RE: [dita] Issue for unifying acronyms and glossary

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

Erik,

Please include the Translation SC in these emails. Everyone on the SC has a voice.

 

What happened to the expanded form? We actually need everything that is in our original proposal. Each item has a distinct purpose. Remember that under no circumstances can translators change the XML.

 

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

 

 

---

From: Erik Hennum [mailto:ehennum@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 10:19 AM
To: JoAnn Hackos
Cc: Andrzej Zydron; dita@lists.oasis-open.org; Gershon L Joseph; Ogden, Jeff; Kara Warburton
Subject: RE: [dita] Issue for unifying acronyms and glossary

Hi, Gershon and JoAnn:

I agree entirely that it would be good to take a little more time with this. We really don't want to rush in something that will create problems for years to come.

I'm wondering if the following refinements would improve the integrated proposal for the minimalist term referencing use cases (including acronym referencing):

* Make <glossdef> optional.
* Make <glossPartOfSpeech> optional (assumed to default to noun if not specified).
* Move <glossSurfaceForm> to <glossBody> and specialize from <p> on the grounds that the surface form will never have usage or linguistic properties; ie, it's better to treat the surface form as a property of the preferred form of the term rather than as an alternate form.

That allows minimalist declarations of terms like the following:

<glossgroup id="carterms">
<title/>

<glossentry id="abs">
<glossterm>ABS</glossterm>
<glossBody>
<glossSurfaceForm>Anti-lock Braking System (ABS)</glossSurfaceForm>
</glossBody>
</glossentry>

... minimalist glossentry declarations for other terms ...

</glossgroup>

Note that the acronym is represented as a 
glossterm. That handles the case where translation workbench software isn't able 
to change elements -- that is, the translator doesn't change the element. As 
specified in the current integrated proposal, references to the abs topic via 
keyref will resolve to <glossterm> text in most cases but to the 
<glossSurfaceForm> text where the more complete form is 
appropriate.

The best practice for glossentries would be much more 
complete similar to the following (where translation software can modify 
markup):

<glossgroup id="carterms">
<title>Car terminology</title>

<glossentry id="abs">
<glossAcronym>ABS</glossAcronym>
<glossdef>A brake technology that minimizes skids.</glossdef>
<glossBody>
<glossSurfaceForm>Anti-lock Braking System (ABS)</glossSurfaceForm>
<glossPartOfSpeech value="noun"/>
<glossAlt>
<glossFullForm>Anti-lock Braking System</glossFullForm>
</glossAlt>
</glossBody>
</glossentry>

... best practice glossentries for other terms ...

</glossgroup>

Such best practices could be enforced by 
constraints. 

That still leaves the case where someone wants to create 
precise terminology declarations but has translation software that can't handle 
markup changes. One possibility would be to identify that the term is a 
preferred term with <glossterm> but also identify the term as an acronym 
with the <glossAcronym> element in the <glossAlt> section. For that 
approach to work, processors would have to detect the duplication:

<glossgroup id="carterms">
<title>Car terminology</title>

<glossentry id="abs">
<glossterm>ABS</glossterm>
<glossdef>A brake technology that minimizes skids.</glossdef>
<glossBody>
<glossSurfaceForm>Anti-lock Braking System (ABS)</glossSurfaceForm>
<glossPartOfSpeech value="noun"/>
<glossAlt>
<glossAcronym>ABS</glossAcronym>
</glossAlt>
<glossAlt>
<glossFullForm>Anti-lock Braking System</glossFullForm>
</glossAlt>
</glossBody>
</glossentry>

... compromise glossentries for other terms ...

</glossgroup>

Does that scale from term referencing to 
glossary publishing to terminology capture for automated text 
analysis?

Do people see issues with that 
approach?


