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Our presenter was Joe Gaba of Lucent Technology, so those of you
who hate getting info from vendors, pls hit delete now!
One insight Joe offered that I thought was, well, insightful, was
*finding out what your translation markets want* before you translate the
whole manual. He came up with some #s: Translating the whole manual to
onelanguage cost $27K; translating the necessary stuff, $2.7K....
He talked about problems with, not the info, but the
*tone*--American tone problematic in other cultures...talked about being
able to achieve simultaneous internation'l releases by getting involvement
*early* in the documentation process...
Also, when choosing software...for reasons that I didn't quite
get, translating MS Word docs was someting like $17 a page vs about $70
for Interleaf...
My apologies to those of you who know this stuff...for the rest of
you, Joe, being a salesman, is reachable through joegaba -at- coax -dot- net
I liked the presentation. I thought he knew what he was talking
about, as did another member with a pretty good BS detector...
And I'll be catching up with private emails over weekend....
Mary
Mary Durlak Erie Documentation Inc.
East Aurora, New York (near Buffalo)
durl -at- buffnet -dot- net