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Subject: DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 16 April 2007
-- Gershon L Joseph Director of Technology and Single Sourcing Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd. Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee Secretary, OASIS DITA Translation Subcommittee Member, OASIS DocBook Technical Committee office: +972-8-974-1569 mobile: +972-57-314-1170 web: http://www.tech-tav.com
DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 16 April 2007
(Recorded by Gershon Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>)
The DITA Translation Subcommittee met on Monday, 16 April 2007 at 08:00am PT
for 60 minutes.
1) Roll Call
Present:
JoAnn Hackos
Gershon Joseph
Robert Anderson
Don Day
Andrzej Zydron
Nick Rosenthal
Rodolfo Raya
Regrets:
2) Accept Minutes from 12 March 2007
Accepted. [JoAnn moved, Gershon seconded, no objections]
3) Review open action items
3.1 ACTION: Gershon to investigate whether he can use a client's samples.
Gershon will assemble all the examples into the template for the TC
CONTINUED. Gershon reminded client, who is still awaiting legal OK.
3.2 ACTION: Gershon and Don will present the approved best practices on
indexing and Translation Memory as committee drafts for approval by the DITA
Technical Committee.
CONTINUED. Gershon to complete marking up in DITA XML and complete OASIS
customization and deliver to TC for review
Don asked Gershon to make new Wiki page with links to the latest drafts
of the Translation SC BPs for review.
3.3 ACTION: Don to raise glossary work item at the TC after the 1.1 draft to
see if it needs its own subcommittee.
JoAnn asked if we added this to 1.2.
Rodolfo suggested we take it off the 1.2 list, and rather use 3rd party
glossary markup that's supported well by ISO and LISA.
Andrzej agrees with Rodolfo. Mentioned that Kara submitted a proposal
for glossary.
COMPLETED.
3.4 ACTION: Andrzej will draft a preliminary statement of the acronyms issues for the
DITA 1.2 issues list.
COMPLETED.
3.5 ACTION: Rodolfo will continue to work on the Best Practice for XLIFF
3.6 ACTION: Gershon will prepare the multilingual and the other Best Practices in the OASIS
template for the TC approval.
3.7 ACTION: JoAnn will try writing the sort order addition to the indexing
Best Practice for review.
4) Returning business:
4.1 Review notes from Kara Warburton and Richard Ishida on Andrzej's acronym proposal.
Issue of acronyms for inflected language. Possible problem in typing the
acronym. Consider too much typing for authors. Consider problem of
translated text in the attribute.
Andrzej: Proposal is to use conref mechanism along with a new acronym element
to point to resolution text. The first time the acronym is used, display the
long form of the acronym with the short form in parentheses. Every subsequent
time the acronym is used, display only the acronym. The problem with DITA
is we don't know which topic will have the first use of the acronym.
One option for online rendering is to have the software generate a tooltip
on the acronym (where the tooltip displays the long form). For PDF, the
publishing software can determine whether this is the first usage of the
acronym or not. With inflected languages, the inflected form may provide
problems with the expanded form.
Robert suggested the conref document could have the parenthesized form
alongside the short form. This provides more information on how it's
translated.
JoAnn: Sometimes the acronyms get translated. Will this work for that?
Rodolfo: Robert's expanded and short suggestion will work well, since
the translator than has to deal with the translation of both acronym and
expansion, including whether to use an acronym or place the expansion in
parentheses, etc.
Notes from Kara Warburton:
Using the acronym itself as the id attribute is not a good idea since
it may not be unique. Many acronyms have multiple different expanded
forms, even within the same domain. For instance, in computing,
ACL can stand for both access control list, and application
connectivity link. When you are dealing with multiple domains,
there are likely to be more than two expanded forms.
Also, how does this relate to the <term> element that already
exists in DITA? An acronym is a type of term, so I would like to
see these two items handled together somehow, such as through a
"type" attribute on the <term> element, that attribute using one
of the values in TBX-lite.
Note: Kara is out of the office this week.
Andrzej has no problem accepting Kara's wording change.
Rodolfo disagrees with Kara and prefers Robert's suggestion. Kara's option
will require modification of the Open Toolkit and requires the creation
of rules for EACH language. Kara's suggestion will not work for every
language. It's better for the translator to do the translation, and not
to rely on the machine to handle the acronym automatically.
Discussion on Kara's proposal... Subcommittee participants are not in
agreement whether it's a good or bad suggestion.
Rodolfo prefers to have the translator control the entire phrase,
including the acronym and the parentheses. He is against relying on
the tool to resolve these.
Chris: I see where Kara is coming from, but Rodolfo is right in that
the processing tool would have to be language-specific to get the
punctuation and sequence of the full acronym correct.
ACTION: JoAnn asked Andrzej to add this statement to the document.
Notes from Richard Ishida:
I just skimmed this, and thought I should point out a couple more
things to consider. Note that acronyms also change in translation,
eg. NATO becomes OTAN in Spanish. Another good reason to avoid
using the acronym as the id.
Also, it would be useful to search the public w3c html mailing
lists (going back a few years) for discussions about acronyms and
abbreviations. Things you'll find there include discussions about
whether it makes sense to separate out acronyms and abbreviations
- ie. can people always decide which is which. And Web
Accessibility requirements that lean towards a need for a
pronunciation guide that is separate from the expanded form, eg.
for clarifying that CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory) is pronounced see-sail, not C.S.A.I.L.
Discussion on element for alternate text.
JoAnn suggested we add a method to add an element for pronunciation of
the acronym.
Don suggested linking to a glossary that's got the acronym and pronunciation
there.
JoAnn: Richard is referring to accessibility tools.
Don: If we provide it, is there an engine that knows what to do with it?
JoAnn suggested we look at W3C to see what they are talking about.
ACTION: JoAnn to write Richard with question about whether an
accessibility tool could process a pronunciation recommendation/clarification
today? i.e., are we talking about a problem that has a solution today or not?
Rodolfo: Following on to Kara's comments: there are some cases in
Spanish when there is no equivalent acronym in Spanish. Therefore we
cannot do what Kara suggests at composition time for first appearance,
since it won't make sense. Therefore the translator MUST control all this.
JoAnn: Could we write a processing tool to handle this?
Robert: Yes, that's easy. Though the translator could simply put the
same text in both acronym and expansion elements.
Chris reiterates that he's concerned there's no need for this.
JoAnn stated that this is the reason we'll ask Richard about it.
ACTION: Robert to send note out to Kara about our discussions.
--OUT OF TIME: Meeting adjourned at 9:00--
4.3 Discuss Rodolfo's proposed additions to the Indexing best practice.
4.4 Discussion of new issues to explore for the committee going forward.
5) New business:
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