As promised, I solicited feedback about the draft article. Below are excerpts from the SDL reviewer in the Language Technologies division:
· My biggest question is about the purpose/intended audience for the document. It reads as though you are targeting the DITA content creators but I can’t see what value would be gained by the DITA content creators in doing this conversion to XLIFF before sending the data into the translation process – this is a process which only adds value for the entity doing the translation, not the content creator. You mention simplifying administration activities – but that is really a very small saving vs. the large cost of the content creator having to perform this transform. If there is some other value that escapes me that I think the document would have more impact if it contained this information.
· Alternatively, you could view this information as much more relevant to tool vendors – giving them guidance on how they should interpret DITA as something ‘more than XML’. Best practise advice on how these and things like conref’s etc. should be ‘dereferenced’ would be useful.
· My only other comment would be on the use of the phrase ‘perfect match’. Certainly in SDL tools when the document source text exactly matches the TM source text (as your document describes) we just call this a 100% match. Beyond that, where the source text is identical and the previous segment is also identical, we have ‘Context Matches’ . And beyond that, where the translation is taken from an earlier version of the same document, we have ‘Perfect Matches’.
Best regards,
Kris
Kristen James Eberlein l DITA Architect and Technical Specialist l SDL Structured Content Technologies Division l (t) + 1 (919) 682-2290 l keberlein@sdl.com
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