RE: Dealing with changes in documentation for translation purposes

["Glenn Maxey" <glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com>]

If translation memory is not already in your translation process, then
you need to make it part of the process. Specifically, a translation
tool like Trados uses translation memory. In their case, their database
stores things at the sentence level and is smart enough to handle/ignore
formatting tags when making a match.

As such, if the sentence is in the translation memory, it doesn't matter
where it appears or how often, it will be matched on.

Even with translation memory, you can save expenses by localizing the
changes to files. However, remembering the exact changes below the file
level probably isn't worth the effort. Run it through the tool and let
it auto-translate from what's in its database; you'll get no matches or
fuzzy matches for things it doesn't have (new or altered material).

Translation companies charge about 20% of the actual translation costs
for sentences it can pull from the database.

Glenn Maxey
Technical Writer
Voyant Technologies, Inc.
1765 West 121st Avenue
Westminster, CO 80234-2301
Tel. +1 303.223.5164
Fax. +1 303.223.5275
glenn -dot- maxey -at- voyanttech -dot- com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Katherine Turner [mailto:katherinet -at- csl -dot- com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 4:36 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Dealing with changes in documentation for 
> translation purposes
> 
> 
> We're trying to come up with a new system for dealing with changes in
> documentation as we need keep our Japanese office informed of 
> what we're
> doing and what we're changing so that they can translate our 
> documentation.
> 
> BACKGROUND INFO
> All of our documentation is stored in Perforce, a source 
> control system.
> 
> Our API Reference is stored as comments next to the relevant 
> code in the
> source code files. We use Doxygen to extract the comments and 
> create our API Reference.
> 
> Our User Guide is stored in Word docs which are converted to PDFs.
> 
> All documentation is translated into Japanese which means that between
> releases we need to keep track of what's changed so that the 
> Japanese can update their documentation. As we're using a source
control 
> system files can be compared to find out what has been changed. This
is easy 
> to use and it's easy to find the information. However, the source
files are 
> numerous and doing this on a file by file basis is not practical.
> 
> As well as releases we also release our software on a weekly 
> basis with a
> changelog which contains all the major changes to the source 
> code and new
> additions to the documentation to keep our customers informed.
> 
> QUESTION
> How do other people keep track of changes to documentation 
> for translation
> purposes?

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