Hello Sivia, Having managed L10N to both Asian and European languages for 10 years, I can sympathize with your L10N manager. Frame does not offer an in-depth change tracking facility as Word does, and for his purposes, I think you need more than just change bars that show only the lines where changes have been made.
To solve his problem, you need a content management system or at least a version control system for the FM docs, online help, release notes, etc. This will allow better trackjing of changes to the docs and help. A tool such as MS Visual Source Safe or Rational Clear Case, which may already be in use at your company by Engineering, allows you to check-in and check out documents. If the files are ASCII, these tools can do a diff on the contents to show what the changes are. Obvioiusly, this does not apply to the binary FM files, but if you save them to text and do diff on the text files, you can highlight the actual text changes and provide only the changed text to the L10n vendor. This saves considerable time and cost. Note that your L10N vendor can also do that with the TM. The only problem with having the vendor do it is that you have less control and it costs a lot more. You can also use Trados to do this, and that actually is probably the best tool for the jobl but you would have to buy it and learn to use it, while your company probably alreay has a version contol system in house. I also understand the needs of your company. Simultaneous delivery of localized and source-language documents is desirable, but requires a lot of advance planning and close cooperation between engineering/development, tech pubs, and localization. Localization should begin with the Beta docs and software, and the L10N vendor should use a TM so that changes can easily be made. In addition, Engineering must agree that the scope of any changes after Beta will not require major changes to the docs and help. Remember, L10N is expensive, especially if you are localizing to multiple languages, and particularly if you are localizing to Japanese, any scandinavian language, or any language that uses Cyrillic fonts (Russian, for example) and similar languages, and possibly cost more if you are starting with Hebrew. Your L10N manager may find some useful information in a book called Localization and Framemaker. You can find the book on the net at http://www.bapmf.net/resources/2000_localization_FM/locandfm.pdf. Hope this helps. Diane Gaskill ======================== -----Original Message----- From: framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink....@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com]On Behalf Of Sivia Atar Sent: Thursday, November 24, 2005 12:46 AM To: 'framers at lists.frameusers.com' Subject: Document Localization Process? Hi, At Mercury we write our source product documentation in FrameMaker and we produce approximately 35,000 pages of documentation each year. Most of our documentation is translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese and we're now also starting to translate into some European languages. Mercury wants to reach the point where it can ship localized versions of its products at the same time as the English Versions. Our Localization Manager says that his team cannot efficiently track changes to our FrameMaker files. This results in delays and makes it difficult to keep translation costs at a reasonable level. I would like to hear how other companies manage the process of localizing documentation (workflow, communication, and tools). Thanks in advance for any information you can provide. ____________________________ Sivia Atar, Documentation Infrastructure Leader, satar at mercury.com direct 972.3.539.9288 fax 972.3.553.1617 19 Shabazi Street, Yehud, Israel 56100 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20051124/f17abeaf/attachment.html
