Right, but the effort is in the manual entry. I am starting with a document coded in LaTeX which produces a 2-column PDF. So using latex2rtf will be my attempt at an automatic conversion but I imagine it will be a disaster. So from there, alternatively, I have a lot of copying and pasting to do. A table does not feel right, but I guess the first thing I have to look into is whether a table can span many pages. If each page must have a separate table, then what happens as the table grows? I anticipate a lot of pain, but nonetheless I'll see what I can do.

Journals and newspapers commonly do multiple columns though not for different languages, so the right column is a continuation of the left. I suppose a table might be a hack around that, assuming L/O even supports 2 columns of text in the traditional sense in the first place.