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Nick Klasovsky wonders: <<We have a large WinHelp system for an industrial
control operator interface that runs on Windows 2000 or XP. It was done in
RoboHelp WinHelp 9. We need to translate it from English to 7 other
languages. What's the best way to do this?>>
I can't speak to the _best_ way, but I've been doing this myself on a small
scale for a few years (English originals of about 60 topics translated into
French) with reasonable success. Translators can work directly in the Word
file without requiring RoboHelp; I rebuild the help file once they're done,
which I can do because I'm sufficiently fluent in French.
That won't necessarily work in your situation since you've got more
languages to deal with and probably larger help files. In your case, it's
probably most effective to find a translation agency skilled in doing the
work for you.
<<Our corporate translation team in Germany does not have RoboHelp, so
giving them the Word doc to translate is not satisfactory, since it does
nothing for the index or TOC, and the translators will probably end up
trashing the embedded coding anyway.>>
This is a training issue, and might be best handled by creating a simple
"how to work in files marked up in RoboHelp" guide. Hyperlinks are displayed
as text with a dotted underline, so you need to explain to the translator
that once a destination has been translated and given its own name, the
links must be updated to reflect that name. (The TOC entry for a topic title
is defined using a footnote, and you can edit it directly in that footnote.)
Similarly, index entries are defined using Word footnotes, and they can work
directly in the footnotes window to translate the index entries.
When you reopen the translated Word file in RoboHelp, it should mostly
rebuild the TOC for you. The approach I suggested is a bit kludgy, and for
larger and more complex projects such as yours, it's probably better to ask
the translators to work in RoboHelp. It shouldn't be too hard to find people
who have both the tools and the skill to do this work.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur. (Oh! Was I
speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips
out.)--Anonymous
