dita-translation comment

[Bryce L Nordgren <bnordgren@fs.fed.us>]

I was on the verge of recommending DITA to a colleague who is working on a 
Russian-English Fire Science Dictionary.  However, after digging a little 
deeper, I am a bit confused as to how one might even use the glossentry 
element to provide a kind of structured translation framework. 

We can start simply: with only a single <glossterm> element allowed in a 
<glossentry>, how does one specify the "preferred term" in two or more 
languages?  If <glossentry> means "one sense of the term", should it 
contain the definition of that sense in all the relevant languages?  My 
read of the MultilingualBestPractices draft suggests not.  So there must 
be some sort of way to link definitions...

I have read the Glossary Specialization white paper, but I am still at a 
loss as to how to specify the equivalent translated entry.  I can easily 
see using a <glossSynonym xml:lang="ru" href="ru_term_def.dita"/>, but 
such a usage certainly is not mentioned in the "best practices" white 
paper (draft) promulgated by the translation subcommittee.  It also 
violates the semantics of <glossSynonym>, as the synonym is semantically 
defined as a non-separately-defined child of the preferred term rather 
than in its own topic...Finally, @href is not defined on <glossSynonym> in 
the current draft of DITA 1.2.

Ideally, we'd really want a structure like a reltable to relate preferred 
terms from different languages.  She pretty much had a terminology 
reltable in her powerpoint slides.  Even the three English speaking 
countries she considered (Canada, USA, Australia) exhibited varying 
degrees of agreement as to what a term meant, which terms were synonymous, 
and which terms lacked a counterpart in the foreign language.  We'd love 
to host this and see more terms and more languages be added, and a 
reltable like structure would greatly ease our maintainence needs.

Perhaps a multilingual example is called for in the Glossary 
specialization white paper? 

Thanks, 
Bryce