RE: Dealing with changes in documentation for translation purposes

["Steve Hudson" <cruddy -at- optushome -dot- com -dot- au>]

Quick answer; Outsource.

Long answer is only possible in generalities.

First, to determine any change one needs two things - irrespective of the
discipline the change belongs to: a baseline and a delta. If you have two
measurements, the seond is only relevant relative to the first. Its the
relationship that's crucial.

This then requires a comparison of this release vs last release. As pointed
out already a good translation system (are you outsourcing translation? if
so - forget this entire email, just send your translation company the new
docs and they should only charge for the new stuff as the rest is in mem)
will memorize already translated material and with good fuzzy logic
(operator augmented), this can stretch somewhat further.

So, your basic problem is generating your list of deltas across a document
set. I suggest taking a squizz at www.mvps.org/word (assuming you use word)
to get a basic macro for processing all docs in a dir and expand on it to
achieve rapid rollout.

Steve Hudson, Word Heretic
HDK List MVP
Word help and tools: heretic -at- tdfa -dot- com


-----Original Message-----
From: Katherine Turner

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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