Technical documentation processes for dealing with translations
Im reviewing our current workflow as its very timeconsuming and would love to hear what other peoples processes are, or even suggestions for improvment. Our general process is as follows:
Currently we use framemaker to create the source manual and then send it away to a translation company, they translate it and send it back to us as mifs, which we convert back to framemaker and then reformat it to our standards. We use a lot of text insets which all need to be relinked to the appropriate language file and the cross references need to be reformatted (to use the correct language) and then relinked, its the relinking part of this process that takes a lot of time. In addition to all that you have to carry out the usual processes such as pagination, numbering, creating TOC etc etc. This process for one langauge can take anywhere between half a day to a full day per manual, depending on the size of the manual and experience level of the person doing it. Currently we are not using any xml and im wondering if this is the road we should be going down? I guess we are using unstructured framemaker, in that we have templates for various languages which we just import the paragraph and character formats, but thats about it.
The whole process is very repetitive and time consuming and im thinking there has to be a way of automating it in some way. I would love to hear peoples views and suggestions, Thanks!
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