DITA not only supports i18n but has specific features to reduce the
translation management effort.
For instance:
You can identify terms that should not be translated "Tomcat", "Windows".
You can provide translations of phrases that are frequently used so they
do not get translated more than once. "Cancel", "Open for Business".
"This feature requires administrative privileges.", etc.
This also adds consistency in a single language and make customization
of labels easier. "This feature requires administrative privileges."
should not come up as "Administrative role required." or "You need admin
privs to do this." If you have decided to use "HST" to replace "VAT" on
a label, you only have to change one term to convert all of your docs.
You can create country, industry-specific or language-specific manuals
easily.
Ron
On 18/06/2015 7:44 PM, Paul Foxworthy wrote:
Hi Ron,
Up to a point I agree we should be planning for scalability and
success. I totally agree we should plan from the beginning for
internationalisation, and if a toolset doesn't support that, we should
avoid it.
I am strongly in favour of good logical markup, so that we can
generate a range of different destinations. DITA is one specific way
to achieve good logical markup, but not the only one.
DocBook *does* support i18n. For instance, the OpenStack project is
using DocBook. Their i18n efforts use the Transifex (transifex.com
<http://transifex.com>) online service, which is free for open source
projects. See https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/Translation.
The message you quoted was an Oracle employee assuming professional
tech writers and investing in commercial software like Oxygen. For
DITA to be viable for us, I would argue it must be usable by
developers with open source tools. We can't expect people to invest
any money in order to document OFBiz. Even with free tools, expecting
people to directly edit XML in Eclipse or whatever is a still a
barrier that will restrict contributions from non-developers. Maybe
that limitation is acceptable if the results will be good enough, but
"scalability" in theory is no good to us if nobody contributes in
practice.
I have not contributed one line of documentation to OFBiz, and I am
very familiar with IDEs and XML. So I am not the best person to judge
these things. I will be interested in the experience of people doing a
proof of concept. I will be very interested in the experience of
people who don't know much about XML.
I don't need to be persuaded that DITA is good, or that it produces
good results. I would like to explore whether or not it's *useable* by
non-specialists with a little knowledge and training.
Cheers
Paul Foxworthy
--
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email: [email protected]
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