After using Emacs for years (huge fan!) I finally realized that Emacs hinders my productivity instead of improving it. Thus I moved to other tools, sadly, and never looked back.
In this case I would use Text Extractor (part of M$ PowerToys) and Google Translate.
I have roughly the same routine. However, I have been lucky to have two additional components on many occasions:
* Super interesting conversations with my walking comrades.
* LSD / mushrooms / MDMA. Apart from doing garbage collection on my subconscious psychedelics make thinking and talking much more fulfilling and satisfactory.
Try smartparens. It's a successor to paredit and works for other languages as well.
I have never coded (and navigated code) faster than in Clojure on Emacs w/ smartparens.