Pagemaker to FrameMaker conversion

[Carol J. Elkins]

Hi Mollye,

Thanks for your comments. Unfortunately, my client doesn't know what he 
wants other than to reduce the twice yearly expense of printing the Spanish 
version of this book. I maintain this manual in FrameMaker and the gal who 
maintains the Spanish version works in PageMaker. I think my client needs 
to consider a new vendor for the Spanish version. Here are a couple of 
examples of why I think this: She has no experience with graphic formats, 
so she cuts and pastes graphics (the hardcopy version!) on which she has 
overlain the translated callouts. She sends these plus her native PageMaker 
files to the printer and the printer spends hours of table time getting 
them ready for prepress.  I suggested to this gal that she purchase Adobe 
Acrobat and send the PDF files to the printer. This she did. Now she thinks 
that Acrobat is her native application and wants to know how to make the 
changes in the PDF file. <sigh>

I suggested to my client that we might convert the doc to FrameMaker and 
have a "professional" manage revisions to the Spanish version. That would, 
at first glimpse, be a better idea than having my FrameMaker version 
translated to Spanish. So my query is really just a preliminary first pass 
at what I might need to consider if I make a recommendation to my client.

Structured Frame is not a practical option for this book.

I have no idea what the doc looks like in PageMaker. The FrameMaker 
template is excellent. Assuming that there is good mapping correlation, is 
there a PageMaker-to-FrameMaker conversion tool that you know of?

I've never heard the term "translation memory," so I don't know what to do 
with your comments that used it. Can you explain it a bit more?

Thanks!

Carol


At 05:28 PM 6/26/2006 -0500, Mollye Barrett wrote:
>Does the client really want the translation vendor to do the conversion?
>Perhaps what they're looking for is a migration plan for converting the
>PageMaker to Frame and then working with translation memory. Are all the
>languages they require supported by Frame? Do they have a strong template
>and/or EDD?
>
>We've worked with many conversions and the gotchas are always, it depends.
>The best projects are those with high stylesheet integrity on both sides of
>the conversion (of course, these are few and far between!). I'd consider get
>them into a structured Frame world, convert PageMaker PDFs to XML and,
>import the XML to Frame. A good EDD will handle the formatting and the
>client will have minimal upkeep on future revisions.
>
>If they have an existing PageMaker translation memory (full of formatting
>tags), their translator may be challenged with this change. As we all know,
>there's more to translations than handing off an input file. This is a
>strategic decision that carries a significant cost and there are many places
>the project could go wrong. So, I'd map out every step of the conversion and
>the translation processing before even discussing the process with the
>client.
>
>There are lots of good conversion resources and many excellent translators.
>Sounds like the client needs someone that can orchestrate the process!