Margaret Aldis shared this with us in
microsoft.public.word.docmanagement:

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

Margaret,

To make matters even worse: some of our customers (local branches of
multinational companies) demand english manuals...

Even with proper translation, we would be one or two versions behind,
because the actual writing of the manual is also done between other
stuff.

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.

In an ideal world, yes. However it is not possible to find someone with
the right technical background AND has the skills to translate AND has
the time to do it. From these 3 requirements, choose *maximum* 2.

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.

We tried a "translation firm" once. The quality was very poor (both in
translation errors as in contextual errors), so now it is done
in-house. That means someone who has to do it part-time between other
work. The same goes for the original version of the manual. 5% of our
time would be a *very* optimistic estimate.

Imagine this: a new module is programmed for the software. When the
programmers are almost done, I and my collegues get to play with it
(test it) for a week so we get to know it. Meanwhile we have to support
existing customers. If we're lucky, we can write the documentation for
the new module a few weeks (or even months!) later. But by that time it
is already "in the field". And by the time we write a manual, version
1.1 of the new module is ready for testing.

And then translation has to start! By the time this is done, we have a
french manual version 1.0, a dutch manual version 1.1 and a software
version 2.0...

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.

OK, we're already doing that.

I wish you the very best of luck :-)

Thank you, we need it. :-)

--
Amedee Van Gasse