like translation theory waited for discussions on help-gnu-emacs. Plus, DeepL does a very good job at translating the boring stuff.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Can't we compile a list of what the commercial CATs
offer? M Helary and Mr Abrahamsen?

I'll read thru this thread tomorrow (today)
God willing but I don't understand everything, in
particular examples would nice to get the exact
meaning of the desired functionality...

With examples we can also see if Emacs already can do
it. And if not: Elisp contest :)

Some features are probably silly, we don't have to
list or do them, or everything in the CATs, just what
really makes sense and is useful on an
every-day basis.

When we are done, we put it in the wiki or in a pack.

We can't have that Emacs doesn't have a firm grip on
this issue. Because translation is a very common task
with text!

Also, let's compile a list of what Emacs already has
to this end. It doesn't matter if some of that stuff
already appears somewhere else, modularity is
our friend.

Pepp pepp :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 30, 2020, at 10:33, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Can't we compile a list of what the commercial CATs
> offer? M Helary and Mr Abrahamsen?

x commercial → ○ professional, if you don't mind :)
OmegaT is very much a professional tool and certainly not a "commercial" one.


My 20 years of practice but otherwise not technically so very informed idea is the following:


1) CAT tools extract translatable contents from various file formats into an easy-to-handle format, and put the translated contents back into the original format. That way the translator does not have to worry *too much* about the idiosyncrasies of the original format.

→ File filters are a core part of a CAT tool *but* as was suggested in the thread it is possible to rely on an external filter that will output contents in a standard localization "intermediate" format (current "industry" standards are PO and XLIFF). Such filters provide export and import functions so that the translated files are converted back to the original format.

File filters can also accept rules for not outputting non-translatable text (the current standard is ITS)

The PO format can be handled by po4a (perl), translate-toolkit (python) and the Okapi Framework tools (java).
XLIFF has the Okapi Framework, OpenXLIFF (electron/node) and the translate-toolkit. All are top-notch pro-grade free software and in the case of Okapi and OpenXLIFF have been developed by people who have participated to the standardization process (XLIFF/TMX/SRX/ITS/TBX, etc...)

→ emacs could rely on such external filters and only specialize in one "intermediate" format. The po-mode already does that for PO files.


2) Once the text is extracted, it needs to be segmented. Basic "no" segmentation usually means paragraph based segmentation. Paragraphs are defined differently depending on the original format (1, or 2 line breaks for a text file, a block tag for XML-based formats, etc.).
Fine-grained segmentation is obtained by using a set of native language based regex that includes break rules and no-break rules. A simple example is break after a "period followed by a space" but don't break after "Mr. " for English.

→ File filters usually handle the segmentation part based on user specifications. Once the file is segmented into the intermediate format, it is not structurally trivial to "split" or "merge" segments because the tool needs to remember what will go back into the original file structure.

→ emacs could rely on the external filters to handle the segmentation.


3) The real strength of a CAT tool shows where it helps the translator handle all the resources needed in the translation. Let me list potential resources:

- Legacy translations, called "translation memories" (TM), usually in multilingual "aligned" files where a given segment has equivalents in various languages. Translated PO files are used as TMs, the XML standard is TMX.

- Glossaries, usually in a similar but simpler format, sometimes only TSV, sometimes CSV, the XML-based standard is TBX.

- Internal translations, which are produced by the translator while translating. Each translated segment adding to the project "memory".

- Dictionaries are a more global form of glossaries, usually monolingual, format varies.

- external files, either local documents, or web documents, in various formats, usually monolingual (otherwise they'd be aligned and used as TMs)

→ each resource format needs a way to be parsed, memorized, fetched, recycled efficiently during the translation


4) Usually the process is the following:

- the translator "enters" a segment
- the tool displays "matches" from the resources that relatively closely correspond to the segment contents
- the translator inserts or modifies the matches
- when no matches are produced the translator enters a translation from scratch
- the translator can add glossary items to the project glossary
- the new translation is added to the "internal" memory set
- the translator moves to the next segment


5) The matching is usually some sort of levenstein distance-based algorithm. The "tokens" that are used in the "distance" calculation are usually produced by native language based tokenizers (the Lucene tokenizers are quite popular)

The better the match, the more efficient the tool is at helping the translator recycle resources. The matching process/quality is where tools profoundly differ (OmegaT is generally considered to have excellent quality matches, sometimes better than expensive commercial tools).

Some tools propose "context" matches where the previous and next segments are also taken into account, some tools propose "subsegment" matches where even if a whole segment won't match significant subparts can, etc.

The matching process must sometimes apply to extremely big resources (like many million lines of multilingual TMs in the case of the EU legal corpora) and must thus be able to handle the data quickly regardless of the set size.


6) Goodies that are time savers include:

- history based autocompletion
- glossary/TM/dictionary based autocompletion
- MT services access
- shortcuts that auto insert predefined text chunks
- spell-checking/grammar checking
- QA checks against glossary terms, completeness/length of the translation, integrity of the format structure, numbers used, etc. (QA checks are also available as external processes in some of the solutions mentioned above, or related solutions.)


> I'll read thru this thread tomorrow (today)
> God willing but I don't understand everything, in
> particular examples would nice to get the exact
> meaning of the desired functionality...

Go ahead if you have questions.

> With examples we can also see if Emacs already can do
> it. And if not: Elisp contest :)

:)

> Some features are probably silly, we don't have to
> list or do them, or everything in the CATs, just what
> really makes sense and is useful on an every-day basis.

A lot of the heavy-duty tasks can be handled by external processes.

> When we are done, we put it in the wiki or in a pack.
> 
> We can't have that Emacs doesn't have a firm grip on
> this issue. Because translation is a very common task
> with text!
> 
> Also, let's compile a list of what Emacs already has
> to this end. It doesn't matter if some of that stuff
> already appears somewhere else, modularity is
> our friend.

:)


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> x commercial → professional, if you don't mind :)
> OmegaT is very much a professional tool and
> certainly not a "commercial" one. [...]

OK, so this is what it is all about, it is having
a database of translations and then an algorithm that
searches that.

Other than that, one needs a pretty simple interface
that applies all that (DB + search), with the
sentences in the source langauge as indata - the
outdata is the translation suggestions found in
the DB.

And if there are no hits the translator types the
translation and then this in turn gets inserted into
the database...

Sounds very boring, virtually using a click-and-play
application, I would much rather just read and type.
But I suppose that isn't efficient enough this day
and age?

But as for this discussion how to do it, it suddenly
becomes a question of using Emacs (the interface) to
use OmegaT's resources (DB + search)...

But count me out...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 15:43, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> x commercial → professional, if you don't mind :)
>> OmegaT is very much a professional tool and
>> certainly not a "commercial" one. [...]
> 
> OK, so this is what it is all about, it is having
> a database of translations and then an algorithm that
> searches that.

That's correct. A lot of tools do that. Most of them don't give very good results, because the developers don't care much.

> Other than that, one needs a pretty simple interface
> that applies all that (DB + search), with the
> sentences in the source langauge as indata - the
> outdata is the translation suggestions found in
> the DB.

That's correct.

> And if there are no hits the translator types the
> translation and then this in turn gets inserted into
> the database...

That's correct too.

> Sounds very boring, virtually using a click-and-play
> application, I would much rather just read and type.
> But I suppose that isn't efficient enough this day
> and age?

? I don't know what you are talking about.

> But as for this discussion how to do it, it suddenly
> becomes a question of using Emacs (the interface) to
> use OmegaT's resources (DB + search)...

No.

You asked for a description of a translator's workflow. I gave you one, pretty detailed, and not dependent on any tool.

Emacs can work with databases (sqlite for ex) and have the matching engine written in emacslisp.

> But count me out...

I never counted on you to do whatever. You asked for a workflow, I gave you one.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>> But as for this discussion how to do it, it
>> suddenly becomes a question of using Emacs (the
>> interface) to use OmegaT's resources (DB +
>> search)...
>
> No.
>
> You asked for a description of a translator's
> workflow. I gave you one, pretty detailed, and not
> dependent on any tool.
>
> Emacs can work with databases (sqlite for ex) and
> have the matching engine written in emacslisp.

Right, but I suspect when people want to use Emacs
rather than OmegaT, it is because they use Emacs as
their editor and common interface to the whole
system, and they are used to it, and Emacs is used to
them (thru config/extension) - I think that this is
the entry point, not that anyone is dissatisfied with
the search/DB capabilities of OmegaT...

So if OmegaT already does the search well and comes
with a database (with data), and if all that is FOSS
it makes more sense to bring it over as it is, and
make the interface which would be an Emacs major mode
or a bunch of different modes - for starters, one
with the "segments", and one with suggestions and
keys:

  a: suggestion 1
  s: suggestion 2
  d: ..         3

and more advanced keys like `e a' = insert suggestion
a only edit it first and so on...

But even with an Emacs keyboard-only interface, while
an IMMENSE improvement, it still doesn't sound like
fun :( Reading, thinking, and typing, all at once,
almost, that sounds like fun. But getting a selection
from a database and picking the best alternative,
that just doesn't appeal to me.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 16:55, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Reading, thinking, and typing, all at once,
> almost, that sounds like fun. But getting a selection
> from a database and picking the best alternative,
> that just doesn't appeal to me.

Well, do what you feel is best for you ! As a translator who pays my bills with my fingers, I don't have much of a choice.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-05, at 09:55, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> But even with an Emacs keyboard-only interface, while
> an IMMENSE improvement, it still doesn't sound like
> fun :( Reading, thinking, and typing, all at once,
> almost, that sounds like fun. But getting a selection
> from a database and picking the best alternative,
> that just doesn't appeal to me.

Well, it is not question of "fun".  It's a question of a job that needs
to be done.

Even taking that into account, the job of a translator can be a nice
one.  I sometimes got a huge satisfaction when I managed to find a nice
translation of some wordplay, for instance.

And rememeber that "translation" is a very general term.  Even though
I'm not a professional translator, I did a few of them in my life.
Translating:

- a scientific paper
- an RPG manual
- subtitles for a movie
- an interview for a journal

are all _very_ different tasks.  In the first case, the repetitiveness
(and hence opportunity to use CAT's memory) is huge.  It is smaller in
the second one, but then the main challenge is (a) coming up with good
translations of certain terms, and (b) being consistent with them,
especially if half the way through you need to modify your translations.
(I don't know if professional CATs would help me with the changes of my
"glossary"...)

In the last two ones, the repetitiveness is almost non-existent (though
my humble attempt at simplifying my job with Emacs - the one with
highlighting sentences - helps quite a bit).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 at 00:32, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
> Translating:
>
> - a scientific paper
> - an RPG manual
> - subtitles for a movie
> - an interview for a journal
>
> are all _very_ different tasks.
> In the last two ones, the repetitiveness is almost non-existent

Hey, you don’t say that. Single-shot closed-plot movies maybe, but as
soon as a sequel/prequel/sidequel is made, you get into translation
continuity story. Same with TV shows.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-05, at 19:47, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 at 00:32, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>> Translating:
>>
>> - a scientific paper
>> - an RPG manual
>> - subtitles for a movie
>> - an interview for a journal
>>
>> are all _very_ different tasks.
>> In the last two ones, the repetitiveness is almost non-existent
>
> Hey, you don’t say that. Single-shot closed-plot movies maybe, but as
> soon as a sequel/prequel/sidequel is made, you get into translation
> continuity story. Same with TV shows.

Fair enough.  I only translated subtitles for one movie w/o a sequel, so
consistemcy was not a big problem (but I admit, there were a few names
of places etc., so the repetitiveness was there, too.)

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 6, 2020, at 2:32, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
> 
> And rememeber that "translation" is a very general term.  Even though
> I'm not a professional translator, I did a few of them in my life.
> Translating:
> 
> - a scientific paper
> - an RPG manual
> - subtitles for a movie
> - an interview for a journal
> 
> are all _very_ different tasks.  In the first case, the repetitiveness
> (and hence opportunity to use CAT's memory) is huge.  It is smaller in
> the second one, but then the main challenge is (a) coming up with good
> translations of certain terms, and (b) being consistent with them,
> especially if half the way through you need to modify your translations.
> (I don't know if professional CATs would help me with the changes of my
> "glossary"...)

I can only talk about OmegaT, but you can (and I do) search in source for a term and in target for another, filter the result and edit at will, or do simple replacements. Since the glossary is a text file you can modify it at will, you can do automatic checks to see if your translation respects the glossary and here again edit at will, etc.

> In the last two ones, the repetitiveness is almost non-existent (though
> my humble attempt at simplifying my job with Emacs - the one with
> highlighting sentences - helps quite a bit).

Indeed. Repetitiveness is one aspect of what CATs help with. Not missing a sentence is another one. I always use a cat when I translate, regardless of the characteristics of the document.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-05-29, at 13:51, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Here, we care about what CAT _can_ do. Keep a list of
> LOTR characters in a text file, send it by mail to
> fellow translators in ~/.mailrc, and expand abbrevs
> and snippet templates Emacs can already do, sorry.

