This is a wonderful feature I didn't know about until now. But it was not what I'm looking for. In computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP), a "text aligner" is a piece of software that identifies which words and phrases correspond to which in a translation. The input is a translated text and the output is a dictionary. It's like a more advanced "diff" tool.
This extension is not working well. It requires users to manually insert tags in the text, that are used by the extension in order to align the text.
This approach has failed, because: *adding tags to the text is difficult. *the method requires coordination between subdomains. This is difficult to obtain, as you can see here: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Crito?match=it *the tags are often deleted because they are not self-explanatory enough *the alignment is sensitive to text formatting. Since most users do not know how the extension works, they destroy the alignment when they modify a page.
So I guess it would be better to remove all the alignment code from this extension, and to use an automated method for that. A text aligner, as you mention, could be running on the toolserver and called using ajax. Are there good free software text aligners?
Thomas