Dear mailinglist, I´m a technician in a bigger company. Our self developed products are sold all around the world. The draft documentation is made by our R&D department in english. Then an external translation office translate the documentation in several languages. Since our products are very technical and special, the quality delivered from the translation office is very poor. So natural speaking technicians from the subsidiaries must check and fix the documentation before release it. To reduce the work, the translation office uses a proprietary software which search for "same" sentences and words and suggest these words and sentences. It is nearly the same thing as the open source software OmegaT ( www.omegat.org) is doing but the proprietary software allows the fixing directly in the document.
Now I´m thinking about, if OpenOffice can help to develop a better tool to create and maintain documents with multilanguage support. I would like to describe my idea: You define one language as the "master" language. You create your documentation in this language with all your objects like text, charts, screenshots etc. as you would do today. But then you give each object an attribute saying, it must be translated or not if you want to create a documentation in a new language. To create a "child" document in a new language, you choose the "Master" document as base. The "only" job you have to do is to translate the marked objects directly in OpenOffice. OpenOffice helps with the translation job by offering recognized words or sentences which can be wrapped by one mouse-click. If the "master" document is changed (most of the time it will be a bug fix), you can see in all the child documents the change as new proposal "in the background". I think, multi-language documents are generated in a lot companies. The way, how such documents are created is very complex. You write your documentation with one software (OpenOffice Writer, Microsoft Word, Adobe Indesign, ...). Then you extract the sentences, translate the text and replace it in the original document (like OmegaT). If OpenOffice can offer tools which can support multilanguage documents, we have a very important feature companies want. What´s your opinion? Chynte
