Maintaining translated versions of notes

What I’m trying to do

I tend to take notes in English, and then create Chinese versions of those notes to share with my clients. I typically create an adjacent note, with a “- CN” suffix and manually translate the document to Chinese. However, we had issues with maintaining the same version of notes when changes are made to the English original document. When I change the English original, sometimes I forget updating the Chinese translated note.

Things I have tried

I tried using the Linter plugin to add timestamps on last edits. That way I can see the last time the Chinese version was edited, but it’s still very time consuming to check for changes in the original file. I came up with this idea for a solution but have no clue how to implement it:

  1. Check the last edit timestamp on the English file and compare that with the Chinese one.
  2. If the difference is more than, say 24 hours between the last edits of the 2 documents, change the status of the CN translation to “out of date”

Does anyone else struggle with similar workflows? How do you handle different language versions of the same source material?

Look at my example if you can adapt to your situation:

TABLE file.cday as "Created", 
      file.mday AS "Modified", 
      number(durationformat(dur(file.mtime - file.ctime), "d")) AS "Days over", 
      choice(number(durationformat(dur(file.mtime - file.ctime), "d")) >= 50, "Overdue", "") AS "Status"
FROM ""
LIMIT 20
SORT dur(file.mtime - file.ctime) desc

This block of code produced something like this…

I have a Dashboard note with this table and a few more comments. You’ll for sure need to adapt to your Chinese suffix and some other details.

Cheers, Marko :nerd_face:

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Thanks Marko! I’m trying to match the English and Chinese versions of files together, but haven’t found a way yet. I will update here once I figure that out.

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