Simultaneous Bilingual Writing?

Question

I have recently undertaken a personal project to translate my WIP novel into Japanese in parallel with writing it. I am managing both in LaTeX and editing them in vim, but the topic itself is too specific for either crosslisting, I feel. Is there any good software for writing translations *of works that are themselves changing* over time in parallel? (I would normally cp the file and translate paragraph-by-paragraph, but I would lose any progress I made so far of the translation, or be translating out-of-date source material due to the edits I am working on in the original). Besides that, any advice?

Answer 1

No, there is no software that will allow you to write bilingual in simultaneous fashion. Translation software doesn't translate in real time, and even when it does, it is usually grammatically unreliable because translating words and sentences between different languages that use different sentence structures (S-V-C vs. S-C-V for instance) can create errors when sentences don't directly translate.

This is why the process is to write a novel, edit it, proofread it, and then start translating it once it is adequately up-to-par in quality both structurally and grammatically.