Thanks,


Erik 
Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com

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

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

12/18/2007 08:25 AM

To	"Gershon L Joseph" <gershon@tech-tav.com>, Erik Hennum/Oakland/IBM@IBMUS, <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>
cc	"Andrzej Zydron" <azydron@xml-intl.com>, "Ogden, Jeff" <jogden@ptc.com>, "Kara Warburton" <KARA@CA.IBM.COM>
Subject	RE: [dita] Issue for unifying acronyms and glossary

I agree with Gershon,
This is not possible. We do not want translators who don’t know 
anything about DITA to add XML markup to anything.
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
joannhackos Skype
www.comtech-serv.com

---

From: Gershon L Joseph 
[mailto:gershon@tech-tav.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 
December 18, 2007 9:07 AM
To: Erik Hennum; dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: JoAnn Hackos; Andrzej Zydron; 
Ogden, Jeff; Kara Warburton
Subject: Re: [dita] Issue for 
unifying acronyms and glossary

Hi Erik,

I thought 
the surface form was intended to be used by the translators when a straight 
translation of the acronym is not appropriate for the target language.

I 
don't think option 2 is viable. It's not only way beyond current translation 
software, it's also going to be an issue for content management systems. They 
need to maintain a relationship between the source language and each 
translation, to identify what's changed in the source since the previous 
translation was done. I'm not aware of any CMS today that would support keeping 
track of changing markup in addition to the date of the source content.

I 
suspect we'll need more time to hash this one out. I can't see us getting to a 
final proposal today.

Gershon

----- Original Message ----
From: Erik Hennum 
<ehennum@us.ibm.com>
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Cc: JoAnn Hackos 
<joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com>; Andrzej Zydron 
<azydron@xml-intl.com>; Gershon L Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>; 
"Ogden, Jeff" <jogden@ptc.com>; Kara Warburton 
<KARA@CA.IBM.COM>
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12:02:57 
AM
Subject: [dita] Issue for unifying acronyms and glossary

Hi, Terminology Enthusiasts:

JoAnn and I had a useful conversation about the integrated acronym and glossary proposal:

http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/dita/download.php/26484/IssueGlossary12026.html

To refresh, the rationale for integrating the 
acronym and glossary proposals is to let user declare a term once for all 
terminology purposes instead of declaring the same term in different ways for 
glossary publication, text analysis dictionaries, and localization. The 
principle of defining a thing once and referring to it multiple times (also 
known as DRY or Don't Repeat Yourself) is generally accepted as important for 
good design in XML. In particular, it would be quite unfortunate if DITA had two 
different ways to declare and reference an acronym and its full form. 

While JoAnn is still reviewing the integrated proposal, the conversation 
identified one issue: how to handle cases where an acronym or abbreviation is 
the preferred term in the original language but doesn't exist or isn't the 
preferred term in the target language.

The current integrated proposal 
envisions that the translator will change the element for the preferred term 
from <glossAcronym> to <glossterm> -- in essence, creating an 
appropriate glossentry for the target language. Current translation workbench 
software, however, typically allows a translator to edit content but not to 
change elements. 

Two ways of handling this case occur to me:

1. 
Modify the currently specified expectations for linktext resolution behavior for 
glossary references to fall back to <glossFullForm> when the preferred 
term is empty and to <glossSurfaceForm> is not appropriate. This behavior 
would be a lightweight addition for processes that get the linktext from 
<glossSurfaceForm> in some contexts.

2. Expect that translation 
workbench software will distinguish terminology declaration markup from content 
and support translators in modifying term declaration markup to create a 
glossentry suitable for the locale but not in in changing the content markup. 

The second approach would seem to provide greater flexibility. For 
instance, the second approach can handle the case where an abbreviation is the 
preferred form in the original language and the abbreviation exists in the 
target language but the full form is preferred. Also, the second approach would 
be required if the term is included in a published glossary so the appropriate 
title is available to topic processing.

However, the second approach does 
require implementers of translation workbench software to add full support for 
markup editing, which is significantly different from support for content 
editing. (In passing, a multi-level <indexterm> provides another case 
where the number of levels and thus the markup might be appropriate to change in 
translation.)

It would be possible to specify both approaches as 
expectations. A translation workbench that supports locale-specific terminology 
declarations won't create cases that take advantage of the fallback processing; 
other translation workbenches will. 


Do you see other ways of 
resolving this problem?


Erik 
Hennum
ehennum@us.ibm.com