OASIS DITA Translation Subcommittee Agenda -- 21 July 2008

Hello Translation SC Members,

Please find the agenda for the 21 July 2008 meeting on the Subcommittee wiki

http://wiki.oasis-open.org/dita/TranslationSubcommittee

I have also copied the agenda below. Please be certain to review the material sent us by Felix Sasaki from the ITS working group. I have also included Andrzej's proposal for the OAXAL TC as an attachment.

JoAnn

8:00-8:05am Roll call PDT

1) Roll Call

2) Approve minutes from previous business meeting:

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.

Awaiting legal OK; Gershon is selecting items for use in the Best Practice. Decision to submit the BP to the TC for review without these items and we'll update them after Gershon gets approval from his client, since it's going to take a while.

3.2 ACTION: Rodolfo and Bryan Schnabel will continue to work on the Best Practice for XLIFF

CONTINUED.

Business:

4.1 Final review of the acronym/glossary best practice document.

JoAnn incorporated Kara's edits and reviewed the entire document. A few questions remain in the text. Please review and be prepared to discuss. We need some clarification on the composition tools item.

4.2 Plans for the XLIFF/DITA joint webinar.

See the attached summary document.

4.3 Continued discussion of the translate attribute and “partial” translations

Recall that DITA processing does not act on the xml:lang attribute.

See notes:

“Many elements in DITA include a translate attribute. It has a value of yes or no. We've been using it in a way similar to the filterable attributes (platform, audience, otherprops, etc.). Before sending our files out for translation, we remove all the content that is marked as translate="no".

As an aside, I'm surprised that the translate attribute isn't filterable like audience.

Anyway, translate yes/no is good for simple situations, but for more complex situations it fails. For example, if you have a topic that is translated into some, but not all languages (a "partial" translation), you can't set translate="no" on it, since, in some cases, it should be translated.”

Note from Felix Sasaki

you could use a mechanism like ITS "Localization Note" for this. See the definition at http://www.w3.org/TR/its/#locNote-datacat

and some BP about it at

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#DevLocNote

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#AuthLocNote

in your case having an attribute "locNote" which qualifies what kind of "partial" translation is needed could solve the problem.

Note that I'm not necessarily proposing to use ITS "Localization Note"

natively, but I'm only pointing you to a potential approach to solve the issue.

4.4 Discussion of information from Felix Sasaki

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group has published a Group Note of Best Practices for XML Internationalization. This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-xml-i18n-bp-20080213/

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-xml-i18n-bp-20080213/xml-i18n-bp.pdf

(reader-friendly PDF)

Section 5 of the document "ITS Applied to Existing Formats"

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-xml-i18n-bp-20080213/#Modularization

contains a section about ITS and DITA

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-xml-i18n-bp-20080213/#dita

Thanks a lot to the people on his list who gave feedback on drafts on this section, and this document in general.

Felix

5) New business:

Do we continue this subcommittee after we complete the three remaining best practices documents: acronyms, glossary, multi-language?

9:00 Adjourn

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