Semantically marking up translations

Question

I'm in the process of marking up an historical manuscript which has been translated from German into English. On the web page I will be providing both languages side by side. Is there an accepted way to markup such a scenario?

I was thinking of splitting the translation blocks using the section tag and providing each with a lang attribute. However semantically this fails at communicating that one section roughly equates to the other.

Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Without an example of the data it's hard to say; but is there a reason that you couldn't section them together, and provide the languages within sibling blockquotes; these then carry the context correctly, and can be styled to appear side by side.

<section>
    <blockquote lang="en">English</blockquote>
    <blockquote lang="de">Deutsch</blockquote>
</section>

Answer 2

I think that table could be used here to relate the original text to its translation:

<table lang="en">
  <tr>
    <th>Original/English</th>
    <th>Translation/German</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><blockquote>…</blockquote></td>
    <td lang="de"><blockquote>…</blockquote></td>
  </tr>
</table>

(assuming that both versions are actually quoted from a different source)

It would be possible to divide the original and the translation into sections or pages or paragraphs (or whatever), if useful, each represented by a separate row (tr).

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See also my answer to a similar question.

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Note that by using blockquote the headings of the manuscript (and the translation) are not part of the document outline.