draft best practices for using DITA in a translation context

[Nancy P Harrison <nancyph@us.ibm.com>]

Summary of Best Practices discussion
on 10Apr2006

We need to present a proposal, for best
practices relative to translation, to the main DITA TC.

Best practices fall into various categories:
        for
authors                -
base of these are DITA topic-oriented writing guidelines
         
               
      - others are more operational
        for
implementors        - setting up stylesheets
and specializations to work consistentlyl for translated and multilingual
content
        for
vendors                -
creating processing that plays well with multilingual content and content
to be translated.



Sample Best practice scenarios and
requirements
Sample 1. Indexing Guideline Use case
        author
- inserts index entries immendiately after the start tag of the element
containing the range of text to be indexed
        processing
- when index entries are encountered, determines the location / scope of
the index refernece as the parent element of the index  

Sample 2  Container items around
multilingual bulleted lists
        author
- sets xml:lang attribute appropriately for each list item
        processor
- produces output appropriate to xml:lang setting for each list item

Sample 3 Sorting multilingual content
(in and index, for example)

Sample 4 Generation of translation style
sheets (e.g. in English, book titles are often displayed in italic; Japanese
has no italic, so book titles are displayed using open/closed corner brackets)
        implementor
or vendor issue

Sample 5 Storage of boilerplate text
        Boilerplate
text is often kept in one or more .dita files used as a source for conrefs
across a document set. How hsould authors / implementors / processors deal
with multiple sets of boilerplate files automatically?  DocBook names
every file containing generated text with a language entension (two letter
only), including English.  A similar scheme, but probably with locale,
not just country, would work for DITA documents as well.

 


____
Nancy Harrison
IBM Rational Software
Phone: 781-676-2535
nancyph@us.ibm.com