Re: [docbook-apps] Best practice for multilanguage Docbook?

["Bob Stayton" <bobs@sagehill.net>]

Hi Mathieu,
I don't think there is a single best practice because different people have different 
requirements.  If it is a single document and you are handling the translation, then a 
single multi-language source document and profiling would be fine.  If you have lots 
of documents and/or many languages, a different approach might be more efficient. 
Further description of your requirements might generate a more detailed response from 
the list.

One question is whether the document will need to be maintained, that is, updated with 
new information periodically. Each update will require retranslation, and the goal of 
the management system should be to minimize the cost of translation by minimizing the 
number of words to be retranslated.

I've seen systems that break up the original language source document into modular 
sections, which are kept under source control. Modules are submitted to the 
translation service(s) as needed, based on a comparison of timestamps of the source 
and translated files. Someone should review the modules before submission to ensure 
real content changed, not just punctuation or product names that could be updated by 
you.   Also, most translation services maintain translation memories, which means only 
changed content within a module will have to be retranslated, not the whole module.  I 
don't think translation memories would work with a mixed language source document.

Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
bobs@sagehill.net


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mathieu Malaterre" <mathieu.malaterre@gmail.com>
To: "DocBook Apps" <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 10, 2011 3:31 AM
Subject: [docbook-apps] Best practice for multilanguage Docbook?


> Hi,
>
>  I am looking for help/suggestion on the following issue: what is the
> best practice for writing a multilanguage docbook document ?
>  docbook support the lang attribute in all elements, so I could use
> the profile mechanism to select generation of a target language based
> on that (*).
>  However looking at the implementation in publican (**), they have
> preferred the 'pot' mechanism.
>
> Any comments/feedback on that ?
> -- 
> Mathieu
>
> (*) http://www.mail-archive.com/docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org/msg03098.html
> (**) https://fedorahosted.org/publican/
>
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