Extremely inefficient, error-prone and irritating.  Again: CATs are
about automating reetitive things.

How would you expect people to know which mail contains which (version
of) the file?  How would you expect people to know which file (out of
several dozen or more) to look at to find something?  How would you
expect people to remember the names of the snippets?  Etc., etc., etc.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> How would you expect people to know which mail
> contains which (version of) the file? How would you
> expect people to know which file (out of several
> dozen or more) to look at to find something?
> How would you expect people to remember the names
> of the snippets? Etc., etc., etc.

I know, it is soo difficult! Sometimes I wonder how
I even manage to use my computer...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>:

(so those are the names of the Swedish translation, interesting)

>   Rivendell  Vattnadal

(can't remember)
("Kløvendal" according to google)

>   Shire      Fylke

Syssel (which is a little ironic considering the Swedish translation...)

>   Strider    Vidstige

Vidvandre

(I've always rather preferred the Norwegian version of Isengard: Jarnagard)

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Steinar Bang wrote:

> (so those are the names of the Swedish translation,
> interesting)

Right, there are to my knowledge two translations of
LOTR and they are not similar in details. This is
from the first one, by Åke Ohlmaks. He was
a ctroversial figure and so was his translation, but
many people like it.

>>   Rivendell Vattnadal
>
> (can't remember) ("Kløvendal" according to google)
>
>>   Shire Fylke
>
> Syssel (which is a little ironic considering the
> Swedish translation...)
>
>>   Strider Vidstige
>
> Vidvandre
>
> (I've always rather preferred the Norwegian version
> of Isengard: Jarnagard)

Heh, cool :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, 29 May 2020 at 15:14, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU
> Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>> Anyway, what other features do the proprietary
>> CATs have?
>>
>> I always thought translation was just a matter of
>> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
>> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
>> idiomatic equivalent.
>
> I have not used any professional CATs, but one important function is
> having a vocabulary (also called translation memory).
>
> Imagine translating a novel. When a new character is introduced, you
> have to decide how his/her name is translated and spelled. You need to
> record it so that you’re consistent. Same goes for any names, not just
> of people.
>
> If the translation is a joint effort, that vocabulary needs to be
> shared so that the whole team calls characters the same names.

I'm a translator, primarily of fiction, and do all of it in Emacs,
specifically in Org mode.

I've thought many times over the years about what I would really want an
Emacs-based translation environment to provide for me. I don't do
technical translation, so there's not a whole lot of value in
sentence-by-sentence correspondences. But as Yuri mentions it can be
very useful to keep track of how you've translated certain names, or
certain important terms, in different places throughout the text.
Basically I would want two things:

1. A way to keep track of location correspondences between the source
   text and translated text. CAT tool split the text up by sentence, but
   that's not very useful for fiction (particularly Chinese->English
   translation) because there's rarely a one-to-one correspondence.
   There /is/ a more reliable correspondence between paragraphs, though,
   and I'd like to know which paragraph equals which. The point would
   mostly be to find my place again when I start translating at the
   beginning of the day, and to implement a more useful follow-mode. I
   imagined this would happen when the mode was turned on: it would run
   down the file and insert markers that would be used to find
   correspondences. Special characters could be inserted into the file
   to indicate that two paragraphs should be joined, or one paragraph
   split.
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.


Anyway, that's what I've been thinking about. Almost no code so far,
though!

Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 30, 2020, at 2:39, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> I've thought many times over the years about what I would really want an
> Emacs-based translation environment to provide for me. I don't do
> technical translation, so there's not a whole lot of value in
> sentence-by-sentence correspondences.

Most translation tools I know (or I've used professionally) rely on a segmentation scheme set by the user. If the user wants paragraph based segmentation, so be it. What people call "sentence" segmentation is actually a regex based system that takes into account various signs in the source language. 

> But as Yuri mentions it can be
> very useful to keep track of how you've translated certain names, or
> certain important terms, in different places throughout the text.
> Basically I would want two things:
> 
> 1. A way to keep track of location correspondences between the source
>   text and translated text. CAT tool split the text up by sentence,

(not true, see above)

> but
>   that's not very useful for fiction (particularly Chinese->English
>   translation) because there's rarely a one-to-one correspondence.
>   There /is/ a more reliable correspondence between paragraphs, though,
>   and I'd like to know which paragraph equals which. The point would
>   mostly be to find my place again when I start translating at the
>   beginning of the day, and to implement a more useful follow-mode.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What's the difficulty that you are facing ?

> I
>   imagined this would happen when the mode was turned on: it would run
>   down the file and insert markers that would be used to find
>   correspondences. Special characters could be inserted into the file
>   to indicate that two paragraphs should be joined, or one paragraph
>   split.

What would be the use of such a marking ?

> 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.

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

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

>> On May 30, 2020, at 2:39, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
>> I've thought many times over the years about what I would really want an
>> Emacs-based translation environment to provide for me. I don't do
>> technical translation, so there's not a whole lot of value in
>> sentence-by-sentence correspondences.
>
> Most translation tools I know (or I've used professionally) rely on a
> segmentation scheme set by the user. If the user wants paragraph based
> segmentation, so be it. What people call "sentence" segmentation is
> actually a regex based system that takes into account various signs in
> the source language.

Okay, that's good to know. I guess I would just set it to split by
paragraph, but would also like manual control in some cases.

>> But as Yuri mentions it can be
>> very useful to keep track of how you've translated certain names, or
>> certain important terms, in different places throughout the text.
>> Basically I would want two things:
>>
>> 1. A way to keep track of location correspondences between the source
>>   text and translated text. CAT tool split the text up by sentence,
>
> (not true, see above)
>
>> but
>>   that's not very useful for fiction (particularly Chinese->English
>>   translation) because there's rarely a one-to-one correspondence.
>>   There /is/ a more reliable correspondence between paragraphs, though,
>>   and I'd like to know which paragraph equals which. The point would
>>   mostly be to find my place again when I start translating at the
>>   beginning of the day, and to implement a more useful follow-mode.
>
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean. What's the difficulty that you are facing ?
>
>> I
>>   imagined this would happen when the mode was turned on: it would run
>>   down the file and insert markers that would be used to find
>>   correspondences. Special characters could be inserted into the file
>>   to indicate that two paragraphs should be joined, or one paragraph
>>   split.
>
> What would be the use of such a marking ?

A follow-mode, as I mentioned above. And just finding my place. I do my
translation in two sibling Org sub-trees, original and translation,
displayed in two side-by-side windows. I don't want to mess with
two-column-mode or anything like that. I want to be able to go to the
bottom of the translation, run a command, and have the second window
display the corresponding original. If I realize I've done something
wrong a couple of chapters previously, and I skip back up to that
location in the translation, I want to run the same command to display
the corresponding spot in the original.

>> 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.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 30, 2020, at 3:22, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
> 
>>> I
>>>  imagined this would happen when the mode was turned on: it would run
>>>  down the file and insert markers that would be used to find
>>>  correspondences. Special characters could be inserted into the file
>>>  to indicate that two paragraphs should be joined, or one paragraph
>>>  split.
>> 
>> What would be the use of such a marking ?
> 
> A follow-mode, as I mentioned above.

Is such a mode in emacs ?

> And just finding my place. I do my
> translation in two sibling Org sub-trees, original and translation,
> displayed in two side-by-side windows. I don't want to mess with
> two-column-mode or anything like that.

:) I'm not sure anybody uses that anymore. But it must have been big when it started because it get the F2 key assigned by default...

> I want to be able to go to the
> bottom of the translation, run a command, and have the second window
> display the corresponding original. If I realize I've done something
> wrong a couple of chapters previously, and I skip back up to that
> location in the translation, I want to run the same command to display
> the corresponding spot in the original.

I seem to remember a long discussion about bookmarks here or on devel a while ago. Did you consider that ?

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>
> Date: Sat, 30 May 2020 12:20:14 +0900
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>,
>  Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> 
> > A follow-mode, as I mentioned above.
> 
> Is such a mode in emacs ?

Yes, it is.  Type "C-h f follow-mode RET".

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 30, 2020, at 15:24, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>
>> Date: Sat, 30 May 2020 12:20:14 +0900
>> Cc: help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>,
>> Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
>> 
>>> A follow-mode, as I mentioned above.
>> 
>> Is such a mode in emacs ?
> 
> Yes, it is.  Type "C-h f follow-mode RET".

Ok, big confusion with the packages. I search in list-packages for a "follow-mode" and obvisouly did not find anything...

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

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

>> On May 30, 2020, at 3:22, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>> 
>>>> I
>>>>  imagined this would happen when the mode was turned on: it would run
>>>>  down the file and insert markers that would be used to find
>>>>  correspondences. Special characters could be inserted into the file
>>>>  to indicate that two paragraphs should be joined, or one paragraph
>>>>  split.
>>> 
>>> What would be the use of such a marking ?

[...]

>> I want to be able to go to the
>> bottom of the translation, run a command, and have the second window
>> display the corresponding original. If I realize I've done something
>> wrong a couple of chapters previously, and I skip back up to that
>> location in the translation, I want to run the same command to display
>> the corresponding spot in the original.
>
> I seem to remember a long discussion about bookmarks here or on devel
> a while ago. Did you consider that ?

The only part of this code I ever actually wrote used bookmarks to save
where I was at the end of the work day. But usually you just save one
bookmark per file, indicating "where you are" in the file. That's a
different concern than splitting the two texts into segments, and
recording correspondences between segments in the texts. If you
segmented a whole novel by sentences, and then saved a bookmark per
sentence, I'm sure it would cause something to catch on fire.

At first I thought I'd run through the text when the mode was turned on,
insert a whole bunch of markers, then keep a list of marker-pairs. That
seemed like it would be hard to keep properly in sync, though, so now
I'm thinking of running through the text and actually inserting
separator characters, perhaps #x1f, either making them invisible or
putting some other nice display on them. That makes it easier to sync,
and has the advantage that it persists to disk and you only have to do
the major parsing once. Then strip them out during export.

Anyway, still experimenting...

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> 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
I am currently translating a book; and have 1/3rd left. I am using my
own (simplistic) org solution; but I would definitely like to test it.

I have just downloaded it and took a quick look, but I don't have time
to test it today; will be interesting to try it tomorrow.

best regards

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> 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
> I am currently translating a book; and have 1/3rd left. I am using my
> own (simplistic) org solution; but I would definitely like to test it.
>
> I have just downloaded it and took a quick look, but I don't have time
> to test it today; will be interesting to try it tomorrow.

Great! Thanks for helping test it. Maybe let me fix up a few things
first -- right now it assumes you haven't started the translation yet,
so it doesn't segment the translation text. That would be easy to add.

The glossary stuff is also pretty rudimentary -- are you keeping a
glossary? What sort of format is it in?

Thanks,
Eric

RE: Emacs as a translator's tool

[arthur miller]

Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.





-------- Originalmeddelande --------
Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
Datum: 2020-09-17 18:03 (GMT+01:00)
Till: Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>, help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> 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
> I am currently translating a book; and have 1/3rd left. I am using my
> own (simplistic) org solution; but I would definitely like to test it.
>
> I have just downloaded it and took a quick look, but I don't have time
> to test it today; will be interesting to try it tomorrow.

Great! Thanks for helping test it. Maybe let me fix up a few things
first -- right now it assumes you haven't started the translation yet,
so it doesn't segment the translation text. That would be easy to add.

The glossary stuff is also pretty rudimentary -- are you keeping a
glossary? What sort of format is it in?

Thanks,
Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.

Ha, this package won't do much at all, then! The main point is having
source and translation together in the same buffer, and keeping
correspondences between locations and glossary items. If the source
isn't in Emacs at all, I don't think it will do much for you.

RE: Emacs as a translator's tool

[arthur miller]

All is not lost! Can I not just extract text?


-------- Originalmeddelande --------
Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
Datum: 2020-09-17 20:27 (GMT+01:00)
Till: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>, help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>, Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.

Ha, this package won't do much at all, then! The main point is having
source and translation together in the same buffer, and keeping
correspondences between locations and glossary items. If the source
isn't in Emacs at all, I don't think it will do much for you.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> All is not lost! Can I not just extract text?

Well, I wouldn't call PDF text extraction "just" anything, but if you
can do it satisfactorily, then yes, that would solve the problem.

Sv: Emacs as a translator's tool

[arthur miller]

Text extracted nicely (I had suspicitions it owuld work so);

I'll try to see if I can get into that tool, will be interesting;
I have never used such tool 🙂.



________________________________
Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
Skickat: den 17 september 2020 22:42
Till: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>; help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>; Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>; Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> All is not lost! Can I not just extract text?

Well, I wouldn't call PDF text extraction "just" anything, but if you
can do it satisfactorily, then yes, that would solve the problem.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

> -------- Originalmeddelande --------
> Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
> Datum: 2020-09-17 20:27 (GMT+01:00)
> Till: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
> Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>,
> help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>, Yuri
> Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
> Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool
>
> arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.
>
> Ha, this package won't do much at all, then! The main point is having
> source and translation together in the same buffer, and keeping
> correspondences between locations and glossary items. If the source
> isn't in Emacs at all, I don't think it will do much for you.

