Gosh, Amedee, this sounds like a nightmare - I'm not surprised you are two
versions behind!

I think your first priority is to get proper resourcing for the translation.
You need people with the right technical background, and not trying to do
this part-time around other activities. They should be maintaining
cross-language glossaries as a first requirement to translating the
text/screenshots.

Ideally you would complete the manual first, and then the translation should
be one-shot. At least aim to have only a single pass on each chapter and for
the translators to get sight of the whole draft early in the game. Good
translation firms will be able to work within your template and the text
should need only minimal (re)formatting after they have finished. It seems
to me translation of isolated paragraphs is just certain to produce errors.
If only some paragraphs have changed, then send a revision-marked file for
translation.

In this situation I would definitely keep the screenshots linked, even
though that means some extra file and folder management. If you do this is
should be possible to do automatic replacements of the Dutch versions with
the French ones in the translated version of the files which should save
some copy and paste time.

I wish you the very best of luck :-)

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org


"Amedee Van Gasse" wrote in message
...
Hello,

I have the following situation: a very long and technical manual
(hundreds of pages) about a complex piece of software that is
constantly changed and (hopefully) improved. Each chapter is another
Word document.

Problems and questions:
* Each document has to be translated from Dutch to French. Some of the
files are already translated, but not all.
* Some of the existing translations are outdated.
* Most images are screenshots, those have to be translated too. The
person who translates doesn't have access to the software the manual
describes.
* Images: should they be inside the document or external files?
* The translator doesn't have the technical knowledge the original
authors have, and she doesn't have a lot of time.
* There are about 4 people working on the manual, not always
simultaneous.
* Each time a part of the manual is updated, the changed paragraph is
mailed to the translator, who translates, sends it back, and the author
copies the translated part in the final document. Or is there a better
method?
* The manual is usually two versions behind the software it describes.

In short: maintainability is becoming a problem.
How is this done in "the real world"?

--
Amedee Van Gasse