Hi Mollye,
Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately, my client doesn't know what he
wants other than to reduce the twice yearly expense of printing the Spanish
version of this book. I maintain this manual in FrameMaker and the gal who
maintains the Spanish version works in PageMaker. I think my client needs
to consider a new vendor for the Spanish version. Here are a couple of
examples of why I think this: She has no experience with graphic formats,
so she cuts and pastes graphics (the hardcopy version!) on which she has
overlain the translated callouts. She sends these plus her native PageMaker
files to the printer and the printer spends hours of table time getting
them ready for prepress. I suggested to this gal that she purchase Adobe
Acrobat and send the PDF files to the printer. This she did. Now she thinks
that Acrobat is her native application and wants to know how to make the
changes in the PDF file. <sigh>
I suggested to my client that we might convert the doc to FrameMaker and
have a "professional" manage revisions to the Spanish version. That would,
at first glimpse, be a better idea than having my FrameMaker version
translated to Spanish. So my query is really just a preliminary first pass
at what I might need to consider if I make a recommendation to my client.
Structured Frame is not a practical option for this book.
I have no idea what the doc looks like in PageMaker. The FrameMaker
template is excellent. Assuming that there is good mapping correlation, is
there a PageMaker-to-FrameMaker conversion tool that you know of?
I've never heard the term "translation memory," so I don't know what to do
with your comments that used it. Can you explain it a bit more?
Thanks!
Carol
At 05:28 PM 6/26/2006 -0500, Mollye Barrett wrote:
Does the client really want the translation vendor to do the conversion?
Perhaps what they're looking for is a migration plan for converting the
PageMaker to Frame and then working with translation memory. Are all the
languages they require supported by Frame? Do they have a strong template
and/or EDD?
We've worked with many conversions and the gotchas are always, it depends.
The best projects are those with high stylesheet integrity on both sides of
the conversion (of course, these are few and far between!). I'd consider get
them into a structured Frame world, convert PageMaker PDFs to XML and,
import the XML to Frame. A good EDD will handle the formatting and the
client will have minimal upkeep on future revisions.
If they have an existing PageMaker translation memory (full of formatting
tags), their translator may be challenged with this change. As we all know,
there's more to translations than handing off an input file. This is a
strategic decision that carries a significant cost and there are many places
the project could go wrong. So, I'd map out every step of the conversion and
the translation processing before even discussing the process with the
client.
There are lots of good conversion resources and many excellent translators.
Sounds like the client needs someone that can orchestrate the process!
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