Ok, text extracted fine; I am not sure how to use the tool yet; but at
least I can repport that when I tried to enable org-translate-mode I got
error:

Symbol’s value as variable is void:org-export-filter-body-functions

That was solved by (require 'ox). I don't know if ox is supposed to be
included by default or not, but seems to solve it.

After that mode started correctly (in my org file), and asked me if I
wanted to index something:

Project not yet segmented, segment now? (y or n) y
You’re 0% done!

I have downloaded the source file just few minutes ago, so I guess I
have the latest version.

Any pointer what to do next/how to use the tool? How should I setup the
document so it can be used with the tool? How do I set the source file
(extracted text), do I need to copy it manually or can I set it up as a
file to be imported?

Currently I try to follow the book layout as closely as possible, so I
have a structure as this:

* Chapter X
** p1
** p2
...
** pn
*Chapyter Y
** pn+1
....

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

[Dropping other people off cc as they might not want to stick with a
pretty old thread]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

>> -------- Originalmeddelande --------
>> Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
>> Datum: 2020-09-17 20:27 (GMT+01:00)
>> Till: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>> Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>,
>> help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>, Yuri
>> Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
>> Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool
>>
>> arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>
>>> Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.
>>
>> Ha, this package won't do much at all, then! The main point is having
>> source and translation together in the same buffer, and keeping
>> correspondences between locations and glossary items. If the source
>> isn't in Emacs at all, I don't think it will do much for you.
>
> Ok, text extracted fine; I am not sure how to use the tool yet; but at
> least I can repport that when I tried to enable org-translate-mode I got
> error:
>
> Symbol’s value as variable is void:org-export-filter-body-functions
>
> That was solved by (require 'ox). I don't know if ox is supposed to be
> included by default or not, but seems to solve it.

Oops, thanks, I'll add that.

> After that mode started correctly (in my org file), and asked me if I
> wanted to index something:
>
> Project not yet segmented, segment now? (y or n) y
> You’re 0% done!
>
> I have downloaded the source file just few minutes ago, so I guess I
> have the latest version.
>
> Any pointer what to do next/how to use the tool? How should I setup the
> document so it can be used with the tool? How do I set the source file
> (extracted text), do I need to copy it manually or can I set it up as a
> file to be imported?
>
> Currently I try to follow the book layout as closely as possible, so I
> have a structure as this:
>
> * Chapter X
> ** p1
> ** p2
> ...
> ** pn
> *Chapyter Y
> ** pn+1
> ....

You can check the Commentary section of the file for the basics: right
now it expects three (at least) top-level Org headings, representing the
source text, translated text, and glossary. So you'd move your existing
translation under a new top-level heading, put the original source text
under a new top-level heading, and add a third top-level heading for the
glossary.

How the package identifies which tree is which is very customizable, but
by default it looks for a ":source:" tag on the top heading of the
source tree, a ":translation:" tag on the top heading of the translation
tree, and a glossary where the heading text itself is just "Glossary".

If you're doing a book, I would then set `ogt-segmentation-strategy' to
the symbol 'paragraph. Then turn on the minor mode, which should segment
the source text. I've updated the library to also segment the
translation text, which will be important to you since you've already
done so much of it.

I'm sort of surprised that segmentation didn't error out before -- if
the code can't find a source tree, it should indicate an error.

Then use "C-M-n" to start a new segment in the translation text, and
"C-M-f" and "C-M-b" to move between segments. Or move around however you
like, and then hit "C-M-t" to update the source window to show the
location corresponding to where you are.

It's early days for this library, so please be patient! Thanks for being
willing to test it.

Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> [Dropping other people off cc as they might not want to stick with a
> pretty old thread]
>
> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>>> -------- Originalmeddelande --------
>>> Från: Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>
>>> Datum: 2020-09-17 20:27 (GMT+01:00)
>>> Till: arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com>
>>> Kopia: Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@traduction-libre.org>,
>>> help-gnu-emacs <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>, Emanuel Berg <moasenwood@zoho.eu>, Yuri
>>> Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>
>>> Ämne: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool
>>>
>>> arthur miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Sure, no rush at all. By the way, the original source is a book in pdf format.
>>>
>>> Ha, this package won't do much at all, then! The main point is having
>>> source and translation together in the same buffer, and keeping
>>> correspondences between locations and glossary items. If the source
>>> isn't in Emacs at all, I don't think it will do much for you.
>>
>> Ok, text extracted fine; I am not sure how to use the tool yet; but at
>> least I can repport that when I tried to enable org-translate-mode I got
>> error:
>>
>> Symbol’s value as variable is void:org-export-filter-body-functions
>>
>> That was solved by (require 'ox). I don't know if ox is supposed to be
>> included by default or not, but seems to solve it.
>
> Oops, thanks, I'll add that.
>
>> After that mode started correctly (in my org file), and asked me if I
>> wanted to index something:
>>
>> Project not yet segmented, segment now? (y or n) y
>> You’re 0% done!
>>
>> I have downloaded the source file just few minutes ago, so I guess I
>> have the latest version.
>>
>> Any pointer what to do next/how to use the tool? How should I setup the
>> document so it can be used with the tool? How do I set the source file
>> (extracted text), do I need to copy it manually or can I set it up as a
>> file to be imported?
>>
>> Currently I try to follow the book layout as closely as possible, so I
>> have a structure as this:
>>
>> * Chapter X
>> ** p1
>> ** p2
>> ...
>> ** pn
>> *Chapyter Y
>> ** pn+1
>> ....
>
> You can check the Commentary section of the file for the basics: right
> now it expects three (at least) top-level Org headings, representing the
> source text, translated text, and glossary. So you'd move your existing
> translation under a new top-level heading, put the original source text
> under a new top-level heading, and add a third top-level heading for the
> glossary.
>
> How the package identifies which tree is which is very customizable, but
> by default it looks for a ":source:" tag on the top heading of the
> source tree, a ":translation:" tag on the top heading of the translation
> tree, and a glossary where the heading text itself is just "Glossary".
>
> If you're doing a book, I would then set `ogt-segmentation-strategy' to
> the symbol 'paragraph. Then turn on the minor mode, which should segment
> the source text. I've updated the library to also segment the
> translation text, which will be important to you since you've already
> done so much of it.
>
> I'm sort of surprised that segmentation didn't error out before -- if
> the code can't find a source tree, it should indicate an error.
>
> Then use "C-M-n" to start a new segment in the translation text, and
> "C-M-f" and "C-M-b" to move between segments. Or move around however you
> like, and then hit "C-M-t" to update the source window to show the
> location corresponding to where you are.

Ok, thank you very much for the help; I will try and see how it works
for me, you clarified a lot, I wasn't really getting it from the
comments.

> It's early days for this library, so please be patient! Thanks for being
> willing to test it.
No worries; it is cool to test it. Since the book is in under the CC
license. TBH I would like to set it up, maybe on Github, so someone else
can help mo translate it from my pidgin-like English into "proper"
English since I am not an English native speaker myself.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

[...]

>> Then use "C-M-n" to start a new segment in the translation text, and
>> "C-M-f" and "C-M-b" to move between segments. Or move around however you
>> like, and then hit "C-M-t" to update the source window to show the
>> location corresponding to where you are.
>
> Ok, thank you very much for the help; I will try and see how it works
> for me, you clarified a lot, I wasn't really getting it from the
> comments.

Okay, I'll try to make the commentary section a little clearer.

>> It's early days for this library, so please be patient! Thanks for being
>> willing to test it.
> No worries; it is cool to test it. Since the book is in under the CC
> license. TBH I would like to set it up, maybe on Github, so someone else
> can help mo translate it from my pidgin-like English into "proper"
> English since I am not an English native speaker myself.

Out of curiosity, what's the book?

Thanks again,
Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> Out of curiosity, what's the book?
http://lispbook.com/

> Thanks again,
> Eric
Thank you :-).

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 10:47:38PM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
> 
> > Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
> >
> >> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Out of curiosity, what's the book?
> http://lispbook.com/

You're translating it... from Croatian into English?

I'm not native speaker either, but if you need a guinea pig, I'm
available :-)

Cheers
 - t

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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 10:47:38PM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:
>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>> 
>> > Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>> >
>> >> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>> >
>> > [...]
>> >
>> > Out of curiosity, what's the book?
>> http://lispbook.com/
>
> You're translating it... from Croatian into English?
>
> I'm not native speaker either, but if you need a guinea pig, I'm
> available :-)

Yes, I figured out ya people didn't learned Croatian yet?

My plan is to put it on GH when I am done with translation. But I would
also like the author to be content with it, so until he gives his blessing I
am not putting the translation online despite it being a creative
commons licence.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Sat, Sep 19, 2020 at 12:57:30AM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:
> <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 10:47:38PM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:

[...]

> Yes, I figured out ya people didn't learned Croatian yet?

Alas, no. That'd be nice :)

> My plan is to put it on GH when I am done with translation. But I would
> also like the author to be content with it, so until he gives his blessing I
> am not putting the translation online despite it being a creative
> commons licence.

Understood. I'll keep my fingers crossed, then!

Thanks & cheers
 - t

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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>
>>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Out of curiosity, what's the book?
> http://lispbook.com/

Cool!

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Arthur Miller]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

>>     it expects three (at least) top-level Org headings, representing the
>> source text, translated text, and glossary. So you'd move your existing
>> translation under a new top-level heading, put the original source text
>> under a new top-level heading, and add a third top-level heading for the
>> glossary.
Ok, checked!
 
>> If you're doing a book, I would then set `ogt-segmentation-strategy' to
>> the symbol 'paragraph. Then turn on the minor mode, which should segment
>> the source text. I've updated the library to also segment the
>> translation text, which will be important to you since you've already
>> done so much of it.
I have done it, and it did the segmenting for the source seemingly
pretty well, but it didn't really understand the translation, maybe
it is confused because I used org headings for the chapters and pages,
so the translation does not correspond 1:1 to the source?

For today I don't have more time, I'll see tomorrow if I can remove
headings and see if it works better.

>> I'm sort of surprised that segmentation didn't error out before -- if
>> the code can't find a source tree, it should indicate an error.
It didn't error; it just said 0% done :-).

Thanks for the help, I was able to move around as you described and it
worked moslty as you advertise, seems like. If I did it from the start I
guess the tool would work much better for me :-).

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>
>>>     it expects three (at least) top-level Org headings, representing the
>>> source text, translated text, and glossary. So you'd move your existing
>>> translation under a new top-level heading, put the original source text
>>> under a new top-level heading, and add a third top-level heading for the
>>> glossary.
> Ok, checked!
>  
>>> If you're doing a book, I would then set `ogt-segmentation-strategy' to
>>> the symbol 'paragraph. Then turn on the minor mode, which should segment
>>> the source text. I've updated the library to also segment the
>>> translation text, which will be important to you since you've already
>>> done so much of it.
> I have done it, and it did the segmenting for the source seemingly
> pretty well, but it didn't really understand the translation, maybe
> it is confused because I used org headings for the chapters and pages,
> so the translation does not correspond 1:1 to the source?

That could be, segmentation isn't super smart.

> For today I don't have more time, I'll see tomorrow if I can remove
> headings and see if it works better.

Rather than do that, I'd play with deleting/adding segmentation
characters. Like I said it's not smart, and once it's done the
segmentation it won't touch it again, so you could just take out "extra"
segmentation characters so the headings don't look like separate segments.

>>> I'm sort of surprised that segmentation didn't error out before -- if
>>> the code can't find a source tree, it should indicate an error.
> It didn't error; it just said 0% done :-).
>
> Thanks for the help, I was able to move around as you described and it
> worked moslty as you advertise, seems like. If I did it from the start I
> guess the tool would work much better for me :-).

Probably! I haven't tried turning it on halfway through. That wasn't
going to be a priority, but if you're the one testing it, those are the
bugs I'll fix :)

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-09-17, at 17:16, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:

> 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:

Hi Eric,

so, after more than a year, I decided to finally take a look.  (Well,
the main reason I started this thread was that I was translating
a relatively short paper, which was done pretty quickly, so I didn't
have much motivation to dive into this...  Sorry!)  I only read the
readme for now, but it looks interesting.

It turned out that I'm now in the middle (sort-of) of another
translation project, much bigger this time.  (It started over a year ago
and I estimate that it's going to take me at least half a year, maybe
more if the scope increases, which is pretty likely.)  The trouble is,
your package won't help me /at all/, since it is tied to Org-mode.  My
project involves translating subtitles in .srt format.  (I blogged about
it twice:
http://mbork.pl/2020-10-26_Scrolling_all_windows_simultaneously
http://mbork.pl/2021-05-30_Extending_subed-mode; I also blogged about my
previous similar project:
http://mbork.pl/2020-10-12_Editing_subtitles_in_Emacs_with_subed)

Of course, when translating subtitles, segmentation is basically taken
care of already (even if I sometimes need to change it a bit).  On the
other hand, being able to view the relevant place in the source in
a separate window, while not strictly necessary, could be helpful.
Also, a glossary would be nice, too.  Is there any chance of separating
org-translate from Org itself?  (It could be useful for other cases,
too, like translating papers in LaTeX - which I also did a few times in
the past.)

