Extracting or deleting content across books in multiple languages

[Tami Settergren]

Hi there,

I'm writing a book in FrameMaker 9 that will be translated into seven languages. Some time after it's translated, I'll need to assemble different versions that exclude parts of the original book. I'd like to be able to assemble the new versions in English, then apply them to the other languages so that the same pieces are automatically excluded in each language. Conditional text comes to mind as a possible way to do this. Does structured FrameMaker offer a better way?

Also, I might want to assemble a new book from parts of different English books, then have the same version assembled automatically from the books in other languages. Can structured FrameMaker help with this?

Thanks,

Tami

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

Tami,

conditional text is usually a little bit hard to maintain through translation processes.

Structured FrameMaker allows you to define attributes for each segment of content you are interested in. Using attribute-based condition management (either using FrameMaker’s built-in feature or the more capable plug-in AXCM <http://www.weststreetconsulting.com/>) gives you far more reliable control over your documents.

- Michael

[Tami Settergren]

Yeah, I rather expected it to be extra (and error-prone) work for the translators. Conditional markers don't seem to export reliably to other formats the translators might use, such as RTF for Word, so I suppose they'd have to be maintained manually.

Ok, I will check out attribute-based condition management.

Thanks Michael!

Tami