View Single Post
  #3   Report Post  
Posted to microsoft.public.word.docmanagement
Marc Marc is offline
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 18
Default managing translations

Hi Robert,
yes, I think so and I've found 2 or 3 tools/ways that would permit the
indepndization of the content and the presentation. One of them is using
Latex and/or DocBook. Do you have experience in any of them?

Marc
"Robert M. Franz (RMF)" wrote:

Hello Marc

Marc wrote:
I'm starting to generate documentation that later will also have to be
trasnlated to other languages different than the original one so I'd like to
have a master copy and then versions that would permit me to track changes,
items pending to translate, .... I'd like to do it in a way that later could
be easy to choose the formt to deliver it (richtext, pdf, html, xml, chm,
...) but basing all on the same source data so when I'd have to make a future
change/update wouldn't it mean a complex task. Does it Word permits to work
like this? Do you know/use any documentation tool or additional MSWord Plugin
or there's no way for doing this in Word?


the longer I think about this, the more I'm convinced that starting
right away in Word won't get you there.

To get this right, you probably want to separate content from
formatting/layout as much as possible. That means you'll end up with a
big database (or spreadsheet-like tool), listing all content broken down
to paragraph level in your master language in one column, add one column
per translated language.

I'm afraid I don't know of any tool to support this process, but I'm
pretty sure that stuff like this is "out there" somewhere.

..02ยข
Robert
--
/"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | MSFT |
\ / | MVP | Scientific Reports
X Against HTML | for | with Word?
/ \ in e-mail & news | Word | http://www.masteringword.eu/