What is the best way to manage multilingual presentations?

Question

I have a presentation made in Latex + Beamer, currently in French. I also need to make the same presentation, with the same structure, in Dutch. I would like to save the presentation in one file, so if I want to change its structure, I need to do this in only one place. What is the best way to translate translations outside of a presentation file?

I was thinking of defining a command for each text element present in the slides, and having a different command definition for each language. But it seems pretty hard ....

Thanks in advance

Raf

Answer 1

I saw only one solution for this (as part of the babel package) - you end each continuous unit of text with a command that looks like this:

 \langswitcher{french text}{dutch text} 

and then define \langswitcher in the preamble to output either the first or second argument.

I know that this does not transfer the translation to a separate file, but it is simple, fast, works for sure and probably solves your problem.

To put a translation in a separate file, at least you still have to identify each piece of text.

Answer 2

I would do

 \newcommand{\en}{#1} \newcommand{\de}{} 

And in the text use:

 \en{ my text in english } \de{ german text } 

And after I just replaced the teams. Keep in mind that the result should differ only because the text should take up more or less space. You can trick the \ phantom command a bit. This solution uses only one file.

Answer 3

save each slide in its own file ... then \ input {dutch-file} \ input {french-file}