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Subject: DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 27 August 2007



Gershon L Joseph
Director of Technology and Single Sourcing
Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd. 
Secretary, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Secretary, OASIS DITA Translation Subcommittee
Member, OASIS DocBook Technical Committee
 
+972-8-974-1569 (direct)
+972-57-314-1170 (mobile)
http://www.tech-tav.com


DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 27 August 2007
(Recorded by Gershon L Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>)

The DITA Translation Subcommittee met on Monday 27 August 2007
at 8:00 PT for 70 minutes.

1)  Roll Call

    Present: 
        JoAnn Hackos (chair)
        Gershon Joseph
        Nick Rosenthal
        Don Day
        Rodolfo Raya
        Kara Warburton
        Robert Anderson

2)  Accept Minutes from 13 August 2007
    (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/TranslationSubcommittee)

    Accepted by acclamation.
 
3)  Review open action items

    3.1 ACTION: Gershon to investigate whether he can use a client's samples.
        Gershon will assemble all the examples into the template for the TC; 
        need to add the examples to the Multilanguage Best Practice.

        CONTINUED.

    3.2 ACTION: Gershon and Don will present the approved best practices on
        indexing, conrefs, Translation Memory, and multilanguage as committee 
        drafts for approval by the  DITA Technical Committee.

        CONTINUED.

        JoAnn downloaded the Word template for OASIS white papers again. The previous 
        template was completely corrupted.

        Don brought up the option of developing stylesheets for DITA to produce
        the OASIS white paper style.

        Decision to try using the new OASIS Word template.

        Rodolfo offered to take a stab at cleaning it up.

        ACTION: JoAnn to create a zip with the source content and latest Word template
        and post to the list. Whoever has time to try cleaning up the files will 
        do so.

    3.5 ACTION: Rodolfo will continue to work on the Best Practice for XLIFF

        CONTINUED.

    3.6 ACTION: JoAnn will try writing the sort order addition to the indexing
        Best Practice for review.

        CONTINUED.

    3.7 ACTION: JoAnn will contact Richard Ischida to get clarification on the 
        need for a pronunciation  element  or attribute for the acronym proposal.

        CONTINUED.

4)  Returning business:

    4.1 Discuss the changes to Andrzej and Rodolfo's acronym proposal. See the 
        Wiki below. Consider Andrzej's additions in response to Kara's comments. 
        See Deborah's email.
        (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/TranslationSubcommittee)

        Discussion on the fact we need to refine the requirements for this proposal.

        JoAnn: What's the difference between acronym and abbreviation?

        Rodolfo: If you decide to expand the abbreviation the first time, it's 
        no different from acronym.

        Kara: DITA is not just an authoring format, it's a CMS format. As such, 
        we've been experienceing a critical requirement to handle texts that 
        are smaller than phrases. Acronyms and abbreviations are a special set;
        proper nouns, short forms, synonyms are other special cases. This acronym 
        proposal touches on areas that are not just for acronyms. I'm concerned 
        we will have only partial coverage with this acronym proposal.

        Don: Maybe this should be under the terminologist umbrella.

        JoAnn: We were interested in the acronym proposal because many organizations 
        were wanting to use conref as a mechanism to provide an acronym, to provide 
        the flexibility to change or move the acronym in and out of a master
        list. I thought abbreviations might work the same way. Though many publishing 
        groups probably dont need a well-defined list of abbreviations, where they 
        do need a well-defined list of acronyms. So we have this issue of needing 
        flexibility in creating and adding acronyms to text and having flexibility 
        in online presentation. My point of view was the issue of conref and online 
        presentation.

        Rodolfo: When Andrzej and I started working on this proposal, we based 
        it on multiple DITA files with conrefs everywhere. We wanted a mechanism 
        to publish acronyms for publishing acronyms (expanding first use) and for 
        translation.

        JoAnn: Second part (aside from publishing) is can we provide a way to deal 
        with the first instance effectively and then provide a mechanism that makes 
        the translation of acronyms straight-forward? Especially in cases where 
        the acronym is not translated.

        Don: We must give the TC an action to comment on the requirements document 
        for the acronym proposal.

        Discussion...

        JoAnn expressed concern whether combining acronyms and these other terms 
        is good for the general documentation community for managing terminology. 

        JoAnn: Many users will be using a terminology database or tool. I don't 
        see the handling of acronyms coming from a terminology point of view. They 
        are not all usually stored inline in the document. Who is our audience 
        at this point for the DITA spec? I think we're talking about 2 audiences: 
        terminologist + publishing. There is some overlap. It was designed to make 
        people aware that conreffing an acronym leads to problems in translation 
        that people were not aware of. Moving into the terminology realm is a whole 
        new layer of complexity beyond our previous goal of making users aware of 
        issues they could hit in translation. The term variant is a huge jump.
        Will publications people looking at DITA understand the point?

        Don: Our input from stakeholders should include both architect and publishing 
        sides.

        Kara: The proposal I put forward is not from a terminoloty perspective, 
        it's from a translation perspective. Translators need a well-formed context 
        for the translation. We have to extract terms for tranlation in order to 
        pretranslate terminology before the documentation is ready to be translated. 
        All we are asking is for the writer to identify "this is a sentence that 
        is meaningful to this term". This is new territory in content management 
        that authors need to be aware of. Markup of terminolgy and inline definitions 
        is new, and it's important we support this in DITA.

        Don suggested an action for us to make certain the wording in which we 
        frame the scope of this requirement document sets the background that Kara 
        just set. How big do we want this idea to go? I'd like to put the requirements 
        in front of the TC tomorrow and take a week to make sure everyone has had 
        a chance to address the scope of the requirements, and then another week 
        to work on the actual requirements.

        JoAnn: Is our scope definition ready to take to the TC?

        Robert: We have to agree on requirements. I feel the next step is to ask 
        the TC to proposse requirements. We should ask the TC to add requirements 
        to the list.

        JoAnn: I'd like to at least go and explain what and why the term variant 
        is there.

        ACTION: Robert to edit the list of requirements to clarify ahead of tomorrow's 
        TC meeting so that the TC can be asked to review and add/modify reqs as needed.

-- over time; meeting adjourned --

    4.2 Continue discussion of Deborah Pickett's thoughts on the ruby attribute
 
    4.2 Discuss Rodolfo's  proposed additions to the Indexing best practice. 
        http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/TranslationSubcommittee

        DEFERRED to next meeting.

5)  New Business

    5.1 Comment on the W3C working draft.

        A W3C working draft document entitled "Best Practices for XML 
        Internationalization" was published last week.

        It includes a section on DITA at

        http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xml-i18n-bp-20070628/#dita

        DEFERRED to next meeting.

    5.2 Continue consideration of the ruby attribute
        Some discussion has begun on the yahoo group about the ruby attribute. 
        See Deborah Pickett's notes.


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