DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 19 June 2006

["Gershon L Joseph" <gershon@tech-tav.com>]

Hi all,

Here's this week's agenda. Apologies for the late delivery of these minutes.
This week's been even more hectic than usual...

Best Regards,
Gershon

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Gershon L Joseph
Member, OASIS DITA and DocBook Technical Committees
Director of Technology and Single Sourcing
Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd.
office: +972-8-974-1569
mobile: +972-57-314-1170
http://www.tech-tav.com
DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 19 June 2006

(Recorded by Gershon Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>)

The DITA Translation Subcommittee met on Monday, 19 June 2006 at 08:00am PT
for 60 minutes.

1.  Roll call

    Present: Robert Anderson, Don Day, Kevin Farwell, JoAnn Hackos, Nancy 
        Harrison, Gershon Joseph, Patrick Klaassen, Charles Pau, Rodolfo Raya,
        Felix Sasaki, Andrzej Zydron

    Regrets: 

2.  Accepted the minutes of the previous meeting.
    http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita-translation/200606/msg00009.html
    Moved by Don, seconded by Gershon, no objections.

3.  Returning Business:

3.1 Discuss Gershon Joseph's draft of the best practice for legacy TM

    If the TM is preprocessed *using a CAT tool* to prepare it for the 
    DITA-based translation project...
    -- change to point out it's the CAT tool.

    If text entities and/or conrefs are used as containers for reusable text, 
    then these ...
    -- Discussion on whether we should discuss use on conref in more detail. 
    DECISION to add xref to the authoring for translation best practice that 
    JoAnn and Andrzej are writing up.

    If you tweak the TMX (exported from the legacy TM) to better align it with 
    the new DITA content,...
    Charles Pau - Could we give some examples?
    Rodolfo - e.g. rule in FrameMaker that terminates a segment after a colon, 
    that rule can be discarded in DITA since there's now markup to indicate 
    where the procedure title ends and the steps begin.

    If you tweak the segmentation rules or otherwise modify the DITA markup so 
    that the TMX and DITA documents are better aligned.
    -- Gershon to work with Rodolfo and Kevin to improve this point.

    will yield perfect matching at --> *should* yield perfect matching...
    Andrzej -- Use "leverage" matching, not "perfect" matching.
    JoAnn -- Add 3 matching levels to terminology section.
    ACTION -- Andrzej to send terminology definitions to Gershon. Gershon to 
    add them to the document and ensure all text uses only these terms.

    Nancy -- This Best Practice is for before adding new content to DITA. 
    Don't work on the content after conversion to DITA until the TM as been
    aligned. Gershon to work with Rodolfo on the note to discuss the options. 
    1) new content can be translated in this round and 
    2) can translate at paragraph vs sentence levels.

    ACTION -- Don to inform us where to publish our best practices.

Meeting adjourned at 09:00am PT.

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For future agendas:

3.3 Management of conref blocks for translations

    Standardized (boilerplate) text is often kept in one or more .dita files 
    used as a source for conrefs across a document set. 

    All boilerplate content for a language must be stand-alone.
        Boilerplate text must be stand-alone phrases to avoid problems translating
        it into some languages, where it does not fit into the surrounding text.

    Depending on the conref target, the conref target should be
        translated before the parent document that refers to the conref 
        is translated. 

    Conreffing to an inline element may result 
        in a badly translated phrase with respect to its surrounding content, 
        so we should probably be against this. Examples: singular/plural,
        prepositions, acronyms e.g. ABS (antilock breaking system) so if 
        you conref to the text itself, the translated text may not read 
        correctly.

    Action Item: Andrjez will provide examples to the group for discussion.

3.4 XLIFF transforms

    Discuss plans for Rodolfo's tests of their XLIFF transforms and possible 
    release to open source. Ask if there is a proposed date.

    Andrzej and Rodolfo have successfully converted DITA to XLIFF and back.
    Rodolfo plans to publish their converter as open source.

4.  New Business:

4.1 Handling multi-language documents

    Charles Pau and others to provide examples to the list for discussion