Cloning Notes tool/Gramplet for Translation

[emyoulation]

When translating a Note for translation to another language is difficult if the original Note includes formatting (aka ‘markup’).

You can copy and paste text within a Note that contains text styling (underscores, font color, etc.) or links. And those survive being pasted within the Note. But the Gramps clipboard does not let markup survive being pasted to a different Note.

So if you were a polyglot wanting to retain an annotated Transcription of a citation in its original language and an English translation, you have to manually re-style the English equivalent Note.

As an example: you’ve transcribed a Russian newspaper article in the original Cyrillic, set the headline in large bold type, replicated the underlining used repeatedly, and linked each mentioned Person/Event to the equivalent object in your Tree. Now you will be publishing your research for an English-speaking audience. You can paste the content into a new Note but it will be in plain text.

If the markup had survived, you could select and overwrite the styled word with the English and the markup would have conveyed. Instead, you have to redo all the markup by hand.

There is no feature to clone a Note … or to export a selected Note to clone it by importing again.

The ideal feature would be a tool or feature that clones a note, have an option to associate the Notes (perhaps adding a language suffix to the ID), opens the Note & its clone side-by-side, and maybe opens your favorite web translation tool with the language. It might have an interface to walk through the strings with markup so you can do individualized translation. Perhaps have a Copy string button to/from that web tool.

But that’s a lot of interface to code.

A simple Clone Object tool might suffice. Ideally it could clone ANY Gramps object, not just Notes. (Objects with 2ndry objects might pop a disambiguation dialog with a cascade outline of those objects having the choice of Share/Clone/Skip actions. Expanding on this: an option to clone the Reference attachments of the original could be helpful.) The clone tool might give the ID a clone suffix of the original ID. This would make them sort together and make Clones more searchable.

See also:

Transcription, Transliteration and Translation

If you were going to annotate a scan of foreign language document, how would you mark the associated Notes? Let’s take an extreme example… assume that we have a family adoption record on a cuneiform clay tablet from the British Museum¹. This image will have a series of Notes attached: a transcription in cuneiform unicode, a transliteration into phonetics, translations into 2 modern languages, and a commentary/summary. What Note “Type” would you use for each separate note? Is there a way to a…

[PLegoux]

I made myself a basic Supertool script to clone citations but it’s not that advanced to ask the question of what I want or not to keep when duplicating, but it would indeed be a good idea to have a tool - and its icon, like the one (in fact its opposite) for merging two objects - to duplicate a Gramps object

[GeorgeWilmes]

Another approach: every transcription, transliteration, or translation is a separate (derivative) source, especially if they are the work of the same author, and even if that author is you. When you cite a piece of information, you are citing one of those sources. (No, I don’t use this approach myself, at least not yet. But I think it would be more robust.)