DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 12 June 2006

["Gershon L Joseph" <gershon@tech-tav.com>]

Best Regards,
Gershon

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Gershon L Joseph
Member, OASIS DITA and DocBook Technical Committees
Director of Technology and Single Sourcing
Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd.
office: +972-8-974-1569
mobile: +972-57-314-1170
http://www.tech-tav.com
DITA Translation Subcommittee Meeting Minutes: 12 June 2006

(Recorded by Gershon Joseph <gershon@tech-tav.com>)

The DITA Translation Subcommittee met on Monday, 12 June 2006 at 08:00am PT
for 60 minutes.

1.  Roll call

    Present: Robert Anderson, Don Day, Kevin Farwell, JoAnn Hackos, Gershon 
        Joseph, Patrick Klaassen, Rodolfo Raya, Felix Sasaki, Yves Savourel,
        David Walters, Christopher Wong, Andrzej Zydron

    Regrets: Nancy Harrison, Charles Pau

    Guests: Bruce Esrig (member of the DITA TC)

2.  Accepted the minutes of the previous meeting.
    http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita-translation/200606/msg00002.html
    Moved by Rodolfo, seconded by Andrzej, no objections.

3.  Returning Business:

3.1 Discussion item from Yves Savourel

    As you may know, the W3C has recently published the Last Call Working 
    Draft for ITS (See [1]) as well as the First Working Draft of a companion 
    document: "Best Practices for XML Internationalization" (See [2]).
    [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-its-20060518/
    [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-xml-i18n-bp-20060518/

    The second document include examples of how to use ITS with a few specific 
    document types (See the "ITS Applied to Existing Formats" section). In the 
    next draft we would like to include DITA in that list.

    The attached file is a try for the possible default rules to process DITA 
    with ITS. We would appreciate very much if some of you had the time to 
    review it and make sure we have not made any mistake, or forgot anything. 
    For example, I'm not sure if the dir attribute should be there or not. I'm 
    also not sure if we have all subflow elements listed. Maybe we need two 
    rule sets: on for the current version of DITA and one for the upcoming one 
    (although if there is no conflict and a single rule set could be used that 
    would be better).

    The specification document [1] should help you understand each element in 
    these rules. The Last Call review for the specification ends on June-30. 
    The Best Practices document will still go through several drafts.

    Bruce: spec does not assume that the correct term is actually in the text,
        though this is not clear from the spec.
        1.  Should this be made more explicit in the spec (model for what 
            you're pointing to?)
        2.  Are there consequences for DITA we need to consider?

    Yves: I don't interpret the spec that way (the target term should be in 
        the markup).

    In depth discussions...

    JoAnn: Our best practice recommendation must include example such as
        Andrzej's because authors need to be aware that we can't just
        translate the list of terms and expect the translation to be correct.
        Therefore, we should recomemend not to use conrefs to resolve inline 
        content (since it's inserted at publishing time and may not be correct 
        in every context it's used).

    Bruce: Question for DITA is can we include conrefs with hints to translators?

    Discussion that this is probably not feasible, since translator does not 
        know where the conref is and may not even have access to the source of 
        the conref.

    ACTION: JoAnn to draft our proposal that summarizes our best practice
        recommendations based on our discussions.

    Discusion on Chris Wong's email (how does new DITA glosary markup fit in
        with ITS markup?)...

    ACTION: Yves is testing insertion of ITS attributes into DITA and will report
        back to the group on his progress.

Meeting adjourned at 09:00am PT.

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For future agendas:

3.2 Discuss Gershon Joseph's draft of the best practice for legacy TM

    Attached to this email for non-TC members.

3.3 Management of conref blocks for translations

    Standarized (boilerplate) text is often kept in one or more .dita files 
    used as a source for conrefs across a document set. 

    All boilerplate content for a language must be stand-alone.
        Boilerplate text must be stand-alone phrases to avoid problems translating
        it into some languages, where it does not fit into the surrounding text.

    Depending on the conref target, the conref target should be
        translated before the parent document that refers to the conref 
        is translated. 

    Conreffing to an inline element may result 
        in a badly translated phrase with respect to its surrounding content, 
        so we should probably be against this. Examples: singular/plural,
        prepositions, acronyms e.g. ABS (antilock breaking system) so if 
        you conref to the text itself, the translated text may not read 
        correctly.

    Action Item: Andrjez will provide examples to the group for discussion.

3.4 XLIFF transforms

    Discuss plans for Rodolfo's tests of their XLIFF transforms and possible 
    release to open source. Ask if there is a proposed date.

    Andrzej and Rodolfo have successfully converted DITA to XLIFF and back.
    Rodolfo plans to publish their converter as open source.

4.  New Business:

4.1 Handling multi-language documents

    Charles Pau and others to provide examples to the list for discussion