Working with translations

Scrivener Newcomer Central
1

Hiya. I work with two language versions side by side. Is there a way to link all documents to its version in the other language, so that when I move one doc in the structure, its twin will move accordingly?

2

Hello and welcome.

I have been working in translation using Scrivener for years (in my case mostly Chinese → English, though occasionally the reverse), so here is my take:

  1. Split up the source document into appropriate chunks; they can be as long or as short as you like, but in general short is better, and in my case this came down to having one-line section headings in separate Binder documents.
  2. Mark those documents with a label; I use the source language name.
  3. Interleave them with a Binder document for the target translation of each source document with an appropriate name.
  4. Mark those documents with a label; I use the target language name.
  5. Set up two collections based on those labels, one for source, one for target.
  6. At the beginning of each source document set up a wikilink to the related target document, using [[…]] (as you can see from the screenshot below, I just use [[English]], but you can use anything you like).
  7. Right clicking on the link gives, Open Document Link in at the top of the dropdown, where you choose where you want it to open.

SCR-20251121-ldxz
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  • The reason for putting the wkiklink in the source document is that you can forget about it when you come to compile your translation.
  • If you want to put reverse links in the target, enclose them in an inline annotation, which you can set to be omitted during compile.
  • If you want to have both source and target collections as continuous Scrivenings sessions, choose Quick Reference Panel in the Open … in, as that will not interrupt your Scrivening session.

Not what you were hoping for (that is not possible) but this works. When it comes to compiling, you just compile the target collection; I developed this system because I often had to produce an interleaved document and this way I could read the target translation as a whole for editing purposes and have the whole source open beside it.

Hope that helps.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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3

Further to that reply and re-reading your post:

If you want to move both the source and the translation together to some other position in the binder, assuming you have interleaved the two languages like I suggest, all you have to do is select both and move them at the same time. Furthermore, if you made one a child of the other (remember that in Scrivener “files” can have children), then all you would have to do is move the parent and the child would move with it.

For my purposes, the Source would have had to be parent as in any interleaved, compiled version, the source text had to precede the translation, but I never had to rearrange sections of text. YMMV.

:slight_smile:
Mark

1 Like
4

Thank you so much for your help!

1 Like