Title: Email signature standard
Troy, there were a couple of
questions that I want to ask. Did the company's style guide
restrict the content developers as to how they used the product
names, for example, using product names only in the nominative
case?
Were the product names translated or left in English? I think
translated, based on your post, but wanted to check -- some
companies handle the problem of reusing company names by NOT
translating them.
You mentioned using attributes to indicate plurals or
possessives; did you do anything to handle case or part of
speech?
Thanks for your interesting post!
Best,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
Co-chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)
On 1/16/2013 8:47 AM, Troy Klukewich wrote:
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
---------------------------------------
CTO
XTM International Ltd.
PO Box 2167, Gerrards Cross, SL9 8XF,
UK
email:
Tel: +44 (0) 1753 480 479
Mob: +44 (0) 7966 477 181
skype: Zydron
www.xtm-intl.com
