Re: About multilingual documents

[Aleksandar Dimitrov <mail@aleks.bg>]

Hi Juan,

this sounds very interesting to me, as I, too, mostly write in Org
and, sometimes write documents in multiple languages, usually with
different varieties of either Latin or Cyrillic.

I have some suggestions:

Apart from the export, one of my biggest gripes is
flyspell. Specifically, the fact that you have to choose one language to
spell check the entire document with. That is insufficient in my case.

I think that the syntax you're suggesting looks good, but I'm not
sure how well it'd fit into org-mode's ecosystem. I had something in
mind that was closer to how org-babel works (it's called *babel*
for a reason, isn't it? :D)

#+begin_src org :lang pl
  … po polsku
#+end_src

#+begin_src org :lang de
  … auf deutsch
#+end_src

This would make use of org-mode's edit special environment function. It
would make it easier to persuade flyspell to do the right thing. You
could, perhaps, add

#+LANGUAGE: en

to the parent document, and then org would take care to set the correct
flyspell language (and the correct macros on LaTeX-export) and change
these parameters in the special environments.

I'm not 100% sure it should be #+begin_src org, maybe introducing a
different special environment would be better, say #+begin_lang XX where
XX is the ISO-code of said language, or the locale (think en_US
vs. en_GB.)

The drawback, and the clear disadvantage compared to your method is that
this works great only when the languages are separated by paragraph
breaks.

Therefore, I think our suggestions might be somewhat orthogonal. Yours
could be a shorthand syntax for introducing inline foreign-language
snippets.

What do you think?

Regards,
Aleks

Juan Manuel Macías writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm curious to see how other Org users deal with multilingual documents,
> that is, those documents (for example, philology or linguistics texts)
> that contain a significant number of online quotes in other languages.
> Naturally, this makes more sense in the LaTeX backend, since it is
> convenient to enclose these quotes in a \foreignlanguage command to
> ensure that LaTeX at least apply the correct hyphenation patterns for
> words in other languages.
>
> Luckily, in the latest versions of Babel (the Babel of LaTeX) you don't
> need to do this when it comes to languages whose script is different
> from Latin (e.g. Greek, languages with Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, etc.).
> We can, for example, define Russian and Greek as:
>
> #+begin_src latex
> \babelprovide[onchar=ids fonts,hyphenrules=russian]{russian}
> \babelprovide[onchar=ids fonts,hyphenrules=ancientgreek]{greek}
> #+end_src
>
> And also the fonts for both languages:
>
> #+begin_src latex
> \babelfont[russian]{rm}{Linux Libertine O}
> \babelfont[greek]{rm}]{Free Serif}
> #+end_src
>
> For Latin-based scripts it is still necessary enclose the text in the
> \foreignlanguage command. And now comes the question: how do Org users
> who work in multilingual documents to obtain this command when exporting
> to Latex?
>
> I usually use macros, which always tend to work fine. But lately I have
> been testing an alternative markup system using an export filter. The
> idea would be something like:
>
> %(lang) lorem ipsum dolor %()
>
> I start from a list of the most used languages:
>
> #+begin_src emacs-lisp
> (langs '(("en" "english")
> 	 ("fr" "french")
> 	 ("de" "german")
> 	 ("it" "italian")
> 	 ("pt" "portuguese")))
> #+end_src
>
> And other possible languages that Babel supports can be indicated
> explicitly, by prepending "--":
>
> %(fr) ... %()
>
> %(--esperanto) ... %()
>
> (If someone wants to try it, I attach a small Org document).
>
> Best regards,
>
> Juan Manuel