Sorry if I was not clear on this.
The books I am talking about are product manuals, about three-four separate
books that are cross-linked, olinked, and modular, all the bells and whistles
that DocBook offers to single-source technical documents. It also gets updated
and somewhat reorganized 3-4 times a year, as new versions of the product are
released.
All of this is currently in English, but we will get it translated to other
languages. I am unsure what is the best way to handle it so that after the
translation, for example, olinks will keep working and point to the proper place
in the translated document, and so on.
I imagine that one way would be to put the source text and the translations into
the same file (for every file we have), and then create different versions of
the top-level book element with different lang attributes. But then if we have
to manage 3+ different languages in the same file, this would be a pain, and it
would also require lots of extra work to merge back the different translations
to the same file when we get it back from the translator.
Another way might be to duplicate every file into separate language directories,
and modify our build scripts to handle them "properly". Here I am not sure if
the olink database and similar things will work properly (but maybe I am just
being afraid of shadows).
Robert
On 07/18/2012 11:05 PM, Bob Stayton wrote:
When you say "Multilanguage DocBook documents", I think of single book
containing both the master language and the translations. Or are the different
languages in different books? If they are mixed together in one book, then you
will have to modify xml:id values in the translated content to avoid duplicate
ids, and that will affect your cross referencing as well.
Bob Stayton
Sagehill Enterprises
[email protected]
----- Original Message ----- From: "Fekete Róbert" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 11:47 AM
Subject: [docbook-apps] Multilanguage DocBook documents - best practices needed
Hi Everyone,
I am in need for your experiences and advice about handling multilanguage
DocBook documents (that is, documents in a master language and its
translations).
We have a set of DocBook documents (books and articles) that are heavily
modular (consisting of 50+ source files), and rich with xrefs, olinks, and
screenshots. Currently we have three output formats, but we are planning to
add new formats as well. Now these documents has to be translated - currently
to one language, possibly to more in the future.
Another gotcha is, that this is is not a one-time translation, but should be
maintained and updated about 3-4 times a year with the changes of the original
document. (We do use version control.)
So my question is, do you have any recommendations on how to handle and manage
the translation and multilanguage building of such a document set? What is the
"best" way to organize the source files? I am looking for a solution that, for
example, minimizes the risk of breaking links in the translated versions, and
also does not require much post-processing on the translated files (except for
generating the output files).
Also, since the translation will be done by an external translation agency
(using computer-aided translation tools), storing the source text and the
translations in the same file is not really feasible.
Any comment, tip, or recommendation is most welcome.
Kind Regards,
Robert Fekete
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