John Devereux wrote:
But I would really appreciate any insights anyone may have.
I've got some experience on this. I'm sure my way is not optimal, but at least it is an experience. First thing to remember is that I started the ConTeXt project many years (5???) ago and the program *and* its documentation have evolved a lot since then. The other thing is that I didn't expect to have to deal with translations. The documentation (and the instrument the manual is for) were both supposed to exist in English only. Yeah. Sure. (We don't do consumer electronics, so regulations are a bit different than for stuff you buy in a shop.) So over these years I've dealt with repeating "please send us the manual as Word file for translation" queries. Every time I've explained in words of one syllable that there's is and will not be a Word file, that the distributed manual file has origins in a totally different system. We stopped using Word when the file grew so big that Word just couldn't cope and when most of the figures to be included were pdf anyway and thus easily incorporated into ConTeXt files. I always offer to send the potential translators the files and the editing instructions and say that I can do a pdf out of the translated files any time, for example after each chapter. (BTW, if you'd like my editing instructions, I have them somewhere in rtf format.) The reactions to the above information vary. A South American professional translator took the files without whining and turned in the translated Spanish text with only *two* messed up codes - which is a lot less of a mess than I do when editing. The French gave up directly; they supposedly have a Word version of their own of the manual and so do the Poles. Three other languages were written in Word (or similar) and I had all the fun in cutting-and-pasting the text into the ConTeXt files. Italian was first done with cut-and-paste method, but then needed so much work that to my surprise they edited the ConTeXt files for me with a very good result - that's probably the most accurate translation of the whole lot. The Russian version of our manual is in the works. They wanted to do it all by themselves, but I haven't heard anything since I debugged their last file (encoding problem, Win-cyrillic to UTF). I hope that means everything is under control there... They are basically working on a pared-down duplicate system so we can easily exchange files. I should add that except for the South American translator and the Russians, the other persons are not IT people, nerds or not necessarily even that computer litterate (if their usage of Word is anything to go by....). If your translators are used to structural coding (html, for example) and especially if they already use suitable editors, you'll have a lot less problems. Then the practical aspect. What I had from the beginning is a system where each chapter of the manual is a file of its own - makes it much easier to handle. Most of the formatting and setups is in the main file, so the chapters just contain list of figures and then the text itself. This makes them much easier to edit and handle. When I started getting the languages, I made subdirectories for them, one per language. This is where I put the tex files for that language + all the figures that have translated text in them; ConTeXt will look first in the same directory and then further afield, so if there's a translated figure, it will get used. If not, the figures of the English manual are used. That way I don't have to repeat anything that has no text in it - and the manuals compile from the beginning, first English everywhere and then little by little with translations. I have a main format file for each language. This is because of the language settings (hyphenation, labels), but also because the English manual is letter size and most translators prefer A4. Sometimes also one language only needs small adjustments (like we have no index in Italian), so I find it easier to keep all the layout stuff separate one language from another. However, the main layout had already been the same for two years when the first translation came along, otherwise I might move some information (like heading formatting) into a shared formatting/setup/layout file for easier changes. So, how do I keep all of this up to date? I don't. Fully. But if I could devote most of my working hours into that, I maybe could... Won't happen this decade, I think. One thing that helps is version control (SVN) that keeps all the files and I try to document very carefully in the log files what I've done. As I usually check in all the files before leaving work, I still remember what was done and the log is reasonably good. SVN also means that I can diff with an earlier version of the file and see what changes were made, this is also handy. Another thing is that any changes I can make myself, I'll do all over the manuals at one go. For example we had a small mistake in a protocol specification - fixing that didn't require much understanding of the language, just careful copying and pasting from another spot in the same file. Minor fixes in German and Swedish can also be done in-house. Our manuals also have version numbers and unless it is revised, any translation keeps its original version number. For example the current English version is 1.64, but I'm doing cut-and-paste on an old translation that's version 1.51. On the front page of each translated manual we now have a disclaimer saying that if information in that manual and the English version conflicts, the English is considered correct. [My ongoing cut-and-paste project is so bad that even with a three-word-command of the language in question I can tell that it is a sorry translation... so the old version number isn't that much of a hinder anyway...] I assume that the only way to keep an evolving manual on track is careful logging of what was done, by whom and when. If translations involve a lot of people, it'll probably help to have clear instructions on what to do when there are changes. When the master language is fixed, you need to know who will log the changes and make sure that the translations are fixed accordingly and how that's done - by sending a new file to translator, by telling them to check them out or by having them send those three lines to you by email so you can cut-and-paste them into your text. But it is definitely worth the while to figure things out so that anything that doesn't need translation, only exists once and is used by all languages. One very small thing that I came up with by the third translation language is that my files are named similarly, but with the language abbreviation first. So I have intro.tex (English), se-intro.tex (Swedish), es-intro.tex (Spanish) etc. First I thought this wasn't necessary as the files are in different directories (root directory intro.tex vs. Swedish/se-intro.tex vs. Spanish/es-intro.tex), but then I realized that it wasn't actually that fun to have three intro.tex tabs open in my Scite, couldn't tell fast which one was which. Occasionally the files also get copied to Desktop and sent all over by email and unique naming does make it easier to figure out what went and where. Just my five cents, Mari Finland