Impact of the Conref Best Practice

I thought you would 
be interested in learning that the Translation Subcommittee's Best Practice on 
Conrefs is already making an impact. 

 

____________

Final 
quote:

Thanks for sending this over. This is exactly 
what I was looking for so this is very 
timely.

 

Do you know if any of the localization vendors are looking 
to enhance their applications to resolve conrefs? This might be another way 
to resolve some of the issues when using conrefs at the word level which many 
customers do for variables and product names. 

__________

Original inquiry::

I was wondering if you have a draft copy of the 
the best practice document,  Best Practice for Using the DITA CONREF 
Attribute for Translation. I was wondering if it had information pertaining to a 
particular situation we're trying to resolve. 

As you know, we have a few customers 
who are working with the translation vendors such as SDL and Idiom. The issue we 
are experiencing is that when customers use conrefs for managing variables this 
creates issues for the TMS as the TMS does not resolve 
conrefs.

Here's what one 
particular customer has discovered:

We're run into a 
translation issue regarding our liberal use of conrefs to our variables file. 
After talking with SDL, it seems our use of conref-ed variables greatly 
complicates the linguist's job in determining how to create gender-specific 
articles, plurals, and possesives. This complication raises the translation 
costs quite significantly.

Do you have any suggestions on how 
this type of conref use could be best managed in DITA for 
translation?

____________________

Clearly, we need more Best Practices documents out 
there, an important task of the new Adoption 
Subcommittee.

JoAnn

JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, 
Inc.
710 Kipling 
Street, Suite 400
Denver CO 80215
303-232-7586