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Subject:Re: WinHelp & Japanese From:Jo Francis Byrd <jbyrd -at- byrdwrites -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 01 Feb 2001 11:33:45 -0600
Mick,
I was involved with a project of this type. It so happens we were using RoboHelp
(the latest version of that time, 7, I think, though it's up to 9.1, now; this
was back in '98). There is a Japanese-language version of RH, made by XLSoft, I
believe. I wrote the English-language version of the help. A Japanese native did
the translating. I tried, as much as possible, to adapt the Japanese-language
template to match the English-language version. You CANNOT use the
English-language template with the Japanese version, Word blows up BIG TIME.
Since the coding for the application was in English, we didn't have to worry too
much about the code for the help. We made it VERY clear the translators were NOT
to touch the #, +, > and ! footnotes in the .doc and .rtf files, they were to
translate only the text, they could translate the $ and K footnotes. As far as I
know, it went well - or reasonably well.
One thing you do have to keep in mind when coordinating this sort of thing,
something I came to realize during this project. The English language and the
Japanese language have NOTHING in common (besides the obvious of being a
language which is both spoken and written). The two languages belong to very
different language families. We use entirely different characters for our
languages. As a consequence, I suspect we use different thought processes to
come to the same conclusion.
So, yeah, it can be done, it just takes careful coordination.
Good luck!
Jo Byrd
Mick Robinson wrote:
> Can't find this in the archives...
> I've been asked about translating a large (1200+ page) WinHelp file into
> Japanese. We've translated an earlier version of this file into European
> languages without major problems. However we've never translated into Japanese
> (although we have translated the program resources, which had a few problems).
> Anybody got any experience of this? Is it possible even?
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