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