Need a good interlinear editor...

June 28, 2008 7:58 PM

I am looking for an interlinear editor or equivalent for managing large foreign language documents with their English translation.

I am looking for a tool that will allow me to paste in a good deal of text in Language A, and then allow me to type in translation in Language B alongside, preferably alternating every line. Ideally, it should output the alternating lines of text as different colors into MS Word or HTML.

I have searched for interlinear editors, but the ones I found seem to be limited to small chunks of text, and I want to be able to hold documents of several hundred pages in such a format.

posted by blue_wardrobe to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

What you're talking about is an aspect of translation memory systems (TM). These typically show you a sentence (or "unit", however you've defined it, though I suspect you'd have a hard time forcing it to the line with anything but poetry) at a time, and you type in the parallel unit in the target language. Trados is the 800-lb gorilla in the TM market, but there's also Wordfast and a number of other apps, including web apps.

TM tools do more than just parallel text; their big draw is that they'll do full or partial matches based on your existing pairs and fill in ahead for you.
posted by adamrice at 8:32 PM on June 28, 2008

Best answer: Have you seen 'Cat's Cradle'? It's specifically designed for work on web sites, rather than long text files, but I use it for both. You can work line by line, with the source and target language side by side ...

Here's some info:
http://www.dirfile.com/catscradle.htm
posted by woodblock100 at 9:15 PM on June 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: @woodblock100: Fantastic! Thanks very much...
posted by blue_wardrobe at 5:40 AM on June 29, 2008

Response by poster: Now I just need the ability to output the translations side-by-side...
posted by blue_wardrobe at 9:57 AM on June 29, 2008