If All he wants to do is format his page in a certain way and then fill in the translations himself from his knowledge or some outside machine translation, I have seen similar things before.
Best would be a human translation to get the job done correctly.I have seen several books and other text where one column is in English and another one in its original language. Usually these text/documents were originally written over 300 years ago in a language "version" that is rarely used anymore or is so old that it is like English vs. the "Old English" of Beowolf's days.
So, if all you need is a word processor that can do a nice page format, LibreOffice should do the trick nicely. Now doing the translation work, I know of no free package that works well at all.
On 11/21/2012 12:32 PM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :) Pootle? It might be worth trying to contact the translation teams or the global translations team to see what different teams are using. I get a bad feeling you might be talking about using "machine translators" rather than having real live people doing the work. Although MTs have become much more accurate in recent years they are still hilariously wrong at times. So, it might be a good way to generate something that then 'just' needs proof-reading and hopefully fairly minor corrections but i think there needs to be a human "in the loop" somewhere. There was the urban-myth about UN Translators testing their skills by translating things into other languages and then back again to see how accurate they were. Not sure what happened to "You're pulling my leg" but "Out of sight, out of mind" got warped into "Invisible idiot", which completely changed the meaning. Regards from Tom :)________________________________ From: Winston Chuen-Shih Yang <winston@cs.wisc.edu> To: users@global.libreoffice.org Sent: Wednesday, 21 November 2012, 17:06 Subject: [libreoffice-users] What software can I use for a translation project (details below)? I had an idea about a translation project. Details are below. Could anyone tell me if LibreOffice would be appropriate? Or would some other software be better? I use Linux and I am into free software. It would be nice to use free software, but it is not necessary. The project involves translating another language, Sanskrit, into English. (Sanskrit is like the Latin and Greek of India. But the original language could be any non-English language with a writing system.) Each page has the same format:The top of the page has a fixed height. It has the original text. The bottom of the page has a fixed height. It has the translated text. The middle of the page has has a table with four columns, and a variable number of rows:Column 1 has the words of the original text. Column 2 has a transliteration ("English-like spelling") of the original word. Column 3 shows the pronunciation of the original word, using characters in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). Column 4 has the translation of the original word.It would be good if the software could handle exceptions to the above rules:A piece of original text might require two pages instead of just one. Depending on the complexity of a piece of original text, I might have to change the heights of the various top, middle, and bottom sections on a page.Thank you. Winston -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
-- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+help@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted