Now may be the time to express (reinforce) XLIFF as a best practice for translating DITA

[bryan.s.schnabel@tektronix.com]

[call for interested folks to consider a new education push]

Hello,

It seems like a number of recent events have conspired to make me think this is a great time for a concerted effort to remind people of that they might be leaving money on the table if they neglect to take advantage of XLIFF for translating DITA topics. 

Several incidents have reinforced this feeling for me. Here's a recent event that I can share, that nicely expresses the point . . . 

I was recently at the excellent DITA Europe 2009 event, watching an excellent presentation about a very impressive, large authoring group who had recently migrated from unstructured Frame to DITA, and implemented an impressive CMS. I was super excited as they showed one success after another, and how they really put all the parts of DITA and CMS to great use . . . right up until the end when they talked about translation. They listed all the things you should do when selecting an LSP. My heart sunk a little when they expressed that "you need to pick a vendor that can really understand and process DITA - and they must prove to you that they can manage hundreds or thousands of topics at a time." I thought, wow, this is a perfect example of where XLIFF can save the day (or at least save them money and time-to-market).

The really cool thing is that now, more than ever, DITA is not just an interesting technology on the horizon. There are now honest-to-goodness implementations up-and-running. There are real groups, saving real cycles and money, with real use cases to examine. I think now is the time to get the *smart* ones to embrace this best practice: use XLIFF to translate DITA!

I think there would be interest on the XLIFF TC side to renew this effort. Who's for it on the DITA side? (I wonder if there's a provision for sharing an SC between TCs?)

Thanks,

Bryan