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Subject:Manual Translation From:Alexander Von_obert <avobert -at- TWH -dot- MSN -dot- SUB -dot- ORG> Date:Tue, 17 Jun 1997 20:51:00 +0100
Hello Eric,
* Antwort auf eine Nachricht von eric -dot- silver -at- EAGLEPOINT -dot- COM an All am 17.06.97
ee> We are currently trying to translate our manuals from English
ee> to French,
ee> German, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, etc.
to a lot of countries, laws, and cultures...
ee> The DTP we are
ee> using is FrameMaker and we have about 50 manuals that are
ee> roughly 250
ee> pages; however, some are up to 700 pages.
A good basis you should only leave is really unavoidable!
ee> We are currently having our international dealers translate the
ee> manuals
ee> since the cost of translation is entirely out of our budget.
This is basically a very good idea as many of them will be responsible for the
product and the manual in many countries. E.g., the entity importing any goods
into the European community is the legal manufacturer who will be responsible
for everything.
ee> We want to be able to bring the electronic files back to our
ee> corporate
ee> headquarters so that we can print the manuals here in case of a
ee> termination of our dealer agreement.
You might not be forced to use the local paper formats. But quite often this
could be a good idea.
ee> This requires that we have the
ee> electronic files in a format that we can read.
You seem to have enough manuals to use Framemaker all over your organisation.
If you supply finished style sheets (or what they are called in Framemaker)
and some guidelines how to use them, any experienced translator should be able
to use them.
ee> We just finished having one of our dealers in France translate
ee> a manual
ee> using Word 7. This was a nightmare. They emailed the files back
ee> to us and the total size of the files was 91 MB.
Uncompressed? Then PKZIP should be able to reduce the files to some 10...20
MB.
ee> As you can imagine, it was
ee> quite difficult to create a Master Document for the TOC and
ee> Index.
You shall not use Winword for more than a few pages! :-(((
ee> How is everyone else doing this? Can we have them use a
ee> localized
ee> version of FrameMaker and ship us the files or are we going to
ee> have to bit the bullet and hire a translation company?
You should not have problems with data interchange between localized
Framemaker versions. I know of people doing this quite often.
But you should think hard before you hire a translation company. You simply
cannot simply translate a manual in many instances. E.g., in the European
Community you must use a European address. Or you must remove/remake many
warning messages. Or replace ANSI to DIN standards...
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