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I think it would make more sense to let the translator take care of giving
you the files that you need. That way, first of all, you would eliminate any
guesswork about the language when you do the layout, and second of all,
hyphenation would be taken care of in the first pass by the translator.
There are lots of us out there (I'm one of them) who could handle Frame
files without any problem. You want Frame files, I'll give you Frame files.
You want Word files, I'll give you Word files. Version 6 or 7, as you wish.
What I'm trying to say, is you should find a translator who is able to give
you exactly what you need, and not be stuck doing part of the work in a
language you may not be familiar with. And that is definitely possible.
Fabien Vais
phantoms -at- accent -dot- net
At 09:35 AM 6/17/97 -0600, you wrote:
>>>> Eric Silver <eric -dot- silver -at- EAGLEPOINT -dot- COM> 06/17/97 07:24am >>>
>We just finished having one of our dealers in France translate a manual
>using Word 7. This was a nightmare. They emailed the files back to us
>and the total size of the files was 91 MB. <snip>
>
>How is everyone else doing this? Can we have them use a localized
>version of FrameMaker and ship us the files or are we going to have to
>bit the bullet and hire a translation company?
>
>Eric--
>
>I do outside contract work for a translation service, laying out the
>manuals they translate into PageMaker or Word. What they do might help
>you.
>
>Basically, the translator gives mea text file, with the translation of every
>page clearly identified. The pages are matched one-for-one. I take the text
>and format it exactly like the English version. I don't know Dutch, or
>French, or Portuguese, or whatever, but the task isn't that difficult. I take
>the existing style sheet, or duplicate it, and apply it to the text. I
relabel the
>graphics as needed. Voila! Foreign language manual! The translator has to
>go over it and correct hyphenation, but other that that, it's done.
>
>So you might want your foreign people to do the text translation and you
>do the layout at your office, using Framemaker or whatever.
>
>Hope this helps,
>
>Nancy Kaminski
>Fairview Hospital and Healthcare Services
>nkamins1 -at- fairview -dot- org
>
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