I’d like to highlight and translate English to German, and German to English, in LibreWriter Documents. I have tried the Tools, Options, etc. pathway but it does not change the default language to German for either that document alone or for all of LibreOffice. ANd actually, I’d like to translate any language into English while in LibreWriter.
What operating system are you using?
I use a free translation tool on Windows 7 which I use to translate German to English.
There are two topics in your question.
1 - Language attribute for segments of document
Any sequence of characters in your has a language attribute used to drive spellcheck, grammar check, hyphenation, etc.
You set this attribute through styles in a hierarchy:
-
Tools→Options...→Language settings→Languagewhere you set the default language for documents (persistent across LO invocations), -
paragraph style, Font tab, Language drop-down menu to change language in paragraphs receiving this style,
-
character style, Font tab, Language drop-down menu to override language for runs of characters in this style.
2 - Translation
Unfortunately, there is presently no satisfactory automatic translation tool. You can find extensions which help you in this task but they all have various shortcomings and you must manually tune their output. I’ve tried a few and reverted to classical methods with a dictionary. You must master the idiosyncracies of source and target languages to produce a quality translation.
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You cannot translate with LO. You can install multiple different language dictionaries allowing you to spellcheck different languages. All text has a language attribute so the correct dictionary is used to spellcheck the text.
Copy the text into Google Translate and translate it there.
If this helps then please tick the answer and/or show you like it with an uptick
Google Translate can give you a rough idea of what’s in the text but it is in no ways a tool for routinely translating “specialised” documents. In particular, when you’re dealing with a paper for a specific domain, Google dictionaries are not fit for this task (many dedicated words are missing). GT also can’t adapt to the restricted area of knowledge. On the whole, I’ve been disappointed by GT, forcing me to reopen my old books.
The poster is looking for automatic translation without human intervention. After having used Google Translate the poster will have an LO document in German - or in any other language supported by Google Translate. Whether it is good enough for the poster’s purpose is a different question. Any automatic translation will be imperfect. Google Translate is quite good at what it does and far cheaper than employing a human translator. The post does not mention “specialised” documents.
I tested it and was disappointed by the result. Consequently, I would not recommend it on a language not mastered by the translator.
A new AI translation tool is proposed, a demo for English/German is available. (I have not tried it)