I'm trying to translate a book as a hobby project and it's a bit of a pain software-wise. I don't need translation memory, just solid alignment of original and translation and highlighting of untranslated parts.
Text editor for translators
software-rectext-editorstranslation
Related Solutions
You could look for additional dictionaries for use in Dictionary.app (included with OS X). Just like my Wikipedia dictionary (don't know if it came with the vanilla OS X installation) loads data from the web, so could your translation service. It seems to be not possible to enhance the Cmd-Ctrl-D "quick dictionary" with such a custom dictionary, though.
You can enable debugging/developer mode for Dashboard which allows you to drag widgets out of the "Dashboard view" onto the normal desktop, so you always have the widget visible.
You can look into creating a custom Text service for the Services menu (select a word in the browser and look under Application -> Services -> Text. In System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services you can even set keyboard shortcuts for such commands.
The custom service can be easily created using Automator.app, I just tried:
- Create a new Automator document based on the "Service" workflow
- Add a single action:
Run Shell Scriptwith the input passed as arguments, and the commandopen http://dict.cc/?s=$1(or whatever website you use for translating) - Save as
Translate to German(in my case it's German) - (Optionally) Assign a keyboard shortcut in
System Preferences - Use it
This is part of the Microsoft website, not Firefox.
They do offer a link to compare the translation to the original, and on that comparison page there is a link to the original text. You can circumvent it immediately by adding /en-us to the web address.
- Take for example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573
- add "/en-us"
- get: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573/en-us
Note that translated pages not always tell you that they are, e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573 in the case of Dutch - but maybe that page was not automatically translated.
Added note 27 July 2016: Things have changed slightly but the trick still works. If I now go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573, I get https://support.microsoft.com/nl-nl/kb/192573. If I then append /en-us, this is again redirected to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/192573.
Best Answer
For Linux:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/transie/index.php?title=Main_Page
"Transie is a dual-pane text editor for translators. It's made with Gambas 2.21 and runs on GNU/Linux with Qt, offering KDE integration. It's packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mandriva and is tested on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Transie is free software, released under the GPLv3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF)."