Interaction of "processing" and "translation" attribute

[Stefan Eike <stefan.eike@mailbox.org>]

Dear DITA TC,

I'm unsure about the interaction of the "processing" and the "translation" attributes. I had a discussion with one of our DITA tool vendors, and we interprete the specification differently.

Consider a <keydef>:

<keydef keys="foo" href="">
We have many <keydef> elements like this in our docs. We use <keydef> elements to point to "database topics". These topics should not be rendered in the output, but these database topics contain reusable textual elements (like <ph> or <dlentry>), that are conkeyrefed into rendered topics. A <keydef> element implicitely sets processing-role="resource-only". So for us, topics referenced with <keydef> should be translated, because they might contain text.

Our DITA tool vendor says, a <keydef> is resource-only and resource-only "things" should not be translated. I assumed, that the "resource-only" would not affect translations. I could not find a statement in the specs that determines that. I expected, that, by default, a <keydef> should be processed like any other element, so it should be "translated", unless translate="no" is set.


So I expected, that, if I'd like to avoid the translation of a <keydef> referenced topic, I would explicitely need to write:

<keydef keys="foo" href="" translate="no"/>

Could you please clarify?

Thank you and best regards,

Stefan Eike