[Tex/LaTex] Printing interlinear translation: how to mix automatically two paragraphs, printing lines alternately

languageslinguisticsparagraphspositioning

I am writing a document on a foreigh language, say French, and want to put some paragraphs in French with their translation in English. But I would like to print one line in French, the corresponding line in English, one line in French, the corresponding line in English, and so on.

For example, if I have these two paragraphs:

On ne connaît que les choses que l'on
apprivoise, dit le renard. Les hommes
n'ont plus le temps de rien connaître.
Ils achètent des choses toutes faites
chez les marchands. Mais comme il
n'existe point de marchands d'amis,
les hommes n'ont plus d'amis. Si tu
veux un ami, apprivoise-moi!

We only know the things that we tame,
said the fox. People no longer have
the time to know anything. They buy
things already made for peddlers. But
since there are no peddlers of
friends, they no longer have friends.
If you want a friend, tame me!

I would like them to be automatically printed like this, providing interlinear translation:

On ne connaît que les choses que l'on apprivoise, dit le renard. Les hommes n'ont plus 
We only know the things that we tame, said the fox. People no longer have 

le temps de rien connaître. Ils achètent des choses toutes faites chez les marchands.
the time to know anything. They buy things already made for peddlers. 

Mais comme il n'existe point de marchands d'amis, les hommes n'ont plus d'amis. 
But since there are no peddlers of friends, they no longer have friends. 

Si tu veux un ami, apprivoise-moi!
If you want a friend, tame me!

So, I am looking for a way to mix both paragraphs, eventually with a way to provide sync information to tell latex which parts have to be kept together. Ideally I would like this to be processed automatically in such a way that a modification of the layout of the page or the size of the font should not oblige me to reformat the text by myself.

Best Answer

Partitions similar to these, but with even higher degrees of syncing, are common in linguistics. At http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/latex4ling/ most LaTeX resources for linguistics have been gathered. Specifically your synched texts are similar to what's called glosses in linguistics; and these can be handled by cgloss4e.sty. See http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/latex4ling/examples/ for more details.

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