100 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
100 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
# Bilingual Computing
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For the last few years, I've been trying to learn French, so that I can live in France.
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I used to speak the language as a child when I lived in Paris, but that was nearly 20 years ago, so I've forgotten a lot of it.
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As well as langauges, I have a healthy interest in computing, online communication and free and open source software.
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I'm adamant about independence in computing, and minimising my dependencies on services provided as products.
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In this post I'd like to talk about a little bit about a few additions and customisations I've made to my Linux environment to support learning and using multiple written languages.
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## Translation Commands
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The first and most obvious thing I wanted was a quick and dirty translator.
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For me, this means being able to open a terminal, hammer in a command and a query, and get a result back.
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I am not too concerned about the accuracy of the translator, or translating large amounts of text.
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So long as it helps me most of the time with a word or phrase, and so long as it's quicker and easier than picking up my phone, it's good enough.
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I found [argos-translate](https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate), which provides open-source offline translation.
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The user downloads translation dictionaries as packages and can then be used to translate strings of text, either individual words or entire phrases.
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Here's my script for translating a phrase in French to English, which I have saved as `en`:
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```bash
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#!/usr/bin/env bash
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# fully expand arguments
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phrase=$@
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argos-translate --from-lang fr --to-lang en "$phrase"
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```
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Note that arguments passed into the script are expanded before being passed as a single string to the translation command.
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That means that I am able to pass arguments without turning them into a literal string, which is nice.
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Without wrapping it in quotes, however, characters such as apostrophes must be explicitly escaped.
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```
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en j\'aime bien les pingouins, ils s\'y connaissent en informatique
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```
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## Keyboard Layouts
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Now that I had a way to do quick translations, the next obvious limitation was my keyboard layout.
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In casual conversation I've often copy-pasted, made do with using multiple characters ('e, e\`) to resemble diacritics, or just omitted them entirely and trusted the other party to understand.
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This would be unacceptable for any longer-form writing, such as blog posts.
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Being a life-long QWERTY user, I was not enthralled by QWERTZ, AZERTY or any other standard European layout that would throw off my existing muscle memory.
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Thankfully [QWERTY-fr](https://github.com/qwerty-fr/qwerty-fr) exists!
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I haven't used an accented keyboard before, but I like how it is designed spatially.
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It reminds me of vim's design, where the position of the key is more important than what is written upon it.
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After installing the additional layout, I wrote a script `kbfr` to enable it with `setxkbmap`.
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I also included some other layout modifications which turn Caps Lock into Ctrl and Esc using `xcape`, and ensure they are run when I set the keyboard layout:
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```
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#!/usr/bin/env bash
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# while caps lock is held down, it applies a ctrl modifier to other keys
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setxkbmap -option caps:ctrl_modifier
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# when caps lock is pressed or released, it acts as esc
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xcape -e 'Caps_Lock=Escape'
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# enable the QWERTY-fr layout
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setxkbmap -v -layout us_qwerty-fr
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```
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I also enabled the xkeyboard module for [polybar](https://github.com/polybar/polybar), so that I could see at a glance which layout I have enabled.
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## A Dictionary
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Finally, I wanted a more complete dictionary than my simple translator scripts.
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This is mostly to help me learn the grammatical gender of words, which my translator scripts are only partially able to help with.
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It's also good practice to figure out the meanings of words when I have only other words of the same language available to help!
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I found the open StarDict dictionary, which has a [command-line version, `sdvc`](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sdcv).
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I installed a French dictionary for it with the AUR package `stardict-acadfr1935`, and since this is the only dictionary I have installed, usage is quite simple - I wrapped it in a `mot` script:
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```
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#!/usr/bin/env bash
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<<<<<<< HEAD
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# get the meaning of a french word
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sdcv -c -n $1
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=======
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# trouve la signification d'un mot français
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mot=$1
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sdcv -c -n $mot
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>>>>>>> ccbe2ec (add bilingual computing/linformatique bilingue)
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```
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This is something I'm not quite happy with yet, but it will do for now.
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The dictionary could include more up-to-date definitions, and the output is often quite verbose.
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The ArchWiki page does describe some suggested usages, which maybe I will look at in the future.
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---
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Thanks to my Quebecois friend Vorty for helping me with my terrible language skills, both English and French.
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