I could help you with coding (though not now, I'm very busy until
February or March), but I'd probably have to sort out legal stuff with
the FSF (I have their copyright papers signed, but I changed jobs from
university teacher to a programmer since then).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2020-09-17, at 17:16, Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> wrote:
>
>> 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:
>
> Hi Eric,
>
> so, after more than a year, I decided to finally take a look.  (Well,
> the main reason I started this thread was that I was translating
> a relatively short paper, which was done pretty quickly, so I didn't
> have much motivation to dive into this...  Sorry!)  I only read the
> readme for now, but it looks interesting.
>
> It turned out that I'm now in the middle (sort-of) of another
> translation project, much bigger this time.  (It started over a year ago
> and I estimate that it's going to take me at least half a year, maybe
> more if the scope increases, which is pretty likely.)  The trouble is,
> your package won't help me /at all/, since it is tied to Org-mode.  My
> project involves translating subtitles in .srt format.  (I blogged about
> it twice:
> http://mbork.pl/2020-10-26_Scrolling_all_windows_simultaneously
> http://mbork.pl/2021-05-30_Extending_subed-mode; I also blogged about my
> previous similar project:
> http://mbork.pl/2020-10-12_Editing_subtitles_in_Emacs_with_subed)
>
> Of course, when translating subtitles, segmentation is basically taken
> care of already (even if I sometimes need to change it a bit).  On the
> other hand, being able to view the relevant place in the source in
> a separate window, while not strictly necessary, could be helpful.
> Also, a glossary would be nice, too.  Is there any chance of separating
> org-translate from Org itself?  (It could be useful for other cases,
> too, like translating papers in LaTeX - which I also did a few times in
> the past.)

Thanks for continuing this thread, and for the feedback!

To be honest, I'm still very ambivalent about this package. Along with
some other code I've written (org-annotate and Gnorb) I feel like
there's potentially something useful in there, but I haven't quite got
it right. Mostly because I don't have a 100% clear concept of what
features are really needed.

I use org-translate, and find the glossary stuff useful, but there's
still something wrong about it. I'd always intended to decouple it from
Org, but I wouldn't want to do that coding work until I figured out
exactly what is wrong, and had a clearer sense of the features I want. A
"hard" glossary is important (where there's a rigid one-to-one
correspondence between language terms), and a "soft" glossary (where
there's a more general linkage), and I feel like org-translate does that
okay. But I also want to just leave certain phrases and words in the
original in my translation, and somehow mark them as "come back to this
later". And I want to put in multiple versions or drafts of a particular
word/phrase/sentence/paragraph, and be able to cycle through them. I
don't know how any of that stuff should look yet.

But yes, as it currently stands org-translate is far too rigid in its
requirement of Org, and its particular source/target setup. For my
current translation project I was given a PDF, not a text file (curse
them!!!), so I can't use org-translate at all. The whole thing needs to
be reconsidered.

Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

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.

All in all, it's a real challenge. Good luck!

[1] https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-09/msg01727.html
[2] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=xliff
[3] Newsgroup: gmane.comp.misc.translate.xliff.user
-- 
Best regards,
Kevin Vigouroux

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:

> 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.

I got this far:

  https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/ecat-incal.el

The next step ...

An algorithm to search the database. [Difficult]

The step after that ...

A visual interface to present options from the database;
a keyboard ditto to choose, one-touch style close-and-short
asdf jkl; from presented options. Also an "edit manually"
function ... [Not exactly easy but will require more work
than brains.]

And the step after that ...

A self-learning or adaptive algorithm that, based on the
usage, will alter the ratios in the database so that the
algorithm will, by itself, given enough input that indicates
one way, present that result ... [Interesting.]

After that ... sideshows :)

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

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
requirements there are very different (and much more fluid) than
something like XLIFF, which seems firmly aimed at localization. I can't
imagine a major-mode that would be practically useful for both
localization and fiction translation.

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

The XLIFF standard does not define which documents should be supported.
The problem has more to do with your perception of the translation
process, which is not defined by XLIFF. The application could display
anything else, not just an XML file. What is interesting is that we can
store and process data with XML.
-- 
Best regards,
Kevin Vigouroux

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:

> What is interesting is that we can store and process data
> with XML.

XML processing XML!

Is that Lisp ... or von Neumann?

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

What could prevent transpositions between Lisp and XML?

My technical level is not sufficient to answer. However, Emacs has a
library to convert XML to Lisp. Morevover, the data structures don’t
have to be equivalent as long as things match.
-- 
Best regards,
Kevin Vigouroux

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:

> What could prevent transpositions between Lisp and XML?

Well ... "transpose" in the Emacs world is, for example,
`transpose-chars' ... and "transposition" in computing is
a term from cryptography!

But if you by that mean something else - namely _____ - then
yes! That's possible and nothing prevents that, really.

> My technical level is not sufficient to answer. However,
> Emacs has a library to convert XML to Lisp. Morevover, the
> data structures don’t have to be equivalent as long as
> things match.

What are you trying to do?

But XML is poor man's Lisp. Indeed, a very poor man ;)

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Dec 22, 2021, at 4:37, Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> The XLIFF standard does not define which documents should be supported.

XML *Localisation Interchange* File Format

As Eric says, the name strongly suggests document types and processes.

I'm not saying that's why OmegaT (for ex.) does not work internally with XLIFF, but that's definitely the reason why a generic translation tool should not focus on XLIFF support but just accept it as one of other file formats.

For one, when you translate, there are plenty of times when you need to modify the source, and having XLIFF in the process requires an extra conversion step each time you do so.

> The problem has more to do with your perception of the translation
> process, which is not defined by XLIFF.

Yes and no.

https://maxprograms.com/articles/analysis.html

> The application could display
> anything else, not just an XML file. What is interesting is that we can
> store and process data with XML.

Then you're talking about TMX, not XLIFF. *If* you want to stick to an XML based standard. PO is just as fine for a lot of use cases.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @brandelune
https://mac4translators.blogspot.com
https://sr.ht/~brandelune/omegat-as-a-book/

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Kevin Vigouroux via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

I conceive things differently by looking for processes that would simplify
the translation: I don’t stay focused on XLIFF documents.

The XLIFF standard brings several ideas: it’s not just a format to
ensure interoperability between different tools.

No, I'm not talking about a particular implementation using some
technologies, but I don’t rule them out either.
-- 
Best regards,
Kevin Vigouroux

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

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.)

> requirements there are very different (and much more fluid) than
> something like XLIFF, which seems firmly aimed at localization. I can't
> imagine a major-mode that would be practically useful for both
> localization and fiction translation.

Agreed.  Actually, a global minor mode might be a better fit.  It could
support e.g. linking between two buffers ("source" and "translation")
and glossary support.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

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 :(

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". :( :(

Translating fiction for publishing houses is the same: Word documents,
track changes. So basically I'm pasting the text into a text-mode or
org-mode buffer, doing my translation, and then exporting to odt/docx.
It's very depressing.

>> requirements there are very different (and much more fluid) than
>> something like XLIFF, which seems firmly aimed at localization. I can't
>> imagine a major-mode that would be practically useful for both
>> localization and fiction translation.
>
> Agreed.  Actually, a global minor mode might be a better fit.  It could
> support e.g. linking between two buffers ("source" and "translation")
> and glossary support.

Right. Jean-Christophe mentioned TMX, which makes a lot of sense, as its
an external storage format, and usable no matter what format your actual
translation is in. And it's good for collaborative translations, though
I don't do that. A minor mode for that would be perfect, and that's
probably what I should have written.

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).

Some day!

Eric

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

>> 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 :(

Can't you guys see if you can find me me a translator job (I
mean a single item) - because if I do it, I can tell the guys
here, "look you bunch of bozos, I have experience from the
field!" So then I'll get jobs from there! And you'll get my
gratitude and I'll have respect for Norway and Poland ;)

Actually I already have that. I only act stupid, most of the
time ...

Are Poles the only ones ever to beat Russia in a war?
What about the Afghans?

As for Norway ... it speaks for itself. Only now I think they
have too much money!

Sweden ... once super-militaristic, armed-to-the-teeth, then
and still one of the riches countries in the world LOL

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>>> 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 :(
>
> Can't you guys see if you can find me me a translator job (I
> mean a single item) - because if I do it, I can tell the guys
> here, "look you bunch of bozos, I have experience from the
> field!" 

I've tried this, and it doesn't work :)

> So then I'll get jobs from there! And you'll get my gratitude and I'll
> have respect for Norway and Poland ;)
>
> Actually I already have that. I only act stupid, most of the
> time ...
>
> Are Poles the only ones ever to beat Russia in a war?
> What about the Afghans?
>
> As for Norway ... it speaks for itself. Only now I think they
> have too much money!

At the risk of going completely off-topic, I'm American, not Norwegian.
My family left Norway right before they discovered oil and all got rich
:(

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

>> As for Norway ... it speaks for itself. Only now I think
>> they have too much money!
>
> At the risk of going completely off-topic, I'm American, not
> Norwegian. My family left Norway right before they
> discovered oil and all got rich :(

OK, noted! I assumed because of your name and interest in
Gnus!

But that so, alright ... I happen to know that the
international book publishing business is not a field
completely dominated by the US, the European businesses hold
strong with in particular the UK, France, and Germany - still,
they have their HQs in NYC!

So maybe you can put in a good word next time you visit
them :)

No oil money? How about the American dream? ;)

Actually that dream isn't a bad one ...

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

>>>> 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 :(
>>
>> Can't you guys see if you can find me me a translator job
>> (I mean a single item) - because if I do it, I can tell the
>> guys here, "look you bunch of bozos, I have experience from
>> the field!"
>
> I've tried this, and it doesn't work :)

Okay ... what worked then?

And wait ... what kind of translator are you, if you
are American?

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>>>>> 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 :(
>>>
>>> Can't you guys see if you can find me me a translator job
>>> (I mean a single item) - because if I do it, I can tell the
>>> guys here, "look you bunch of bozos, I have experience from
>>> the field!"
>>
>> I've tried this, and it doesn't work :)
>
> Okay ... what worked then?

Nothing! I still have to use Word files.

> And wait ... what kind of translator are you, if you
> are American?

While most of us are monolingual, it's true, I translate from Chinese
into English.

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>>> As for Norway ... it speaks for itself. Only now I think
>>> they have too much money!
>>
>> At the risk of going completely off-topic, I'm American, not
>> Norwegian. My family left Norway right before they
>> discovered oil and all got rich :(
>
> OK, noted! I assumed because of your name and interest in
> Gnus!
>
> But that so, alright ... I happen to know that the
> international book publishing business is not a field
> completely dominated by the US, the European businesses hold
> strong with in particular the UK, France, and Germany - still,
> they have their HQs in NYC!
>
> So maybe you can put in a good word next time you visit
> them :)

Experience has proven that NY publishers don't take my advice at all :)

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2021-12-22, at 19:48, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>>> 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 :(
>
> Can't you guys see if you can find me me a translator job (I
> mean a single item) - because if I do it, I can tell the guys
> here, "look you bunch of bozos, I have experience from the
> field!" So then I'll get jobs from there! And you'll get my
> gratitude and I'll have respect for Norway and Poland ;)

Well, I don't have a translator job, either.  And I have a friend who is
a translator, and it seems this job sucks more and more these days...
(Easy commissione are gone because of Google Translator; rates have been
the same for about 20 years, not even raised according to inflation...)

> Actually I already have that. I only act stupid, most of the
> time ...
>
> Are Poles the only ones ever to beat Russia in a war?

Well, we had our share of defeats, but we also had some truly badass
moments...  Actually, we saved Europe twice
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_(1920)), helped save
England (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._303_Squadron_RAF), helped
save at least Eastern Europe once
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_John_Paul_II#Role_in_the_fall_of_Communism),
helped the Allies at least twice (not counting the Battle of England -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma)...

> Sweden ... once super-militaristic, armed-to-the-teeth, then
> and still one of the riches countries in the world LOL

Actually, we also fought Swedes once
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history)).

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> Well, I don't have a translator job, either. And I have
> a friend who is a translator, and it seems this job sucks
> more and more these days... (Easy commissione are gone
> because of Google Translator; rates have been the same for
> about 20 years, not even raised according to inflation...)

Yeah ... I'm back to running a workshop :)
<https://dataswamp.org/~incal/blog/ums/ut/ut-ums.png> (4.7M)

But I would like to have an bookish or analytical work just
once before I leave this world. A full-time translator tho,
oh no. I think even with Emacs a full-blown CAT that
would stink. Well, MUCH less so obviously, but still ...

