Semi-Automatic Translation and SVG Card Walls

Yesterday I was helping translating part of a chapter written by Paulo Caroli for a book about agile development to be released in brazilian portuguese. My workflow went as follows:

1. Copy a paragraph and paste it on Google Translate to get a rough translation
2. Paste the translation back on the original document right bellow the original paragraph
3. Make adjustments on the rough translation, consulting the original text when needed, until it seemed good enough

The reason I've used an automatic translation tool is because there's many trivial things that the tool get right. So it makes my job much easier. I've seen many people (including myself, sometime ago) that would disregard automatic translation tools for being inaccurate. However, as I was discussing one day with my former classmate Daniel Beck (who does research in Natural Language Processing), current automatic translation can help a lot in getting the easiest parts done and leave only the hard stuff for you to work on.

Anyway, as I worked today on this translation I saw some features that could enhance my workflow. As far as I know, the larger the context the translation tool have the better is the translation, so it would be nice to me if I could paste all of the chapter text as a context for the paragraphs that I want to translate. I know I could paste the whole text and get the whole translation, but I've wanted a way to have a improved translation and still be able to work in smaller chunks of text each time. 

Another thing is some common expressions that occur that can have several possible translations but you want to have a single one. For instance, "card wall" appeared several times on the text, and each time it was translated for different expressions (parede cartão, cartão de muro, muro cartão), even on the same paragraph. In this case it was very important to maintain consistency because it's a key concept and it need to have the same name through the whole text. It would be very useful to be able to say that some expression should always use the same translation.

Paulo also asked for some help at doing some images. I gave a shot at doing a card wall using Inkscape. This is how it looks at this moment:

The svg is here in case you want to play with it.