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I posted the below message last week, and I thought some of you might be
interested to know that we have found a solution to the problem.
Our translators use Trados, which has a utility called S-Tagger for Frame. I
can write my documents in FrameMaker and save them as MIF files. S-Tagger
for Frame converts MIF files to RTF or TXT files (your choice), which the
translators can use in Word (which is attached to Translator's Workbench, a
Trados interface). The translators use their Workbench to translate the file
in Word, then convert it back to MIF. The MIF files can then be reopened in
FrameMaker in the target language with all formatting intact.
For all future paragraph or sentence translations, I can simply mark them
with revision bars in the Frame file. And I can now use WebWorks Publisher
to convert the Frame files to HTML.
Thanks for all your suggestions,
Alyssa Fox
-----Original Message-----
From: Alyssa Fox [mailto:afox -at- zeh -dot- com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 10:25 AM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTS -dot- RAYCOMM -dot- COM
Subject: Translation issues
Task at hand:
I have 4 manuals to write for a new product - an installation guide, a
user's manual, and two system administrator manuals.
Issue:
All of these manuals must be translated into other languages. I am trying to
come up with a way of writing/organizing the manuals such that when
something changes or is updated, only that paragraph/section needs to be
re-translated, not the entire manual or chapter (for translation cost
reasons). Right now the plan is to have these manuals in HTML format. The
easiest solution to me would be to write them in FrameMaker, and convert
them to nice, clean, pretty HTML using WebWorks Publisher. However, the
catch is that the translators use Word, not FrameMaker. HTML converted from
Word is ugly. Another catch is that Word hard-codes its links, so if/when I
need to update cross-references, links will break.
Question:
Anyone have any ideas as to a tool or method for constructing these manuals
so that only a paragraph at a time will have to be re-translated?
Your help is greatly appreciated....
Alyssa Fox
afox -at- zeh -dot- com
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Alyssa Fox
Technical Writer
Zeh Graphic Systems, Inc. http://www.zeh.com
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