FW: [dita] RE: Impact of the Conref Best Practice

["JoAnn Hackos" <joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com>]

Hello Fellows -- 
Are any of you aware of practices within the tools like SDL and Idiom
that handle the grammar problems caused by conrefs? See Eric Severson's
note below. I'm not aware of anything in a "termbase" that handles this
problem. Can't see how it would.
JoAnn

JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400
Denver, CO 80215
303-232-7586
joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com
joannhackos Skype
www.comtech-serv.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Day [mailto:dond@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 7:18 AM
To: JoAnn Hackos
Subject: Re: [dita] RE: Impact of the Conref Best Practice

Hi, JoAnn. I'm looking at TC agenda items for today. I'm thinking that
Eric's question really belongs to the extended Translation SC list for
response. I don't see a great need to open anything up, but it would be
great if we can point to already existing practices that apply
regardless
of the XML vocabulary, and thus not have to modify our currently
approved
statement.

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Chair, IBM DITA Architects Board
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-244-2868 (home office)

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot


 

             "Severson, Eric"

             <Eric.Severson@fl

             atironssolutions.
To 
             com>                      JoAnn Hackos

                                       <joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com>,

             03/30/2008 07:48          "dita@lists.oasis-open.org"

             PM                        <dita@lists.oasis-open.org>

 
cc 
                                       "Martin, Ben"

 
<Ben.Martin@flatironssolutions.com> 
                                       , "Earley, Jim"

 
<Jim.Earley@flatironssolutions.com> 
                                       , "Hudson, Scott"

 
<Scott.Hudson@flatironssolutions.co 
                                       m>

 
Subject 
                                       [dita] RE: Impact of the Conref

                                       Best Practice

 

 

 

 

 

 





Good stuff. One question that just occurred to me: has anyone looked
specifically at the way "term bases" are typically used in solutions
like
SDL and Idiom?  I believe there are already recommended best practices
in
that context for solving the grammatical issues with aligning term
replacement across multiple languages.  Since DITA and conref don't
really
change that problem, it might be great to compare notes on this with the
translation vendors, and with the XLIFF/TMX/TBX standards folks, if you
haven't already.

All the best,
Eric

Eric Severson
Eric.Severson@FlatironsSolutions.com
303-542-2125

Flatirons Solutions Corporation

From: JoAnn Hackos [mailto:joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 30, 2008 7:49 AM
To: dita@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [dita] Impact of the Conref Best Practice

I thought you would be interested in learning that the Translation
Subcommittee's Best Practice on Conrefs is already making an impact.

____________
Final quote:
Thanks for sending this over. This is exactly what I was looking for so
this is very timely.

Do you know if any of the localization vendors are looking to enhance
their
applications to resolve conrefs? This might be another way to resolve
some
of the issues when using conrefs at the word level which many customers
do
for variables and product names.
__________
Original inquiry::
I was wondering if you have a draft copy of the the best practice
document,
Best Practice for Using the DITA CONREF Attribute for Translation. I was
wondering if it had information pertaining to a particular situation
we're
trying to resolve.
As you know, we have a few customers who are working with the
translation
vendors such as SDL and Idiom. The issue we are experiencing is that
when
customers use conrefs for managing variables this creates issues for the
TMS as the TMS does not resolve conrefs.
Here's what one particular customer has discovered:
We're run into a translation issue regarding our liberal use of conrefs
to
our variables file. After talking with SDL, it seems our use of
conref-ed
variables greatly complicates the linguist's job in determining how to
create gender-specific articles, plurals, and possesives. This
complication
raises the translation costs quite significantly.
Do you have any suggestions on how this type of conref use could be best
managed in DITA for translation?
____________________
Clearly, we need more Best Practices documents out there, an important
task
of the new Adoption Subcommittee.
JoAnn


JoAnn T. Hackos, PhD
President
Comtech Services, Inc.
710 Kipling Street, Suite 400
Denver CO 80215
303-232-7586
joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com