RE: [dita-translation] DITA SC Agenda Monday 12 2006

["Chris Wong" <cwong@idiominc.com>]

Looking at the ITS discussion on terms that you pointed out
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-its-20060518/#terms), I noticed that it
has some overlap with existing DITA markup (<term>) and proposals (#14,
glossary proposal). 

Just a general question here: the ITS recommendations are namespaced
additions to an existing XML document, whereas DITA has some existing
markup that achieves some subset of those recommendations. What end
result are we looking for? Do we replace existing DITA markup with ITS
equivalents? Do we introduce ITS markup into DITA as-is? 

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: Esrig, Bruce (Bruce) [mailto:esrig@lucent.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 9:03 AM
To: 'Andrzej Zydron'; JoAnn Hackos
Cc: dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org; Chris Wong; mambrose@sdl.com;
bhertz@sdl.com; Bryan Schnabel; charles_pau@us.ibm.com;
christian.lieske@sap.com; dpooley@sdl.com; dschell@us.ibm.com; Esrig,
Bruce (Bruce); fsasaki@w3.org; rfletcher@sdl.com; Howard.Schwartz;
Jennifer Linton; Peter.Reynolds@lionbridge.com; ishida@w3.org;
tony.jewtushenko@productinnovator.com; KARA@CA.IBM.COM;
ysavourel@translate.com; 'Erik Hennum'
Subject: RE: [dita-translation] DITA SC Agenda Monday 12 2006

Apologies in advance for writing in such a heavy style ... I'm catching
up on background thoughts that many of you already know and have
discussed, and then talking about implications for DITA.

A shortest-possible response to Andrzej's example would be that it
appears that DITA source markup might need an explicit indicator for
case, for use in translations.

After reading the minutes and the ITS spec discussion of terminology
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-its-20060518/#terms ...

The terminology markup in the ITS spec permits but does not require term
references that are more nearly translation-invariant. Would there be
someone who could write a use case that could be added to the ITS spec.
The use case would be based on the ideas in the next paragraph(s) to
emphasize the best practice (when adequate supporting tools are
available)?

The infoTermRef and alternatively the infoTermRefPointer attributes
could best be used to point to locations where all information about a
term occurrence appears:
 - the surface text of the occurrence in various languages and cases
 - definitions of the term in various languages
 - abbreviations and initialisms associated with the term

The prevalent practice in DITA of making termbases that you can conref
from does not result in translation-invariant source, as Andrzej's
example shows.

A best practice for DITA language design would be to abandon the view
that the author can specify the term occurrence, and instead ask the
author to specify how the processing system should build the term
occurrence. Because of the familiarity of the simpler approach (authors
specify the terms that they would like to have used), the best practice
might need to be done in a language extension, leaving the existing
mechanisms for use by projects that don't mind language-dependent
source.

This is consistent with the principle that XML is founded on markup with
meaning. With regard to terminology, we should be using a pointer, not
the surface form of a term, as an identifier for the intended sense. We
then need further support in order to convert from the intended sense to
the desired surface form.

The DITA markup that builds an occurrence in an arbitrary target
language would specify what part of an entry in an idealized term base
to extract, such as the surface text of the term, in a particular case,
in a particular language. Or alternatively, the abbreviation or
initialism associated with the term on a particular project, in a
particular case, in a particular language.

Best wishes,

Bruce Esrig

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrzej Zydron [mailto:azydron@xml-intl.com]
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 3:11 AM
To: JoAnn Hackos
Cc: dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org; cwong@idiominc.com;
mambrose@sdl.com; bhertz@sdl.com; Bryan Schnabel;
charles_pau@us.ibm.com; christian.lieske@sap.com; dpooley@sdl.com;
dschell@us.ibm.com; esrig@lucent.com; fsasaki@w3.org; rfletcher@sdl.com;
Howard.Schwartz; Jennifer Linton; Peter.Reynolds@lionbridge.com;
ishida@w3.org; tony.jewtushenko@productinnovator.com; KARA@CA.IBM.COM;
ysavourel@translate.com
Subject: Re: [dita-translation] DITA SC Agenda Monday 12 2006



Hi Everybody,

The following is an example of the use of an inline conref that could
result in a grammatically incorrect target version of the sentence:

<p>Using a <term conref="termbase#e304bc"/><!-- hydraulic lift --> raise
the vehicle from the ground.</p>

Although this example would work perfectly well for non-inflected
languages such as English or French, it would produce ungrammatical text
for any inflected language that requires an instrumentive form such as
most Slavonic languages.

Best Regards,

AZ


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