Translate attribute

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Hi all,

As discussed on the call today, here is the article that mentions the
translate attribute (thanks to Paul Prescod for finding it seconds after
the discussion):
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/dita/index.jsp

It is way too much of an overview article for most on this list; the
relevant page is this one:
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/dita/transdtd.jsp

Essentially, the best practice is that the translate attribute should be
defaulted in the DTD or Schema. If my specialized doctype has an element
that is never translated, I can fix @translate to "no", or default to "no"
and allow authors to make exceptions. The translation tools can pick this
up from the doctype (or they can normalize the documents first), so that
the author never needs to see it.

The only time an author should set the translate attribute manually is when
the author knows that the current element goes against the norm. For
example, I could decide that the following phrase should never be
translated, even though all other phrases are translated:
<ph id="tc" translate="no">OASIS DITA Technical Committee</ph>

Alternatively, the article descirbes a <band> element that defaults to
translate="no". If an author really wanted to allow translation for a band
name, they could override the default:
<band translate="yes">The Doors</band>

This all depends on translation tools that check the attribute first, as
well as on architects to set defaults properly, and on authors to ignore
the attribute unless they have a reason to do otherwise.

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit