Den tors 11 juni 2020 10:45Jan Willem Flamma <register12c@gmail.com> skrev:

Dear list members,

I write training manuals and use the Modes mechanism a lot to create documents at various competency levels using a single set of source files. So far the manuals have been written in English but now a separate Dutch translation has to be created.

It is important that the two manuals are setup similarly so the section/subsection numbers and question numbers are the same in the English manual and the Dutch manual. Note: I do not intend to create a manual that has the English and Dutch text at opposite sides (as can be done using streams)

I’m keen to continue using a single set of source files and thought it would be best to simply type the translated sections and subsections just below the original English sections and subsections using modeset. This gives me the option of creating an English case and a Dutch case. Within this two cases I would still apply all sorts of other modes using \startmode and \doifmode.

I have done that with LaTeX and IMHO that way lies madness. It may work for shorter text but for text(s) of any length it gets messy. You lose the "flow" in both texts, and it shows when you read the typeset text, and the source becomes hard to navigate. You are probably better off using an editor which allows you to have the two versions open side by side in their own viewports (I use what Vim calls "windows"). If each section heading is on its own line you might try something like a Perl script to loop over the lines in the English version and print only the section headings to a new file, where you translate them and build up the Dutch version around them. It's even better if the editor has the capacity to show an outline pane for each version — if there is an outline mode which understands ConTeXt.

I'm sorry to discourage you but chances are that you end up with an intractable mess which you will have to spend much time disentangling later.