Re: [docbook-apps] OT: How to translate DocBook documents into differentlanguages

Hi,
well, I'd not say that this is very off-topic, but in fact a common 
problem...

The good news is that there are tools to accomplish your task, the bad 
news is that they are not open source, but commercial software.
The following ones have been proved to do the job well:
- Trados Tag Editor by Trados (www.trados.com),
- Transit by Star Transit (www.star-transit.com),
- XLIFF Editor by Heartsome (www.heartsome.net) - which is the only 
Java-based and therefore platform-independent tool.

Maybe you can try to get an evaluation copy; on the other hand there 
might be specially priced licenses for research institutes.

All of these tools are translation memory systems: The basic idea is to 
involve a fuzzy search engine to re-use phrases you have already 
translated. This implies that when you begin from scratch (and have no 
translation memory yet), you cannot pre-translate your document.
There are some machine-translation tools such as SYSTRAN, but I have no 
idea how well they fit the task, and whether they preserve your markup.

Regards,
Markus

Joachim Ziegler escribió:

> This is off-topic, but maybe some of you are sometimes faced with the 
> same problem:
>
> I have a long English Docbook document (440 pages in  printed output) 
> that I want to translate to German.
>
> There a two important points for me:
>
> - In the English document, I don't want to type in again all the 
> markup which took me so many hours. I want to reuse my precious 
> markup. The structure of the target document will be exactly the same.
>
> - I want to use a translation program to produce a first, rough 
> version of a (mechanical) translation.
>
> What is a good approach to do this? Can these steps be mixed? Are 
> there programs for these kind of jobs? Any experiences? Advices?
>
> Thank you very much in advance,
> Joachim
>