Organization skills from Emacs comes handy! Soo easy compared
to what we do every day, but don't tell anyone :)
<https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/wood-shelf.jpg> (411K)
<https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/wall-bench-shelf.jpg> (2.2M)
<https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/triangle-wagon.jpg> (2.4M)

For example ... see the distances between the uprights in the
"triangle-wagon.jpg" photo? They are the same. It doesn't take
a math professional like yourself to know that with static
quantities and a single unknown it's - algebra :)

But a lot of these guys don't know that. "- How did you do it? -
A folding rule ... - Aaah ..."

>> Are Poles the only ones ever to beat Russia in a war?
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_(1920))

Yeah, that's it.

>> Sweden ... once super-militaristic, armed-to-the-teeth,
>> then and still one of the riches countries in the world LOL
>
> Actually, we also fought Swedes once
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history)).

I know, I heard it several times! And I have heard young
Polish people blame Sweden even more than Russia for the
_present_ situation in Poland (whatever that is, in their
minds). Because the Russians at least help rebuild and
organize things after WW2, they said.

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2021-12-23, at 22:59, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> Well, I don't have a translator job, either. And I have
>> a friend who is a translator, and it seems this job sucks
>> more and more these days... (Easy commissione are gone
>> because of Google Translator; rates have been the same for
>> about 20 years, not even raised according to inflation...)
>
> Yeah ... I'm back to running a workshop :)
> <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/blog/ums/ut/ut-ums.png> (4.7M)
>
> But I would like to have an bookish or analytical work just
> once before I leave this world. A full-time translator tho,
> oh no. I think even with Emacs a full-blown CAT that
> would stink. Well, MUCH less so obviously, but still ...
>
> Organization skills from Emacs comes handy! Soo easy compared
> to what we do every day, but don't tell anyone :)
> <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/wood-shelf.jpg> (411K)
> <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/wall-bench-shelf.jpg> (2.2M)
> <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/ums/photo/triangle-wagon.jpg> (2.4M)
>
> For example ... see the distances between the uprights in the
> "triangle-wagon.jpg" photo? They are the same. It doesn't take
> a math professional like yourself to know that with static
> quantities and a single unknown it's - algebra :)
>
> But a lot of these guys don't know that. "- How did you do it? -
> A folding rule ... - Aaah ..."
>
>>> Are Poles the only ones ever to beat Russia in a war?
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Warsaw_(1920))
>
> Yeah, that's it.
>
>>> Sweden ... once super-militaristic, armed-to-the-teeth,
>>> then and still one of the riches countries in the world LOL
>>
>> Actually, we also fought Swedes once
>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history)).
>
> I know, I heard it several times! And I have heard young
> Polish people blame Sweden even more than Russia for the
> _present_ situation in Poland (whatever that is, in their
> minds). Because the Russians at least help rebuild and
> organize things after WW2, they said.

Hard to believe.  Russians "helped" with a lot of things after WW2, like
killing Polish soldiers not killed earlier by Germans and installing
a police state.  I don't think rebuilding and organizing were on the
list.

And blaming Sweded for what we have today is clearly insane.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

> Lastly, if I ever magically become a better programmer than
> I am [...]

But that happens, without magic, little by little, every day.
Only at this level ... it's not exactly like the great leap
forward :)

Even Stefan learns something new every day I'm sure? :D

"You work on new things, you work on old things"
  - "Iron" Mike Tyson

"We learn every day. About boxing. And about life!"
  - Floyd "Money" Mayweather

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

>> 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.)

Cool!

Use this!

;; this file:
;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/comic-book-insult.el

(require 'seq)

(defun scramble-string (str)
  "Randomize the characters of a string."
  (interactive "sscramble me: ")
  (let ((rand-str (seq-sort (lambda (_ __) (zerop (random 2))) str )))
    (if (called-interactively-p 'any)
        (message rand-str)
      rand-str) ))

(defun comic-book-insult ()
  (interactive)
  (insert (concat (scramble-string "@#$%&") "!")) )

;; (comic-book-insult) ; #$%&@!
;; (comic-book-insult) ; $&#@%!

;; (scramble-string "Hello there, Emacs is very cool piece of software")
;; "aye eposrr lvre olsec,ewfico ceti ftomH hseoa l E"

-- 
underground experts united
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 29, 2020, at 17:14, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> I always thought translation was just a matter of
> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
> idiomatic equivalent.

It is. But *computer aided translation* tools make that easier by putting all the translation ressources (glossaries, legacy translations, dictionaries, searches, autocompletion) into one translation "IDE" that helps the translator not lose time on repetitive tasks.

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>> I always thought translation was just a matter of
>> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
>> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
>> idiomatic equivalent.
>
> It is. But *computer aided translation* tools make
> that easier by putting all the translation
> ressources (glossaries, legacy translations,
> dictionaries, searches, autocompletion) into one
> translation "IDE" that helps the translator not
> lose time on repetitive tasks.

... which are?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On May 29, 2020, at 17:43, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>>> I always thought translation was just a matter of
>>> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
>>> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
>>> idiomatic equivalent.
>> 
>> It is. But *computer aided translation* tools make
>> that easier by putting all the translation
>> ressources (glossaries, legacy translations,
>> dictionaries, searches, autocompletion) into one
>> translation "IDE" that helps the translator not
>> lose time on repetitive tasks.
> 
> ... which are?

Typing text :)

If there is ONE repetitive task in translation, it is typing text.

So anything that is already registered and which can be semi-automatically entered is a godsend.

For ex. You translate a sentence in which half is already registered as a legacy translation. The translation memory engine finds the match in the background (no need for you to search it) and presents its corresponding translation (that's called "fuzzy matching"). You hit a shortcut and boom, you have half the sentence translated. Now, the other half contains glossary terms that are in a TSV file (or equivalent), here again the search has happened in the background and you are presented with a choice of terms that you can enter with a keybinding. You just need to type the semantic "glue" between the terms.

Et voilà. The "IDE" did all the searches in the background when you started working on a given segment and autocompletion or keybindings give you easy access to what you need to enter.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> For ex. You translate a sentence in which half is
> already registered as a legacy translation.
> The translation memory engine finds the match in
> the background (no need for you to search it) and
> presents its corresponding translation (that's
> called "fuzzy matching"). You hit a shortcut and
> boom, you have half the sentence translated. Now,
> the other half contains glossary terms that are in
> a TSV file (or equivalent), here again the search
> has happened in the background and you are
> presented with a choice of terms that you can enter
> with a keybinding. You just need to type the
> semantic "glue" between the terms.

OK. I personally don't like that but that's in Emacs,
for sure. abbrev-mode and more advanced yasnippet and
many, many other solutions and packs.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-05-29, at 10:14, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> 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.

> Anyway, what other features do the proprietary
> CATs have?
>
> I always thought translation was just a matter of
> reading one thing and then typing what it means,
> looking up the occasional word or phrase for the
> idiomatic equivalent.

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.

> 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...

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

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 :)

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.

>> 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...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> 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.

Aha, _manually_. No, of course you can't have that.
I thought you meant moving point in general.

But I still don't understand why to have virtually
the same code thrice...

>> 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...?

Every time I ever compiled source code for example.
Also browsing the web involves the browser parsing
HTML and CSS. It happens all the time when using
a computer.

>> 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.

... idiomatic translations of phrases isn't
a major issue?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 9:43, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>>> 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.
> 
> ... idiomatic translations of phrases isn't
> a major issue?

No, because that is exactly what the translator is here for.

What we are discussing here is how the computer is helping the translator for all the other parts that require efficiency.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>> ... idiomatic translations of phrases isn't
>> a major issue?
>
> No, because that is exactly what the translator is
> here for.

OK, so translators are not allowed to use tools?

What about dictionaries, are you still allowed to
use them?

> What we are discussing here is how the computer is
> helping the translator for all the other parts that
> require efficiency.

I see, for other parts, it is allowed!

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 10:08, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>>> ... idiomatic translations of phrases isn't
>>> a major issue?
>> 
>> No, because that is exactly what the translator is
>> here for.
> 
> OK, so translators are not allowed to use tools?
> 
> What about dictionaries, are you still allowed to
> use them?
> 
>> What we are discussing here is how the computer is
>> helping the translator for all the other parts that
>> require efficiency.
> 
> I see, for other parts, it is allowed!


I'm not sure I understand where you're drifting.

Idiomatic translations can be helped with tools, but as we see with MT, even the best tools still fail to produce correct idiomatic translations.

Which is the reason why I wrote "that is exactly what the translator is here for", meaning that the translator is here to ensure that the translation is idiomatic.

The tool can help the translator to produce a string that the translator will validate as idiomatic.

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> I'm not sure I understand where you're drifting.
>
> Idiomatic translations can be helped with tools,
> but as we see with MT, even the best tools still
> fail to produce correct idiomatic translations.
>
> Which is the reason why I wrote "that is exactly
> what the translator is here for", meaning that the
> translator is here to ensure that the translation
> is idiomatic.
>
> The tool can help the translator to produce
> a string that the translator will validate
> as idiomatic.

A file with common pitfalls and idiomatic
translations can help both machine AND human
translators find the idiomatic translation, or, if
there isn't one really, what people would say
instead...

"Good enough for government work" - there is no such
expression in Swedish - "good enough for the intended
purpose" - "tillräckligt bra för det avsedda
ändamålet" (sounds extremely dorky, no one would ever
say that) - "det duger" - ?

"Have one on the house" - there is no ... - etc etc -
"vi kan bjucka på den"

???

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 5, 2020, at 12:15, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> I'm not sure I understand where you're drifting.
>> 
>> Idiomatic translations can be helped with tools,
>> but as we see with MT, even the best tools still
>> fail to produce correct idiomatic translations.
>> 
>> Which is the reason why I wrote "that is exactly
>> what the translator is here for", meaning that the
>> translator is here to ensure that the translation
>> is idiomatic.
>> 
>> The tool can help the translator to produce
>> a string that the translator will validate
>> as idiomatic.
> 
> A file with common pitfalls and idiomatic
> translations can help both machine AND human
> translators find the idiomatic translation, or, if
> there isn't one really, what people would say
> instead...

Indeed, and that is just a special case of what we call "contextual matches" where the source text can match a number of translations but only a few are correct in the context of the few previous or following segments.

So in terms of CAT functionality, such data would be included in a translation memory, or a glossary file with comments, etc.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-05, at 05:15, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure I understand where you're drifting.
>>
>> Idiomatic translations can be helped with tools,
>> but as we see with MT, even the best tools still
>> fail to produce correct idiomatic translations.
>>
>> Which is the reason why I wrote "that is exactly
>> what the translator is here for", meaning that the
>> translator is here to ensure that the translation
>> is idiomatic.
>>
>> The tool can help the translator to produce
>> a string that the translator will validate
>> as idiomatic.
>
> A file with common pitfalls and idiomatic
> translations can help both machine AND human
> translators find the idiomatic translation, or, if
> there isn't one really, what people would say
> instead...

The point I am trying to make (and I guess Jean-Christophe, too) is that
most of the time, a professional translator won't _need_ such a file,
since knowing "common pitfalls and idiomatic translations" by heart is
one of the most important parts of their profession anyway.  What you
suggest is like giving a C programmer a cheat sheet with the syntax of
`if', `for` and `while`.

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> The point I am trying to make (and I guess
> Jean-Christophe, too) is that most of the time,
> a professional translator won't _need_ such a file,
> since knowing "common pitfalls and idiomatic
> translations" by heart is one of the most important
> parts of their profession anyway.

OK, change that from a file with "common pitfalls and
idiomatic translations" to a file with EVERYTHING and
you get what the pros use.

That makes more sense: while the pros know the common
pitfalls by heart as you say, not even they can be
expected to know everything!

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-05, at 02:43, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> But I still don't understand why to have virtually
> the same code thrice...

If you find a good way to refactor it so that it is more DRY, I'd love
to see it.  That code was written as a PoC quickly and without a lot of
thought.

>>> 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...?
>
> Every time I ever compiled source code for example.
> Also browsing the web involves the browser parsing
> HTML and CSS. It happens all the time when using
> a computer.

Obviously, I meant "translation" as in "translation between two natural
languages, done by a human being".  I'd bet you did not, otherwise you'd
never say that it is "mechanical and easy".

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> If you find a good way to refactor it so that it is
> more DRY, I'd love to see it.

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;;;
;;; this file:
;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el

(defvar sentence-overlay nil)

(defun remove-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
    (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence ()
  (interactive)
  (remove-highlight)
  (let ((overlay (make-overlay (progn (forward-sentence)  (point))
                               (progn (backward-sentence) (point)) )))
    (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-function-name-face)
    (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence-next ()
  (interactive)
  (forward-sentence)
  (highlight-sentence) )

(defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (backward-sentence)
  (highlight-sentence) )

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> If you find a good way to refactor it so that it is
>> more DRY, I'd love to see it.
>
> ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
> ;;;
> ;;; this file:
> ;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
> ;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
>
> (defvar sentence-overlay nil)
>
> (defun remove-highlight ()
>   (interactive)
>   (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>     (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence ()
>   (interactive)
>   (remove-highlight)
>   (let ((overlay (make-overlay (progn (forward-sentence)  (point))
>                                (progn (backward-sentence) (point)) )))
>     (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-function-name-face)
>     (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))

You don't need to delete the overlay and make it again each time, just
use `move-overlay'. You can also move an overlay that's been deleted,
essentially recreating it, so long as you still have a reference to it.

