CODEWITHSUNDEEP
emacs
xyz
xyz

Reputation: 651

Compare two sides of one bilingual text in emacs

How can you work with the two sides of a bilingual/parallel text?

I know how to run diff and ediff on a text to spot little differences, but a bilingual text will have two completely different sides (expect for the paragraphs, number of chapters and other structural elements like notes). End of line and end of paragraph are certainly useful to mark the units of the two sides.

Is it possible to open two buffers, side by side, and tell what matches what?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 305

Answers (1)

assem
assem

Reputation: 2097

This is a hard problem but I dug up an old blog post I read awhile ago that is relevant (and even mentions emacs for preprocessing):

https://languagefixation.wordpress.com/2011/02/09/how-to-create-parallel-texts-for-language-learning-part-1/

Especially check out part2

Beyond that, my suggestion is twofold:

1) Operate on small parts at a time (a chapter or less) and not an entire book

2) Utilize alignment tools available to generate metadata which emacs uses to just 'prettify' the buffer

As there's no existing solution (that I know of or can find), you'll have to get dirty with elisp and create a major or minor mode to colorize matching segments and/or navigate segments.

Quick Hack

However, I hacked some elisp together that takes preprocessed text and uses emacs concept of 'paragraph' and 'sentence' to colorize the buffer; it's a little verbose so I stuck it in a gist:

https://gist.github.com/terranpro/3175bb9f3ed00b3a145c

simple example It's pretty ugly but should give you a start; just run it once in each of the text buffers. But be aware that you'll need to have the text already ready in terms of emacs' paragraphs and sentences (two spaces after a period!!). Hope it gives you a decent starting point.

Upvotes: 2

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