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Hi Andrzej:
We translated the English XML content and mapping files into
multiple languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, which
are probably some of the more difficult languages to translate. The
agencies worked with our build kit and generated translated versions
per language, including PDF. Granted, we had some great development
resources to program the XSLT and XSL:FO appropriately to handle
multiple languages.
I do remember some iterations where translation had to tweak the PDF
output until we programmed a solution (indexing was challenging for
Japanese, right-to-left languages, etc.). In any case, the amount of
total manual work translation had to perform versus previous
iterations was massively reduced with subsequent cost savings and
rapid turn-around. From what I recall, we reached 100% automation
for all languages handled.
If you could be more specific about which language morphologies
cannot work with variables, I'd be interested. In some cases, the
best solution might be to dump out an XLIFF with resolved values for
variables, so the base XML isn't translated, but the XLIFF version
of the same with a two-way transformation back to the build kit for
a translated version of deliverables.
Some translation groups will work with build kits, some don't, so
this also needs to be factored into workflow.
So I suspect that there may be no perfect global solution to handle
all possible languages from base DITA XML, but a technical solution
that handles most and then an alternate workflow for those languages
that cannot work with variables as such.
Troy
On 1/15/2013 1:34 PM, Andrzej Zydron wrote:
Hi Troy,
Thank you for this
interesting post. Your
mechanism will work for English, and the small group of
languages with a similar primitive morphology. Unfortunately it
will fall apart when you come to translate the XML
content into any language
with a richer morphology - the resultant output will produce ungrammatical output
and the
cost of recovery from this will be extensive.
English is a linguistic freak (a fact that is
lost on most monolingual English
speakers)
which allows for the relative easy substitutions that you described. I you plan to translate your content
into other languages
this is not a
practical possibility.
Best Regards,
Andrzej Zydroń
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