How do I know? Because this thread finally motivated me to finish the
translation environment package I've been thinking of for a while, and I
just wrote pretty much the same code a couple of days ago :)

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

> You don't need to delete the overlay and make it
> again each time, just use `move-overlay'.

Alrighty, how about this? Only highlight-sentence has
changed...

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;;;
;;; this file:
;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el

(defvar sentence-overlay nil)

(defun remove-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
    (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)  (point)))
        (end (progn (backward-sentence) (point))) )
    (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
        (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
      (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
        (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-function-name-face)
        (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))

(defun highlight-sentence-next ()
  (interactive)
  (forward-sentence)
  (highlight-sentence) )

(defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (backward-sentence)
  (highlight-sentence) )

> How do I know? Because this thread finally
> motivated me to finish the translation environment
> package I've been thinking of for a while, and
> I just wrote pretty much the same code a couple of
> days ago :)

Well... OK :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
>> You don't need to delete the overlay and make it
>> again each time, just use `move-overlay'.
>
> Alrighty, how about this? Only highlight-sentence has
> changed...
>
> ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
> ;;;
> ;;; this file:
> ;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
> ;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
>
> (defvar sentence-overlay nil)
>
> (defun remove-highlight ()
>   (interactive)
>   (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>     (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence ()
>   (interactive)
>   (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)  (point)))
>         (end (progn (backward-sentence) (point))) )
>     (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>         (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
>       (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
>         (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-function-name-face)
>         (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-next ()
>   (interactive)
>   (forward-sentence)
>   (highlight-sentence) )
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
>   (interactive)
>   (backward-sentence)
>   (highlight-sentence) )

Looks good to me!

>> How do I know? Because this thread finally
>> motivated me to finish the translation environment
>> package I've been thinking of for a while, and
>> I just wrote pretty much the same code a couple of
>> days ago :)
>
> Well... OK :)

Maybe some merging can be done when everyone's finished their version...

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

> Maybe some merging can be done when everyone's
> finished their version...

Like I said, the interface will be the easy part.
The database and algorithm will be worse...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

Thanks, but this won't work in this form, as you don't move the point to
the overlay before.  But the idea LGTM.  As I said, I wrote my code in
a hurry and spent more time thinking how to wrap it in a minor mode than
how to make the commands themselves better.

Best,

On 2020-06-07, at 23:15, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> If you find a good way to refactor it so that it is
>> more DRY, I'd love to see it.
>
> ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
> ;;;
> ;;; this file:
> ;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
> ;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
>
> (defvar sentence-overlay nil)
>
> (defun remove-highlight ()
>   (interactive)
>   (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>     (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence ()
>   (interactive)
>   (remove-highlight)
>   (let ((overlay (make-overlay (progn (forward-sentence)  (point))
>                                (progn (backward-sentence) (point)) )))
>     (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-function-name-face)
>     (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-next ()
>   (interactive)
>   (forward-sentence)
>   (highlight-sentence) )
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
>   (interactive)
>   (backward-sentence)
>   (highlight-sentence) )


--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> Thanks, but this won't work in this form

It works, check out this dump:
  <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/pimgs/cat.png>

> as you don't move the point to the overlay before.

... not sure I'm following, but there is only one
overlay, point is moved both ways with
`forward-sentence' and `backward-sentence', the
overlay is moved with `move-overlay'. point is always
at the beginning of a sentence.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

> It works, check out this dump:
>   <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/pimgs/cat.png>

One thing tho, M. Helary said something about the
chopping up of the input into segments, my intuition
tells me they are shorter (the input more
segmentized) than what you get with
`forward-sentence' and `backward-sentence'. (My
intuition also tells me backward-sentence is
(forward-sentence -1) ...)

Maybe `sentence-end' already has been configured
somewhere to get the most restrictive definition,
i.e., here, with the purpose of getting the shortest
possible segments that still make sense...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

> One thing tho, M. Helary said something about the
> chopping up of the input into segments, my
> intuition tells me they are shorter (the input more
> segmentized) than what you get with
> `forward-sentence' and `backward-sentence'. (My
> intuition also tells me backward-sentence is
> (forward-sentence -1) ...)
>
> Maybe `sentence-end' already has been configured
> somewhere to get the most restrictive definition,
> i.e., here, with the purpose of getting the
> shortest possible segments that still make sense...

Unless... unless the DB is really fined
tuned already. Then we should do our own segmentation
rules, we should get the exact same as they (OmegaT
or whoever has it) uses...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 8, 2020, at 21:15, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> One thing tho, M. Helary said something about the
>> chopping up of the input into segments, my
>> intuition tells me they are shorter (the input more
>> segmentized) than what you get with
>> `forward-sentence' and `backward-sentence'. (My
>> intuition also tells me backward-sentence is
>> (forward-sentence -1) ...)
>> 
>> Maybe `sentence-end' already has been configured
>> somewhere to get the most restrictive definition,
>> i.e., here, with the purpose of getting the
>> shortest possible segments that still make sense...
> 
> Unless... unless the DB is really fined
> tuned already. Then we should do our own segmentation
> rules, we should get the exact same as they (OmegaT
> or whoever has it) uses...

CAT segmentation rules are defined by the SRX standard. They are basically a set of cascading regex rules (break/don't break).

It is possible to fine-tune a translation by modifying a rule set before or during the translation.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> CAT segmentation rules are defined by the SRX
> standard. They are basically a set of cascading
> regex rules (break/don't break).

OK? do (sentence-end) to get, maybe,

"\\([.?!…‽][]\"'”’)}]*\\($\\|[	  ]\\)\\|[。．？！]+\\)[  	
]"*

Because "ll paragraph boundaries also end sentences" ...

    paragraph-separate is a variable defined in
    ‘paragraphs.el’. Its value is "[ \f]*$"

      This variable is safe as a file local variable if
      its value satisfies the predicate ‘stringp’.

    Documentation:
    Regexp for beginning of a line that separates
    paragraphs. If you change this, you may have to
    change ‘paragraph-start’ also.

So we'll just change it to comply with the SRX
standard :)

> It is possible to fine-tune a translation by
> modifying a rule set ...

It is possible but with Emacs, even more so :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 6:13, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> CAT segmentation rules are defined by the SRX
>> standard. They are basically a set of cascading
>> regex rules (break/don't break).
> 
>    Documentation:
>    Regexp for beginning of a line that separates
>    paragraphs. If you change this, you may have to
>    change ‘paragraph-start’ also.
> 
> So we'll just change it to comply with the SRX
> standard :)

Sure. You may want to take a look at the standard.

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> Sure. You may want to take a look at the standard.

I think you know it better...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 9:12, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> Sure. You may want to take a look at the standard. (SRX)
> 
> I think you know it better...

Just a bit. What matters here is that if you want to have a "compatible" thing, thinking about standards is important. If it does not matter (and.I don't think it matters much in Marcin's application), then whatever is practical is fine.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> Sure. You may want to take a look at the standard.

Do you have the actual set of rules?

I found this quote:

   SRX make use of the ICU Regular Expression
   syntax,^[3] but not all programming languages
   support all ICU expressions, making implementing
   SRX in some languages difficult or impossible.
   Java is an example of this. [1]

Heh, poor Java, well if I had the rules I'm pretty
confident we can implement them in one form or
another...

And I found a list

  * Pangolin is a free open-source SRX editor.
    <https://github.com/davidmason/Pangolin>
    
  * Ratel is a free open-source and cross-platform
    application to create and maintain SRX 2.0 files [...]
    <http://okapiframework.org/wiki/index.php?title=Ratel>
    
  * SRXEditor is a free open source cross-platform
    editor of segmentation rules by Maxprograms,
    designed to use Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX) 2.0.
    <http://www.maxprograms.com/products/srxeditor.html> [1]

None of that is in the Debian repos what I can
see...

No mention of SRX in the [M]ELPAs and no (?) good
Google hits for Emacs and SRX.

Is it this file: [2] Then why the archive link? (from
the SRXEditor page, see URL above) Is this standard
obsoleted or unofficial, perhaps?


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRX_Segmentation_Rules_eXchage_LISA_OSCAR_XML_based_Standard
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20090709131535/http://www.lisa.org/fileadmin/standards/srx20.html

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 10:39, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> Sure. You may want to take a look at the standard.
> 
> Do you have the actual set of rules?
> 
> I found this quote:
> 
>   SRX make use of the ICU Regular Expression
>   syntax,^[3] but not all programming languages
>   support all ICU expressions, making implementing
>   SRX in some languages difficult or impossible.
>   Java is an example of this. [1]
> 
> Heh, poor Java, well if I had the rules I'm pretty
> confident we can implement them in one form or
> another...
> 
> And I found a list
> 
>  * Pangolin is a free open-source SRX editor.
>    <https://github.com/davidmason/Pangolin>

Interesting. Web based and based on Ratel (below)

>  * Ratel is a free open-source and cross-platform
>    application to create and maintain SRX 2.0 files [...]
>    <http://okapiframework.org/wiki/index.php?title=Ratel>

The Okapi Framework should really be in Debian :) Some of its main contributors were editors for related standards.

>  * SRXEditor is a free open source cross-platform
>    editor of segmentation rules by Maxprograms,
>    designed to use Segmentation Rules eXchange (SRX) 2.0.
>    <http://www.maxprograms.com/products/srxeditor.html> [1]

Maxprograms has been releasing its code as FOSS for a little while, only charging for the installers. The main developer was editor for a few related standards.

I mentioned both Okapi and Maxprograms in the mail where I wrote about the processes.

> None of that is in the Debian repos what I can
> see...
> 
> No mention of SRX in the [M]ELPAs and no (?) good
> Google hits for Emacs and SRX.

Not really surprising.

> Is it this file: [2] Then why the archive link? (from
> the SRXEditor page, see URL above) Is this standard
> obsoleted or unofficial, perhaps?

SRX is not obsolete or unofficial, LISA has been disbanded, in 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Localization_Industry_Standards_Association

Jean-Christophe 

> 
> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRX_Segmentation_Rules_eXchage_LISA_OSCAR_XML_based_Standard
> [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20090709131535/http://www.lisa.org/fileadmin/standards/srx20.html
> 
> -- 
> underground experts united
> http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
> https://dataswamp.org/~incal
> 
> 

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> SRX is not obsolete or unofficial, LISA has been
> disbanded, in 2011.

OK, but where are the actual rules?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 12:47, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> SRX is not obsolete or unofficial, LISA has been
>> disbanded, in 2011.
> 
> OK, but where are the actual rules?

SRX is a standard that defines how to create rules, it is not a set of rules. Sorry if that was not clear.

The SRX DTD is here for ex:
https://github.com/rmraya/SRXEditor/blob/master/catalog/srx/srx.dtd

The SRX schema for version 2.1 is
https://github.com/rmraya/SRXEditor/blob/master/catalog/srx/srx21.xsd


The default SRX rules for Maxprograms' OpenXLIFF is:
https://github.com/rmraya/OpenXLIFF/blob/master/srx/default.srx


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> SRX is a standard that defines how to create rules,
> it is not a set of rules. Sorry if that was
> not clear.

Please post the definition of a segment. If there
isn't any onee definition we might as well just use
the Emacs default sentence definition already posted
in the thread, case closed.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 13:13, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> SRX is a standard that defines how to create rules,
>> it is not a set of rules. Sorry if that was
>> not clear.
> 
> Please post the definition of a segment.

You define the segment the way you want.

SRX is a definition format.

> If there
> isn't any onee definition we might as well just use
> the Emacs default sentence definition already posted
> in the thread, case closed.

There never was a case in the first place :)

Emacs default sentence definition can be expressed as a SRX rules set. SRX is useful for eXchanging information. But the format you use internally is irrelevant.


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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> Emacs default sentence definition can be expressed
> as a SRX rules set. SRX is useful for eXchanging
> information. But the format you use internally
> is irrelevant.

The Emacs sentence format and associated functions
certainly makes sense to use but with tweaked
settings to get in particular shorter segments
I think would benefit both searching the DB and
getting better results.

For example this is one sentence by the default
rules:

   Both of these are library functions that do a lot
   under the hood, but if they don't meet your needs
   (or you just want to experiment and learn) you can
   also use system calls directly.

But, would you get a good translation suggestion out
of all of that?

Or is it better to simplify in terms of the computer,
and increase the interactivity/human checking by
feeding

   1. Both of these are library functions
   2. that do a lot under the hood
   3. but if they don't meet your needs
   4. or you just want to experiment and learn
   5. you can also use system calls directly

?

