Multilingual support (proposals and state of the question)

[Juan Manuel Macías]

Hi all,

I would like to start a thread on this question, leaving some basic ideas and
sketches of my own, in case someone else wanted to join the discussion.

I think it would be nice if Org Mode offered consistent support (out of
the box) for multilingual documents. That is, those documents where
there is a main language and it is possible to toggle between a list of
others 'secondary' languages, in the LaTeX Babel way. Those documents
could be consistently exported to other formats with multilingual
support: LaTeX, of course, but also html, odt, etc.

What is your opinion?

I think Org documents should have three levels in multilingual management:

- Short text segments, something like an 'inline block' for other languages
- Blocks
- Sections

For short inline segments, IMHO and without the need to innovate, I
think an excellent candidate are the links defined with
org-link-set-parameters. For example:

Lorem ipsum [[lang:de][some text in German]] dolor sit amet

(For structures of this kind I found very interesting ideas here:
https://github.com/alhassy/org-special-block-extras)

As for blocks, I think of a hypothetical 'lang' block:

#+begin_lang el :variant polytonic
Some text in polytonic Greek...
#+end_lang

However, in a previous thread
(87k0og8fss.fsf@list.aleks.bg/">https://orgmode.org/list/87k0og8fss.fsf@list.aleks.bg/) Aleksandar
Dimitrov proposed an idea that seemed very suggestive, at least in
concept: add a ':lang' argument to the Org code blocks:

#+begin_src org :lang fr
Some text in french
#+end_src

And finally, for sections, you could think of a new property ':lang:'

* Header
  :PROPERTIES:
  :LANG: pt
  :END:

...

Best regards,

Juan Manuel