Translation question

[Alison Craig]

First of all, how is the French to English translation going to take place? Hopefully, it will be done by professional translators using proper translation tools so a Translation Memory (TM) will be created for future translation rounds.

Will the "master" file always be the French file? If so, then you might want to bring the French file into FM and once complete, have that translated into English.

If the English translation will become the "master" file going forward, then I would have the Word file translated into English and then bring it into Frame.

Personally, I wouldn't go near mixing the two languages in one book using conditional text. This will make future translations much more difficult and it will also cause problems if you ever translate into an additional language. I've overseen the translation of manuals into as many as 17 different languages and you want them all to stand on their own.


Alison Craig
Technical Documentation Lead

604-279-8550 | fax 604-279-8559 | toll-free 1-866-437-9508
Ultrasonix Medical Corporation | www.ultrasonix.com<http://www.ultrasonix.com/>

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From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Laura Fergusson
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2012 4:18 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Translation question

Hi all

I'm starting to work on revamping user guides from another division in our company.

One of the guides is currently in Word(!), in French, and I'm about to move it to FrameMaker and translate it into English at the same time.

I have a question: Is there a case for just having ONE book file for this guide, which contains files which have both French and English in them (hidden or displayed by conditional text)?
I can't decide if this is a good idea or not, or if I should instead have two completely separate books for the English and French guides.

This will not be a one-off, btw, all guides for this division need both French and English versions.
None of them seem horribly long or overly complicated.

It may be that I should definitely maintain two separate versions - but I'm just not sure.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Laura


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