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TomFrame
Participant
June 8, 2011
질문

What is the best method for language translations?

  • June 8, 2011
  • 2 답변들
  • 1443 조회

I'm looking to translate an English document to other languages. Is there a way of creating layers in the same file or do I have to manage multiple files for each language?

Thanks,

Tom

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    2 답변

    T
    TomFrame작성자
    Participant
    June 8, 2011

    In summary. It seems like conditional text may not be a good option for a full document translation since it may be more cumbersome to manage compared to the benefit of one single file to manage.

    Everyone's responses where helpful and will definitely be taken into consideration in my decision of which method to use.

    I would appreciate experiences from people that have actually worked in translations and how it worked out for them such as Error7103's response.

    For Adobe, I do suggest implementing Layers in future releases since they are very helpful in many other programs they have.

    Thank you all,

    Tom

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 8, 2011

    I would appreciate experiences from people that have actually worked in translations...

    Another [beneficial] discovery of the Conditional Text approach:

    For anchored frames or tables that need to be switched on and off, It turns out that the anchor glyph (the inverted "T") can have a condition code applied just to it.

    In my case, this means that where the anchoring text need not change, but what is anchored to it does, I don't need to replicate any text adjacent to the anchor (or replicate the entire sentence or paragraph). I probably will anchor the two alternate frames at different places in the paragraph, so the anchors are more easily selected. Caveat: having both turned on is apt to be messy.

    For Adobe, I do suggest implementing Layers in future releases since they are very helpful in many other programs they have.

    Adobe Forums > FrameMaker > FrameMaker Feature Requests

    Chances are layers aren't the ideal way to handle multi-lingual documents (or ideal for enough users to make it worthwhile).

    You probably want a 2-up display, with the original language in one place on the screen, and the current translated language in another (rather than one on top of the other).

    If your goal is 1:1 page content matching, you could get side-by-side authoring now, using conditional text and interleaving entire pages of content.

    I note that in the real world, for short documents, they usually arrive with all the languages visible. Each language may be in its own "chapter", or it may be one of those hideous fold-ups with one lang per fold, but each language scattered across multiple folds.

    T
    TomFrame작성자
    Participant
    June 8, 2011

    Wow, that's a great suggestion! The 2-up idea for the different versions of the same file for side-by-side authoring would be the ideal way to work on any type of conditional expressions, be it language or variation of a product. Like the Photoshop save for the web output dialogue box. That would be an awesome feature for Adobe to implement.

    Adobe, if you read this, this is a great suggestion.

    As you say Error7103, that's why we come here.

    Arnis Gubins
    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    June 8, 2011

    FM doesn't actually support layers per se, so you would have to use separate files.

    T
    TomFrame작성자
    Participant
    June 8, 2011

    Thanks for the quick response. As I continue to research this issue, Framemaker's description says it can handle multiple languages and it seems like it can do layering wich Framemaker calls conditional expressions that can be turned on of off as needed. Would this work?

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Bob_NilandCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 8, 2011

    Framemaker's description says it can handle multiple languages ...

    Yep. You can write the document in any one language

    ... and it  seems like it can do layering which Framemaker calls conditional  expressions that can be turned on of off as needed. Would this work?

    As it happens, I'm doing sort-of that right now. We need to generate two different versions of the English document depending on destination region. USA gets one. UK gets another. All the US customary units (often mis-named Imperial units) are switched off for the UK ed. But more in line with your problem, certain bits of industry jargon are conditionally tagged, so we can switch between US and UK nomenclature.

    With "both versions" visible, this causes the document to have a larger flow (repagination issues), and causes some flows (in anchored frames) to flow-under (out of sight) during editing.

    Also, unless you have FM10, you can't see which text is which, because you can't set visible indicators in the Condition Codes that are easy to switch off (you can use color if you can live with Print All Text as Black when pushing, which we can't). I think FM10 adds a CC feature that might handle this more elegantly.

    We've also had to settle on just one spelling dictionary (UK), because it's not trivial to switch an entire document from one dict to another, as it's defined in each paragraph format (although a batch switch could be scripted).

    In any case, we can live with the minor hassles, to avoid maintaining near-twin documents.

    But I can't imagine interleaving whole sentences or paragraphs of entirely different languages, particularly if the writer doesn't speak them all.

    Do text as insets? Probably won't work, due to Xrefs.

    Most publishers probably give the single-language source files to a translator. There are some things you can do to make life easier for translators. It's surprising how seldom they ask. I suspect that in some cases here, they are translating from our PDFs, because I get so few requests to run my pre-translation scripts.

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