Translating Books and Papers

I have a side project called BookLoggr which was created for the purpose of saving notes to books as I have done for decades but on the empty back pages of books. A year ago I added a feature for uploading pdfs and found myself often just cutting and pasting interesting sentences. I soon started saving academic papers as well as books.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate reading beginner books in french. On each page, I’ll find many new words that I need to look up and annotate with the english word inside the book. It is very time consuming and awkward to put the book down, pull up deepl.com and type the word into the translation form. It is much less disruptive to be able to click a button to translate the page and I can optionally write the english word inside the physical copy of the book.

So, I decided to repurpose my existing interface for adding a note (which was already associated with a page number) to make the note the entire contents of a page. Now, before I start reading the french book, I add each page of the book as a note. Last night, I wrote the code to allow clicking a button to translate a page of french text using DeepL.

I added the pages last night and will try it out and see how it goes…