Translation to other Languages

[_Frankie_Page_]

We are a US-based company and write all service and operator manuals using Framemaker. We have distributors worldwide. What is the best way to translate these documents to other languages? any suggestions?

[Art Campbell]

The "Best" way probably depends on what you're trying to accomplish, how much control you want to have over the end product, and how much money you can spend. Related to that is whether the companies that you're selling in require local language instructions, which many EU countries do... in general, the broader and less technical the audience for your product is, the more likely you are to have to translate.

Most good translation companies will take Frame source files and farm them out to native language speakers in your target countries. Then you do production on each set of languages in your shop. Note that this requires a fair amount of prep work to flow smoothly. For instance, you should be writing well, using simple English constructions; and not including copy in graphic files (instead of callouts, number or letter the components or steps, so you can translate them as part of the text flow).

The other way to go is to send the source files to your distributors and hope for the best... But in all likely hood that's going to generat e more work for you because they're unlikely to be Frame-savvy. So they're going to both be unwilling to buy, but also to master FM so they can do the work themselves. You may be able to sleaze by outputtting to RTF so they could use Word, but that's also not a great way to go.

Art

[_Van_Kurtz_]

I would add to Art's comments:

Try to minimize the number of different words and sentence structures, that is, write consistently. Good translations companies use translation memory, charge by the word, but do not charge for multiple uses of the same word. By using the same word for the same concept throughout the document, you save money.

Van

[_Frankie_Page_]

Art and Van:

Thanks for your comments. We actually want the responsibility to lie with the distributors in other countries. They have been translating our manuals in their language but with difficulty. They balk at investing in Framemaker (because of expense issues) and prefer Word because they are familiar with it !! I have tried saving some Framemaker files as Word files; sometimes it works and sometimes it just crashes Framemaker !! I am told that the service/sales people of the distributors actually do some translating while they are traveling; basically rewriting the manual in their own language with Word. I am just looking for a way to make it easier for them...

[AxialInfo]

Frankie, another possibility for you might be to use the 3rd party tool "MIF2Go" to create better Word files from FM (well, more specifically, to create RTF files which would then have to be saved as the Word .doc binary files).

http://www.omsys.com

MIF2Go is much more robust than FM's built-in Word conversion (it doesn't crash!) and it can be setup to have much more control over the final output.

OmSys offers a free trial, and has a very, very, very extensive user manual. It can be a bit daunting at first, but the results are significantly better than any other method of generating Word files.

[Geetha Gowri5C19]

In our organisation we come across a similar requirement, is there an option in frame maker to translate the Frame Maker file content from English to some other language ?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Generally companies outsource the FM content files in one language to a translation service that then returns the translated content in either FM format or .MIF files. Some places have in-house translation resources and just make a copy of the original FM files and create translated versions themselves with it.

[Stefan Gentz]

Since FrameMaker 2020, you can also save a document or all documents in a book directly as a translation package containing pre-segmented XLIFF files. You can send the package to your translator and they return the translated XLIFF files to you. You can then import it and get the translated book.

You can find more details in the FrameMaker Online Help:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/index.html#t=using-framemaker%2Fuser-guide%2Ffrm_trans...