Re: [docbook-apps] OT: How to translate DocBook documents into differentlanguages

[Joachim Ziegler <ziegler@mpi-sb.mpg.de>]

Hello Markus,

thank you for your quick response!

Markus Schütz wrote:
> The good news is that there are tools to accomplish your task, the bad 
> news is that they are not open source, but commercial software.
> The following ones have been proved to do the job well:
> - Trados Tag Editor by Trados (www.trados.com),
> - Transit by Star Transit (www.star-transit.com),

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any evaluation version of 
Trados/Transit for download.


> - XLIFF Editor by Heartsome (www.heartsome.net) - which is the only 
> Java-based and therefore platform-independent tool.

Thank you for this link. I've tried an evaluation version 
("xlfedit-lite"). I was playing around with it for some hours.

Unfortunately, I can't find any tutorial on that program, so to a big 
extent, I had to guess how to use this program. There is a manual, but 
it is surely not written for absolute beginners like me.

It seems that this program might be very useful for me, although there 
are some points I'm worried about:

1) I use external entities like this

<book><title>My First Book</title>
&chap1;
&chap2;
&chap3;
&appa;
&appb;
</book>

but XLIFF creates one big document from that. Ok, I could fix this by 
hand afterwards.


2) The editor expands all internal entity references. I do not know how 
to switch off this behaviour.

3) The editor treats some DocBook inline elements like <author> 
obviously as block elements. I do not know how to tell it the 
difference. Again, the manual is not very clear here.

Frankly speaking, I do not understand the handling of inline markup in 
the editor, nor its interaction with the underlying DTD.

4) The program sometimes crashes. :-)


Altogether, it seems that I'm just missing a good introductory text on 
how to use this program for producing a translation of a larger work.


Still another question: I need a good way to produce a pure txt-version 
of my DocBook document which can then be fed into a translation program.
Is there an easy way to do this? (OK, I could do some XSLT programming, 
but maybe someone has already come up with a solution.)

Greetings,
Joachim



-- 
Joachim Ziegler                       Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85
Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik    66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
Email: ziegler@mpi-sb.mpg.de          Tel.: (+49) 0681 9325-127