Re: Tweaking the export

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

On Sat, Jan 28 2012, Christian Wittern wrote:

> Hi, Jambunathan and Nicolas,
>
> On 2012-01-27 22:47, Jambunathan K wrote:
>> Nicolas
>>
>> I will let Christian answer for himself.
> Thanks Jambunathan, you are not only an excellent coder, but also an
> expert mind reader:-)
> What you describe is exactly what I want to achieve.
>
>> text A text A'
>> line 2 line 2
>>
>> My name is Jambunathan. I live	Mon nom est Jambunathan. Je vis	
>> in India. ....................	en India.......................
>>
>> He wants the "English column" to be collected in to an English file and
>> the "French column" to be collected in to a French file.
>
>> In some sense, he wants to tangle the "English column", let's say as
>> verse_en.org and "French column" to verse_fr.org
>
> Exactly.  The reason for wanting to do this is that the above is my
> setup for translating, but in some cases the publication will have
> only the translation, for such cases, I want to extract just the
> translation.  This should then produce a new org file, that simple has
> either everything before the tab (the original) or everything after
> the tab (the translation), while leaving all lines that do not contain
> a <tab> character as they are.

I also use org mode for translating (from modern Chinese,
coincidentally), and as Sebastien mentioned, I find it easiest to split
a single file into two subtrees, source and target, then split the
window so that I've got the two subtrees side-by-side. You could use
follow-mode at this point, though I don't. Selective export then becomes
trivial, though you'd have a harder time getting it into a two-column
table.

It's always annoying to ask how to do something and then be told to do
something else, so I'm not going to do that, but I do think you might
encounter fewer difficulties making the above setup do what you want,
rather than the TAB arrangement.

Of course, classical Chinese (particularly poetry) lends itself better
to doing discrete chunks one at a time… modern prose would be a
nightmare with TABs, though.

I've toyed with a home-made follow-type setup, where the two subtrees
are displayed in split windows as above, and the sub-headings of the two
subtrees have properties pointing to the IDs of their corresponding
sub-heading (ie, source chapters are linked to target chapters and vice
versa). I got about halfway to implementing something where
corresponding paragraphs are highlighted in the non-active window,
before getting distracted by an actual translation deadline.

(The pie-in-the-sky next step would be to use org-mode to maintain a
TMX-formatted translation database
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_Memory_eXchange), and allow
for automatic insertion of translations of known terms, a library I
expect to have written some time before the obsoletion of Emacs itself.)

Anyway, I'm not sure I had much of a point, but if there are any other
translators using org-mode, it might be interesting to discuss how we
could make it more useful, perhaps in a separate thread.

Eric

-- 
Gnu Emacs 24.0.92.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.9)
 of 2012-01-26 on pellet
Org-mode version 7.8.03 (release_7.8.03.249.g742c4e9)