Anyway, if there isn't anything let's drop this, what
remains is the DB of translation suggestions, and the
algorithm to search and quantify, so e.g., for (1),
one would get, if one translates into Swedish

   segment: Both of these are library functions           hit
   ----------------------------------------------------------
   suggestion 1 [a]: Båda två är biblioteksfunktioner     90%
   suggestion 2 [s]: Båda två är bibliotekets funktioner   7%
   ...               ...                                  ...
   suggestion n [~]: Den här översättningen suger          1%

Then one would hit [a] to insert suggestion 1!

So yes, where do you get the database?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 20:49, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
>> Emacs default sentence definition can be expressed
>> as a SRX rules set. SRX is useful for eXchanging
>> information. But the format you use internally
>> is irrelevant.
> 
> The Emacs sentence format and associated functions
> certainly makes sense to use but with tweaked
> settings to get in particular shorter segments
> I think would benefit both searching the DB and
> getting better results.

Sure, but it's not trivial to find "natural" subsegments with the tools at hand.

> For example this is one sentence by the default
> rules:
> 
>   Both of these are library functions that do a lot
>   under the hood, but if they don't meet your needs
>   (or you just want to experiment and learn) you can
>   also use system calls directly.
> 
> But, would you get a good translation suggestion out
> of all of that?

It depends on what's been translated already, I guess.

> Or is it better to simplify in terms of the computer,
> and increase the interactivity/human checking by
> feeding
> 
>   1. Both of these are library functions
>   2. that do a lot under the hood
>   3. but if they don't meet your needs
>   4. or you just want to experiment and learn
>   5. you can also use system calls directly
> 
> ?

I honestly have no idea how complex matching algorithms work to produce subsegment matches.

> Anyway, if there isn't anything let's drop this, what
> remains is the DB of translation suggestions, and the
> algorithm to search and quantify, so e.g., for (1),
> one would get, if one translates into Swedish
> 
>   segment: Both of these are library functions           hit
>   ----------------------------------------------------------
>   suggestion 1 [a]: Båda två är biblioteksfunktioner     90%
>   suggestion 2 [s]: Båda två är bibliotekets funktioner   7%
>   ...               ...                                  ...
>   suggestion n [~]: Den här översättningen suger          1%
> 
> Then one would hit [a] to insert suggestion 1!
> 
> So yes, where do you get the database?

In most of the cases, it's something the translator build from her own translations.

And then, there is the matching algorithm that produces the most relevant match.

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

>> The Emacs sentence format and associated functions
>> certainly makes sense to use but with tweaked
>> settings to get in particular shorter segments
>> I think would benefit both searching the DB and
>> getting better results.
>
> Sure, but it's not trivial to find "natural"
> subsegments with the tools at hand.

That's why I hoped someone already did it :(

Well, obviously someone did!

It isn't trivial, no, and regexps will only get you
that far. Here one should get proper parsing IMO.

But let's postpone this for now...

>> So yes, where do you get the database?
>
> In most of the cases, it's something the translator
> build from her own translations.

Really? That's cool, then you can have your own style
from day 1, and the more you do it, the stronger you
get...

Any suggestions as to the format of the database?

Just because a database can be as simple as a text
file [1] it doesn't mean it should be, always.


[1] https://dataswamp.org/~incal/bike/TIRE

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-08, at 08:30, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> Thanks, but this won't work in this form
>
> It works, check out this dump:
>   <https://dataswamp.org/~incal/pimgs/cat.png>
>
>> as you don't move the point to the overlay before.
>
> ... not sure I'm following, but there is only one
> overlay, point is moved both ways with
> `forward-sentence' and `backward-sentence', the
> overlay is moved with `move-overlay'. point is always
> at the beginning of a sentence.

Well, it works, but it does not what I would want it to do.  (Well,
I haven't tested it, but I am pretty sure, since the code is quite
simple.)

What I want is this: I have the source in, say, buffer A, and I perform
the translation in, say, buffer B.  The overlay is in buffer A, and
I want to move it to the next sentence (in buffer A) _without moving the
point away from buffer B_.

My code does exactly that (even if inefficiently).

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> What I want is this: I have the source in, say,
> buffer A, and I perform the translation in, say,
> buffer B. The overlay is in buffer A, and I want to
> move it to the next sentence (in buffer A) _without
> moving the point away from buffer B_.

Well, technically, there is a point in every buffer
(and window, so there can be several for one buffer
even), but I understand what you mean:

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;;;
;;; this file:
;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el

(defvar sentence-overlay nil)

(defvar source-buffer nil)

(defun set-source-buffer ()
  (interactive)
  (setq source-buffer (current-buffer)) )

(defun remove-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
    (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence ()
  (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)    (point)))
        (end (progn (forward-sentence -1) (point))) )
    (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
        (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
      (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
        (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-comment-face)
        (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))

(defun highlight-sentence-move (next)
  (if (bufferp source-buffer)
      (with-current-buffer source-buffer
        (forward-sentence (if next 1 -1))
        (highlight-sentence) )
    (error "source-buffer not set") ))

(defun highlight-sentence-next ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move t) )

(defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move nil) )

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-08, at 22:44, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> What I want is this: I have the source in, say,
>> buffer A, and I perform the translation in, say,
>> buffer B. The overlay is in buffer A, and I want to
>> move it to the next sentence (in buffer A) _without
>> moving the point away from buffer B_.
>
> Well, technically, there is a point in every buffer
> (and window, so there can be several for one buffer
> even), but I understand what you mean:

Well, if that code works for you, then great.  But it has two issues
from my POV.

1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every overlay belongs to some
buffer.  No need to keep the variable `source-buffer'.

2. Your code seems to assume that the point in the source buffer lies
within the highlighted sentence, no?  This need not be true, since

3. the source buffer may be (in my use-case) the same as the destination
buffer, i.e., I sometimes keep both the English and Polish (let's say)
versions in the same file.  My code covers that case as well as two
separate buffers.

BTW, I like the trick with negative one as argument to
`forward-sentence'.  I didn't think about it, I guess that may be
exactly the missing piece I looked for when I suspected my code has too
much repetition.  Thanks!

Best,
mb


>
> ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
> ;;;
> ;;; this file:
> ;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
> ;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
>
> (defvar sentence-overlay nil)
>
> (defvar source-buffer nil)
>
> (defun set-source-buffer ()
>   (interactive)
>   (setq source-buffer (current-buffer)) )
>
> (defun remove-highlight ()
>   (interactive)
>   (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>     (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence ()
>   (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)    (point)))
>         (end (progn (forward-sentence -1) (point))) )
>     (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
>         (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
>       (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
>         (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-comment-face)
>         (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-move (next)
>   (if (bufferp source-buffer)
>       (with-current-buffer source-buffer
>         (forward-sentence (if next 1 -1))
>         (highlight-sentence) )
>     (error "source-buffer not set") ))
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-next ()
>   (interactive)
>   (highlight-sentence-move t) )
>
> (defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
>   (interactive)
>   (highlight-sentence-move nil) )


-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> 1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every
> overlay belongs to some buffer. No need to keep the
> variable `source-buffer'.

I don't understand?

> 2. Your code seems to assume that the point in the
> source buffer lies within the highlighted sentence,
> no? This need not be true, since
>
> 3. the source buffer may be (in my use-case) the
> same as the destination buffer, i.e., I sometimes
> keep both the English and Polish (let's say)
> versions in the same file. My code covers that case
> as well as two separate buffers.

Right, but I think its a good idea to keep them
apart. And then have different modes...

Still, one can do that as well... with a variable
instead of point to keep track of it the overlay.
Maybe editing screws it up. Its just better to have
different buffers for different purposes, then people
can also rearrange stuff visually more easily, and
many other advantages...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Re: point, one could have one pair of functions
that just move the overlay in terms of the overlay,
next/prev sentence simple as that.

Needs a recenter in terms of the overlay as well...

Then one could have another function that sets the
overlay to where point is (i.e., init/reset)...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 10:54:44PM +0200, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:
> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> 
> > 1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every
> > overlay belongs to some buffer. No need to keep the
> > variable `source-buffer'.
> 
> I don't understand?

The overlay already "knows" to which buffer it belongs. See
function (overlay-buffer OVERLAY).

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[tomas]

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On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 03:35:03PM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 09, 2020 at 10:54:44PM +0200, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor wrote:
> > Marcin Borkowski wrote:
> > 
> > > 1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every
> > > overlay belongs to some buffer. No need to keep the
> > > variable `source-buffer'.
> > 
> > I don't understand?
> 
> The overlay already "knows" to which buffer it belongs. See
> function (overlay-buffer OVERLAY).

Uh -- I see downtrhead you already got it. Sorry for chiming in late
to the party.

Cheers
-- t

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recentering another window (was: Re: Emacs as a translator's tool)

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

t wrote:

> Uh -- I see downtrhead you already got it.
> Sorry for chiming in late to the party.

Heh, no, that's what classy people do...

OT (on topic): I'm not getting `recenter' to work in
the other window. This, within
a `with-current-buffer' with an explicit buffer
argument

  (unless (pos-visible-in-window-p (point) (selected-window))
    (recenter) )

says

  ‘recenter’ing a window that does not display
  current-buffer

which seems to be what I want, but nothing happens.

BTW, I got the code from [1] where `or' is used.
That way of using or is cool in cases such as

  (or maybe-set-var-1 ... maybe-set-var-n default-hard-coded-value)

but in the stated `pos-visible-in-window-p'/recenter
case I think `unless' is better unless I'm ignorant
of something...


[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Window-Start-and-End.html

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-09, at 22:54, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> 1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every
>> overlay belongs to some buffer. No need to keep the
>> variable `source-buffer'.
>
> I don't understand?

Check out the function `overlay-buffer'.

>> 2. Your code seems to assume that the point in the
>> source buffer lies within the highlighted sentence,
>> no? This need not be true, since
>>
>> 3. the source buffer may be (in my use-case) the
>> same as the destination buffer, i.e., I sometimes
>> keep both the English and Polish (let's say)
>> versions in the same file. My code covers that case
>> as well as two separate buffers.
>
> Right, but I think its a good idea to keep them
> apart. And then have different modes...

It depends.  How about preapring a LaTeX file with two language versions
typeset side-by-side?  (There are other use-cases where having both
language versions in the same file makes sense.)

> Still, one can do that as well... with a variable
> instead of point to keep track of it the overlay.
> Maybe editing screws it up. Its just better to have
> different buffers for different purposes, then people
> can also rearrange stuff visually more easily, and
> many other advantages...

But my solution, in which I only use the overlay itself (no point, no
markers, no variables pointing to buffers) seems to cover all such
cases, and in quite an elegant way.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

>> Right, but I think its a good idea to keep them
>> apart. And then have different modes...
>
> It depends. How about preapring a LaTeX file with two
> language versions typeset side-by-side?

Better to use the translation tool somewhere else,
when its done one can do whatever with the material
including typesetting. LaTeX mode and markup will
just complicate everything.

Do it all in one buffer in general: DNC

>> Still, one can do that as well... with a variable
>> instead of point to keep track of it the overlay.
>> Maybe editing screws it up. Its just better to
>> have different buffers for different purposes,
>> then people can also rearrange stuff visually more
>> easily, and many other advantages...
>
> But my solution, in which I only use the overlay
> itself (no point, no markers, no variables pointing
> to buffers) seems to cover all such cases, and in
> quite an elegant way.

There is only one variable and that holds the
overlay. Moving point I consider a good thing, only
perhaps one should keep two sets of functions, to
make it more clear what happens and when, and make it
more versatile.

As for your solution, I have only seen one version,
the first you posted here...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-10, at 23:28, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>>> Right, but I think its a good idea to keep them
>>> apart. And then have different modes...
>>
>> It depends. How about preapring a LaTeX file with two
>> language versions typeset side-by-side?
>
> Better to use the translation tool somewhere else,
> when its done one can do whatever with the material
> including typesetting. LaTeX mode and markup will
> just complicate everything.

Well, to each his own.

> Do it all in one buffer in general: DNC
>
>>> Still, one can do that as well... with a variable
>>> instead of point to keep track of it the overlay.
>>> Maybe editing screws it up. Its just better to
>>> have different buffers for different purposes,
>>> then people can also rearrange stuff visually more
>>> easily, and many other advantages...
>>
>> But my solution, in which I only use the overlay
>> itself (no point, no markers, no variables pointing
>> to buffers) seems to cover all such cases, and in
>> quite an elegant way.
>
> There is only one variable and that holds the
> overlay. Moving point I consider a good thing, only
> perhaps one should keep two sets of functions, to
> make it more clear what happens and when, and make it
> more versatile.

It may be the case that moving point is a good idea, too, yes.

> As for your solution, I have only seen one version,
> the first you posted here...

Yes, I mean that one.  Also, the new version here:
https://github.com/mbork/emacs-cat.

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> It may be the case that moving point is a good
> idea, too, yes.

I'm gonna drop this project for now, and maybe pick
it up if I even get the opportunity/a specific reason
to use it.

The main problem is the segments/sentences are too
long so inserting them into a database and hoping for
them to appear the exact same way and thus be a help
against repetition is vain. But if one could solve
that, with some sort of grammar parser to get
subsegments out of the sentences, then I think one
could do quite an efficient Emacs CAT with not that
much of an effort...

