New Project II

A guy called Drew Hodge, out in Canada, has asked:-

Have you considered converting your exiting help source into XML? Because of their inherent separation of content and structure, XML documents are often preferred by human translators, and perhaps by machine translators these days too. Although XML source is UTF-8 by default, you can specify other character encodings if necessary.

I like the sound of your project and would enjoy collaborating with you. I don't have any language skills, but I've recently come back into the Biomed field after a dozen or so years working as a technical writer, a second career for me after starting out in Biomed in the late 70s. During a stint with IBM, I wrote help documentation in XML and prepared it for translation into 13 languages, so that experience might be useful.

What Drew's saying is interesting. I'll bear it in mind (chew it over, or whatever). At the moment I'm thinking in terms of a straight forward look-up table being called each time a form is opened that will populate the labels on the form according to the language setting (as a technical writer, no doubt you'll be groaning at such a long sentence)!

That is, Spanish (say) will call the Spanish labels from a simple .dbf file which can be edited, improved, or otherwise tweaked by the end user. So if a guy out in Mexico, say, doesn't like my choice of a Spanish word on a form, then he can change it to something he's less ashamed of. This is the way I prefer to do most of my stuff ... let the users have reasonable access to the underlying data to use and mould to their own particular (or weird even) requirements.

But yes, help file narratives are a different kettle of fish, as there is a lot of text in there. I haven't given it a great deal of thought as yet, but (off the top of my head) I may just provide my usual English file, plus a blank "page" for my more helpful users to fill in for themselves. In actual fact, users at the highest level of access can edit (or screw up, as they wish) my help file anyway! So I have the option there to "leave as is", as they (architects, usually) say.

In truth, my stuff needs a total re-write in a modern language. But who has time for that? Not to mention that dreaded word "funding"! As you must know, most users haven't got a clue how much work it all takes.