[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl

Does anyone know of a reasonable way to search an english epub for French words? [...] it would be nice to span those little phrases with lang="fr".

Yes, I wrote a tutorial on this back in:

• 2019: "Is there a way to use the selection in a Saved Search?"

I described how to use Sigil's/Calibre's Spellcheck Lists in order to tag each Spanish/"foreign word" with an HTML language.

You could then use some regex to merge everything together.

- - -

I even wrote another tutorial showing you how you can use 2 dictionaries to quickly spot "foreign words" too:

• 2019: "Export list of words in spellcheck "

In that case, I used the trick to quickly find all British<->American spellings.

Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl

EDIT: I should have thought of this earlier. If I'm lucky, either the publisher or Calibre will have enclosed the French stuff in italics. I'll search for <i> and, where appropriate, replace it with <i lang="fr">.

Use:

<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">

personally, I also add a class there too:

<i class="french" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">

to make it easier to manipulate via CSS.

Then if you want all your French words to be red? Very simple to understand CSS:

.french {
   color: red;
}

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Side Note: If you want even more on proper HTML language markup, type this into your favorite search engine:

xml:lang Tex2002ans site:mobileread.com

I've written more than 100 times about all this in ebooks!

- - -

Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl

On a quasi-related note, is there some construct to translate little blurbs of text for the reader? If these were full-fledged untranslated paragraphs of French, I'd run it through Google Translate and stick the result in a footnote. But, for these little Poirot exclamations, most of them are trivial and only some use words I don't recognize.

Leave it up to the reader/app itself. For example:

• PocketBook

allows you to Auto-Translate text, inline, similar to Google Translate on a webpage.

You could also press+hold, then send the highlighted text to a translation site too.

(In PocketBook, you can also choose which engine you want to use, like DeepL, Google Translate, Bing Translate, etc.)

Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl

I was thinking of commandeering <abbr title="...translation...">french phrase</abbr>, but though it works in Calibre, it doesn't as a kepub on my Forma.

[...]

Right now, the best I can come up with is a full-fledged footnote to properly set the translation off from the paragraph.

If it's only for your personal usage, then you could do a footnote.

But if it's an ebook for actual sale, DO NOT use those hackish <abbr> or <ruby> methods.

If you device doesn't have the Auto-Translate stuff, you could also do something like shoving the translation right after + in a different font:

« Je parle français! » (I speak French!)

would be this HTML:

<span class="french" lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">« Je parle français! »</span> <span class="translated">(I speak French!)</span>

This would allow you to easily tweak your manually translated text, so you could do something like:

span.translated {
    font-weight: bold;
}

Originally Posted by enuddleyarbl

But, for these little Poirot exclamations, most of them are trivial and only some use words I don't recognize.

In that case, you may be able to gather from context. If not, then I just treat it like "unknown babble" or completely made-up fantasy words.

Similar to when I run across Greek or Japanese or Chinese in my books. I just nod my head... then continue reading. (But not until I properly tag the language, of course!!!)