Re: Translation design patterns or approaches

[onf]

Hi Bento,

On Thu Nov 7, 2024 at 7:38 PM CET, Bento Borges Schirmer wrote:
> I want to translate my CV to english. The simplest option would be to copy
> my document and just alter it. It would be no headache, since it is just
> one page. But maybe there is a smarter way?
>
> Do you know any design pattern, macro set or preprocessor that could handle
> this task in a manageable way?

I don't think I understand why such a task would benefit from the use
of macros or a preprocessor? I suppose you could say it might be easier
to translate text in its plain form without interleaved troff syntax,
but I don't think anyone ever wrote a tool that would facilitate this.

Plan9 troff has deroff, which extracts text from troff documents, but
it's obviously not reliable for groff (or other modern troffs).
I suppose you could combine that with sed to facilitate such a process,
but making that work correctly seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Since you emphasize making the translation process "manageable", the
only thing I can suggest is using a revision control tool such as git
or RCS, which will make it much easier to ensure correctness of the
result. git-diff(1) even has an option --word-diff, which shows the
words that changed rather than entire lines, which could be handy.

~ onf