DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 13 August 2007

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

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
 
+972-8-974-1569 (direct)
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http://www.tech-tav.com


DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 13 August 2007
(Recorded by Gershon L Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>)

The DITA Translation Subcommittee met on Monday 13 August 2007
at 8:00 PT for 60 minutes.

1)  Roll Call

    Present: 
        Don Day
        Gershon Joseph
        JoAnn Hackos (chair)
        Nick Rosenthal
        Andrzej Zydron

    Regrets:
        Rodolfo Raya
 
2)  Accept Minutes from 16 July 2007
    Accept Minutes from 30 July 2007

    Accepted by acclamation.
 
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; 
        need to add the examples to the Multilanguage Best Practice.

        CONTINUED. Awaiting legal OK; Gershon is selecting items for use in the 
        Best Practice.

        Decision to submit the BP to the TC for review without these items and we'll
        update them after Gershon gets approval from his client, since it's 
        going to take a while.

    3.2 ACTION: Gershon and Don will present the approved best practices on
        indexing, conrefs, Translation Memory, and multilanguage 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; now working with Mary McRae 
        to get these Documents in shape for a vote. 

        JoAnn has put some up on the SC homepage. JoAnn to put the remaining 
        documents up in time for next Tuesday's TC meeting for the TC to approve.

    3.5 ACTION: Rodolfo will continue to work on the Best Practice for XLIFF

        CONTINUED.

    3.6 ACTION: JoAnn will try writing the sort order addition to the indexing
        Best Practice for review.

        CONTINUED.

        Sort order in a translated index will be different from that of the 
        source language. Ordering of the collated sequence is best handled by 
        processing tools that are language-specific.
        (JoAnn wrote down the actual preferred text)

    3.7 ACTION: JoAnn will contact Richard Ischida to get clarification on the 
        need for a pronunciation  element  or attribute for the acronym proposal.

        IN PROGRESS -- note sent to Richard. JoAnn raised the issue at the OASIS 
        Symposium with  the Accessibility working group headed by Peter Brunet 
        from IBM. They are working on Accessibility for ODF. Suggested that DITA 
        be included in the accessibility discussions. No response as yet.

4)  Returning business:

    4.1 Discuss the changes to Andrzej and Rodolfo's  acronym proposal. See the  Wiki

        Andrzej: The final proposal should include the following elements:
        * full (expanded) form
        * short form (only if there in one)
        * first form (optional; used only if the first form requires a different 
        form than the expanded form.

        Andrzej suggested setting up a separate call with Kara and Rodolfo to
        refine this, since there were some objections that still need to be discussed.

        Don: There is a case of acronyms being used and rebranded, e.g. KFC. 
        OASIS is the same, since they've been trying to brand the acronym OASIS 
        and not what it means in any language. Such acronyms would not be 
        translated, and also would not have an expanded form.

        JoAnn: Some acronyms represent a brand name for which the original expanded 
        form is no longer used or is secondary to the acronym.

        ACTION: Andrzej to edit the "Purpose of the Acronym Proposal" page.

        ACTION: Andrzej, Rodolfo and Kara to meet offline to resolve all remaining 
        conflicts to come up with a consensus proposal. Andrzej to update the proposal
        on the Wiki following the offline meeting so the SC can discuss the latest 
        proposal at our next meeting.
 
    4.2 Discuss Rodolfo's  proposed additions to the Indexing best practice. 
        http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/TranslationSubcommittee

        DEFERRED to next meeting.

5)  New Business

    5.1 Comment on the W3C working draft.

        A W3C working draft document entitled "Best Practices for XML 
        Internationalization" was published last week.

        It includes a section on DITA at

        http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xml-i18n-bp-20070628/#dita

        DEFERRED to next meeting.

    5.2 Begin consideration of the ruby attribute

        Some discussion has begun on the yahoo group about the ruby attribute. 
        See Deborah Pickett's notes.
        
        Andrzej: There already is a W3C namespace for Ruby. 

        Gershon asked whether the need for Ruby is being driven by real-life
        projects or just a theoretical exercise. He felt the SC discussed Ruby before
        and decided not to support it explicitly in DITA. We should not revisit unless
        there is significant user pressure to do so.

        Discussions, including that W3C has a Ruby namespace and we should just let
        DITA add support for namespaces and then the standard W3C namespace could be 
        used with <foreign> without any need to modify the DITA spec.

        Andrzej: Ruby is just a way to mark up pronunciation, and using it for acronyms
        is misuse of the Ruby attribute.

        Further discussion...

        The SC reached consensus that there is no need to address the Ruby attribute
        at this time.