> Yes, I mean that one. Also, the new version here:
> https://github.com/mbork/emacs-cat

Byte compiler warnings:

emacs-cat.el: 
In toplevel form:
emacs-cat.el:35:1:Warning: defface for
    ‘emacs-cat-highlight-face’ fails to specify
    containing group

In emacs-cat-highlight-next-sentence:
emacs-cat.el:57:4:Warning: Use ‘with-current-buffer’
    rather than save-excursion+set-buffer

In emacs-cat-highlight-previous-sentence:
emacs-cat.el:66:4:Warning: Use ‘with-current-buffer’
    rather than save-excursion+set-buffer
    
emacs-cat.el:78:7:Warning: assignment to free
variable ‘emacs-cat-basic-map’

emacs-cat.el:80:13:Warning: reference to free
variable ‘emacs-cat-basic-map’

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-06-13, at 00:02, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:

> Marcin Borkowski wrote:
>
>> It may be the case that moving point is a good
>> idea, too, yes.
>
> I'm gonna drop this project for now, and maybe pick
> it up if I even get the opportunity/a specific reason
> to use it.
>
> The main problem is the segments/sentences are too
> long so inserting them into a database and hoping for
> them to appear the exact same way and thus be a help
> against repetition is vain. But if one could solve
> that, with some sort of grammar parser to get
> subsegments out of the sentences, then I think one
> could do quite an efficient Emacs CAT with not that
> much of an effort...
>
>> Yes, I mean that one. Also, the new version here:
>> https://github.com/mbork/emacs-cat
>
> Byte compiler warnings:
>
> emacs-cat.el: 
> In toplevel form:
> emacs-cat.el:35:1:Warning: defface for
>     ‘emacs-cat-highlight-face’ fails to specify
>     containing group

Easy to fix, will do.

> In emacs-cat-highlight-next-sentence:
> emacs-cat.el:57:4:Warning: Use ‘with-current-buffer’
>     rather than save-excursion+set-buffer

I know about this one, and it looks like a bug in the compiler (I'll
expand on it later).

> emacs-cat.el:78:7:Warning: assignment to free
> variable ‘emacs-cat-basic-map’
>
> emacs-cat.el:80:13:Warning: reference to free
> variable ‘emacs-cat-basic-map’

Easy to fix, too.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

>> In emacs-cat-highlight-next-sentence:
>> emacs-cat.el:57:4:Warning: Use ‘with-current-buffer’
>>     rather than save-excursion+set-buffer
>
> I know about this one, and it looks like a bug in
> the compiler

Yeah? Why do you think so? I was rather impressed it
could detect and give such an advanced suggestion :)

I posted a question in a subthread (was: ...) why the
`recenter' stuff didn't work, maybe
`with-current-buffer' does something that screws that
up...

The byte compiler is in Elisp so maybe there is
a comment in the code or something where they
motivate why they give that warning or provide
pointer to further reading...

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

> The byte compiler is in Elisp so maybe there is
> a comment in the code or something where they
> motivate why they give that warning or provide
> pointer to further reading...

OK, no, the source [1] has this part:

    (defun byte-compile-save-excursion (form)
      (if (and (eq 'set-buffer (car-safe (car-safe (cdr form))))
               (byte-compile-warning-enabled-p 'suspicious))
          (byte-compile-warn
           "Use `with-current-buffer' rather than save-excursion+set-buffer"))
      (byte-compile-out 'byte-save-excursion 0)
      (byte-compile-body-do-effect (cdr form))
      (byte-compile-out 'byte-unbind 1))

Well, hell, worth a shot...

BTW, bytecomp.el itself relies heavily on
`with-current-buffer' so in a way it makes sense it
suggests it :)


[1] /usr/share/emacs/26.1/lisp/emacs-lisp/bytecomp.el

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> Check out the function `overlay-buffer'.

You mean like this:

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;;;
;;; this file:
;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el

(defvar sentence-overlay nil)

(defun remove-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
    (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)    (point)))
        (end (progn (forward-sentence -1) (point))) )
    (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
        (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
      (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
        (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-comment-face)
        (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))
(defalias 'hs-init #'highlight-sentence)

(defun highlight-sentence-move (next)
  (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
      (with-current-buffer (overlay-buffer sentence-overlay)
        (forward-sentence (if next 1 -1))
        (highlight-sentence))
    (highlight-sentence) ))

(defun highlight-sentence-next ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move t) )

(defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move nil) )

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> 2. Your code seems to assume that the point in the
> source buffer lies within the highlighted sentence,
> no? This need not be true

It doesn't assume it but that seems to be what's
happening in part...

When you go to another sentence point moves, but then
you can move point around and the overlay is
still there.

Again I think one could do it easily with a variable
instead of point but again what's the problem with
point following the currently highlighted sentence?

Doesn't that even makes sense?

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Marcin Borkowski wrote:

> Well, if that code works for you, then great.
> But it has two issues from my POV.
>
> 1. It is inefficient, in the sense that every
> overlay belongs to some buffer. No need to keep the
> variable `source-buffer'.

Ah, now I understand what I mean, well, I don't know
if it really makes it more efficient to extract it
every time (depends on definition of efficiency) but
maybe the code gets prettier that way, so OK:

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*-
;;;
;;; this file:
;;;   http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el
;;;   https://dataswamp.org/~incal/emacs-init/incal-ecat.el

(defvar sentence-overlay nil)

(defun remove-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (when (overlayp sentence-overlay)
    (delete-overlay sentence-overlay) ))

(defun highlight-sentence ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((beg (progn (forward-sentence)    (point)))
        (end (progn (forward-sentence -1) (point))) )
    (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
        (move-overlay sentence-overlay beg end)
      (let ((overlay (make-overlay beg end)))
        (overlay-put overlay 'face 'font-lock-comment-face)
        (setq sentence-overlay overlay) ))))
(defalias 'hs-init #'highlight-sentence)

(defun highlight-sentence-move (next)
  (if (overlayp sentence-overlay)
      (with-current-buffer (overlay-buffer sentence-overlay)
        (forward-sentence (if next 1 -1))
        (highlight-sentence) )
    (highlight-sentence) ))

(defun highlight-sentence-next ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move t) )

(defun highlight-sentence-prev ()
  (interactive)
  (highlight-sentence-move nil) )

> BTW, I like the trick with negative one as argument
> to `forward-sentence'.

Right, its cool :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[MENGUAL Jean-Philippe]

Hi,

I mainly use, in Emacs, the po-mode (gettext-el). I still have the 
problem I described here, i.e. I would love the "Last-translator" to be 
up-to-date automatically with my info in the PO files, but except this, 
requiring me to do things manually, I like how it works. Also you need 
to have in your .emacs the po-wrap function, to ensure the file stays on 
the screen 80 columns.

Regards


Logo Hypra 	JEAN-PHILIPPE MENGUAL
DIRECTEUR TECHNIQUE ET QUALITÉ
102, rue des poissonniers, 75018, Paris
Tel : +331 84 73 06 61 <tel:+33184730661> Mob : +336 76 34 93 37
<tel:+33676349337>
jpmengual@hypra.fr <mailto:jpmengual@hypra.fr>
www.hypra.fr <http://www.hypra.fr/>
Facebook Hypra <https://www.facebook.com/hyprasoftware/> Twitter Hypra
<https://twitter.com/Hypra_> Linkedin Jean-Philippe
<https://fr.linkedin.com/in/jean-philippe-mengual-800133135>



Le 29/05/2020 à 07:55, Marcin Borkowski a écrit :
> 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,
> 

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

MENGUAL Jean-Philippe wrote:

> I mainly use, in Emacs, the po-mode (gettext-el).
> I still have the problem I described here, i.e.
> I would love the "Last-translator" to be up-to-date
> automatically with my info in the PO files, but
> except this, requiring me to do things manually,
> I like how it works. Also you need to have in your
> .emacs the po-wrap function, to ensure the file
> stays on the screen 80 columns.

Say what? :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2020-05-29, at 08:39, MENGUAL Jean-Philippe <mengualjeanphi@free.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I mainly use, in Emacs, the po-mode (gettext-el). I still have the
> problem I described here, i.e. I would love the "Last-translator" to
> be up-to-date automatically with my info in the PO files, but except
> this, requiring me to do things manually, I like how it works. Also
> you need to have in your .emacs the po-wrap function, to ensure the
> file stays on the screen 80 columns.

Thanks for the response.  Do I get it correctly that you mean
translating software, so mainly short, possibly unrelated pieces of
text?  If so, this seems pretty different to translating a paper or
a book...

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

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.

>  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.)

As Jean-Philippe mentions po-mode exists, even if limited in scope.


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

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

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> 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.

Be sure to add it to Gmane!

  https://gmane.io

> 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.

What's a translation memory system/matching? :O

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:

> 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.

Indeed, its in the Debian repos:

    $ aptitude show omegat
    [...]
    Description: Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool
     OmegaT's main features are
     * multiple source texts handling, retaining
       complex folder hierarchies
     * fuzzy matching with other segments in the
       source file(s) or TMX files from previous
       projects
     * easy glossary terms management
     * flexible regex-based sentence segmenting
       (using an SRX-like method)
     * powerful regex-based searches along with the
       facility to apply a filter to display search
       results in the editor
     * ability to batch process documents from the
       command line
     * extended project statistics
     * easy-to-understand documentation and tutorial
     * plugin architecture with separate Lucene
       stemmer (recognition of inflected forms) and
       LanguageTool (style and grammar checker)
       plugins
     * integration with Hunspell for spelling
       checking
     * simple API to access source/target/selection
       textual data

     OmegaT supports 24 formats, including
     documentation formats such as OpenDocument, Open
     XML (MS Office 2007), DocBook and (x)HTML, and
     also localization formats such as Java
     properties and PO files. An Okapi plugin can
     further extend the supported formats, for
     example to include TTX (TradosTag).
     Homepage: https://www.omegat.org

Heh, Java people: "ability to batch process documents
from the command line" :)

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Emacs as a translator's tool

[Takesi Ayanokoji]

Hi,Marcin

> does anyone here perform translations within Emacs?

I am translating Emacs' info manuals using Emacs' po-mode and Po4a program.

--- "Why Po4a?" starts here.

I use PO format as translation memory because it is major format for *nix
i18n nowadays.

PO format is used gettext's tool-chain programs, but some tools in gettext
is limited for translating messages in various program sources.

These tools process source files includes messages convert/reflect to/from
translation memories.

For this reason, I use Po4a tools for generating po files from files
written in various  formats, and vise versa.

--- "Why Po4a?" ends here.

> 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

In the po-mode, strings are highlighted "currently processing msgid".

Msgid is strings before translating.
These strings' range (sentence, paragraph, page, ...) is defined by Po4a
when extracting from original document files, and Po4a semms define msgid
as a paragraph.

For example, belows are 'Anti news' in Emacs manual before and after
translating.

before:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ayatakesi/emacs-24.5-doc-emacs/d826fbbb960688a04f46cec4e8e0131d2c39e218/anti.texi.po

after:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ayatakesi/emacs-24.5-doc-emacs/b0506307007fc3d36e8168c2f84bd125e97484fe/anti.texi.po

And in po4a, there are many commands operates on a msgid/msgstr.

Best,

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Giovanni Bono]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 980 bytes --]

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:


[-- Attachment #2: 20200529.png --]
[-- Type: image/png, Size: 235784 bytes --]

[-- Attachment #3: Type: text/plain, Size: 1083 bytes --]


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,

  Giovanni


[-- Attachment #4: roth_2015.el --]
[-- Type: application/emacs-lisp, Size: 58778 bytes --]

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Giovanni Bono wrote:

> ;; -*- mode: emacs-lisp; lexical-binding: t; -*-
> [...]

:O

Certainly not the way I'm used to see Emacs Lisp...

But as they say, styles make fights!

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Giovanni Bono]

Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor
<help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> writes:

> Giovanni Bono wrote:
>
>> ;; -*- mode: emacs-lisp; lexical-binding: t; -*-
>> [...]
>
> :O
>
> Certainly not the way I'm used to see Emacs Lisp...
>
> But as they say, styles make fights!

If you are referring to variable scoping, I think it makes no actual
difference to the code I posted.  I was probably just experimenting,

  Giovanni

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor]

Giovanni Bono wrote:

>> Giovanni Bono wrote:
>>
>>> ;; -*- mode: emacs-lisp; lexical-binding: t; -*-
>>> [...]
>>
>> :O
>>
>> Certainly not the way I'm used to see Emacs
>> Lisp...
>>
>> But as they say, styles make fights!
>
> If you are referring to variable scoping, I think
> it makes no actual difference to the code I posted.
> I was probably just experimenting,

No no, just the whole style... it is just everything
at once I guess. You are skilled and used to write
code like that, no doubt.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
https://dataswamp.org/~incal

Re: Emacs as a translator's tool

[Marcin Borkowski]

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,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl

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