Subcommittee Meeting 8 May 2006

["JoAnn Hackos" <joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com>]

Hello Folks!
I'm finally back from travel and workshops, at least for this week. We
did not meet last week because of holidays. This week, we need to
continue our discussion of best practices. Please review Nancy
Harrison's memo before the call.
 
Agenda for Monday 10 April 2006

11:00 am - 12:00 am Eastern Standard Team (-5 GMT)

DITA Technical Committtee teleconference 

USA Toll Free Number: 866-566-4838 

USA Toll Number: +1-210-280-1707 

PASSCODE: 185771



Roll Call

Approve Minutes from 24 April 2006 (enclosed for those who are not TC

members)

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-translation/
<http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita-translation/> 

This link goes to the subcommittee home page rather than directly to the
minutes. Please link to the minutes yourselves.

I have attached a Word document with the minutes. 


Action Items:
  --ACTION-- Robert to respond to Yves via email and site our 
        decision/recommendation in that email. Robert to write up
proposal to 
        be submitted to TC list.
	  Suggestion to make default translate=no on 
        required-cleanup and draft-content.

New Business:

Discuss Andrzej's note on inline elements as follows:

"If we have the opportunity during today's conference call, I would like

to discuss the issue of subflows within inline elements.

The definition of inline elements for DITA has been a great step 
forward. We now need to classify which of the inline elements are in 
fact subflows, that is they do not form part of the linguistic text flow

within which they occur. For example footnote text (fn) or index text 
(indexterm). For localization it is important to be able to separate 
these out during translation and then to be able to put the text back 
where appropriate."

Discuss Nancy Harrison's outline of Best Practice needs. Attached.

 
JoAnn 

JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD 
President 
Comtech Services, Inc. 
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400 
Denver, CO 80215 
303-232-7586 
joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com 
http://www.comtech-serv.com <http://www.comtech-serv.com/>  
Skype joannhackos

--- Begin Message ---

• From: "Nancy P Harrison" <nancyph@us.ibm.com>
• To: <dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org>
• Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 08:34:15 -0600

Summary of Best Practices discussion on 10Apr2006 

We need to present a proposal, for best practices relative to translation, to the main DITA TC. 

Best practices fall into various categories: 
        for authors                - base of these are DITA topic-oriented writing guidelines 
                                - others are more operational 
        for implementors        - setting up stylesheets and specializations to work consistentlyl for translated and multilingual content 
        for vendors                - creating processing that plays well with multilingual content and content to be translated. 



Sample Best practice scenarios and requirements 
Sample 1. Indexing Guideline Use case 
        author - inserts index entries immendiately after the start tag of the element containing the range of text to be indexed 
        processing - when index entries are encountered, determines the location / scope of the index refernece as the parent element of the index   

Sample 2  Container items around multilingual bulleted lists 
        author - sets xml:lang attribute appropriately for each list item 
        processor - produces output appropriate to xml:lang setting for each list item 

Sample 3 Sorting multilingual content (in and index, for example) 

Sample 4 Generation of translation style sheets (e.g. in English, book titles are often displayed in italic; Japanese has no italic, so book titles are displayed using open/closed corner brackets) 
        implementor or vendor issue 

Sample 5 Storage of boilerplate text 
        Boilerplate text is often kept in one or more .dita files used as a source for conrefs across a document set. How hsould authors / implementors / processors deal with multiple sets of boilerplate files automatically?  DocBook names every file containing generated text with a language entension (two letter only), including English.  A similar scheme, but probably with locale, not just country, would work for DITA documents as well. 

  


____
Nancy Harrison
IBM Rational Software
Phone: 781-676-2535
nancyph@us.ibm.com

--- End Message ---

MEETING MINUTES April 24 2006.doc