b) glosses. One very simple gloss can look like this:
Neboť tak Bůh miloval svět
Because that so [the]God loved [the]world
For God so loved the world
The point is that an example from a weird language (actually, this is
beginning of John 3.16 in my native Czech :-)) is represented in the
word-by-word translation into English and then good English translation is
provided. Obviously most natural way how to represent this in OOo (or
M$-Word for this matter) is table for the first two lines of the text and
the third line aligned with this table.
I thought of a different way that might be even more natural than a table -
I don't know if it will be any easier for making a macro for automation, but
it might be worth considering. You said that only the first two lines need
to line up with each other, and that it happens based on word breaks in the
first line. There is a feature in Writer that is designed primarily for use
with the Japanese language, but may be handy in your case also - it is
called "ruby". Again, I don't know how easy it will be to automate it, but
you can see how it works first by doing it manually. Try this:
1) Write your Czech sentence, only allowing spaces between things you want
to break apart. Highlight the whole sentence (you can also do it a piece at
a time, but this is more efficient).
2) Select Format -> Asian Phonetic Guide...
3) In the dialog box that comes up, you should see your sentence nicely
parsed into the pieces. Fill in the English literal translation next to
each.
4) Choose whatever Alignment you would like (probably either Left or
Center) and change the Position to Bottom. Choose a Character Style that
you'd like for it, either the same as the original text or something else
that works for your needs (probably not as small as the default Rubies
style, which is most useful when really doing Japanese). Click Apply.
The English words will appear under the Czech ones, and will stay lined up
with them no matter what else changes in the document. Then you can add
back any spaces you may have removed to get the Ruby to parse the way you
want.
If you can get a macro to apply Ruby, and you want to signal breaks by
multiple spaces like in your example, just have the first task of the macro
be to replace single spaces with some other character, then do the ruby,
then put the spaces back.
I hope this is of some use to you.
Karen
P.S. I love your choice of example sentence! :-) In case you're wondering,
I'm a Christian missionary in Japan.
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