Approaches to multilingual documentation

[richardl]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Flare, so have spent some time studying the docs and forums, but still can't make much sense of Flare's multilanguage support...

The way I do it (without Flare) currently - I have a simple document in English and Chinese. It is written in HTML, with an English paragraph followed by a Chinese paragraph. I have a CSS class for each language, and a button hooked up to a bit of javascript to either show or hide the Chinese text or English text.

Only a tiny amount of our documentation is multi-lingual, and all the translation is done in-house, so going for something like Lingo seems like overkill. But I'd still like to bring all of our documentation into Flare and take advantage of some of the more advanced single sourcing features.

So I have two questions:

- To create multilingual output, the docs seem to assume you have duplicated the entire project and then translated it. Can someone explain the rationale here? It seems to me that you're duplicating a lot of unnecessary stuff (all of the non-content project files), so it goes contrary to the single source idea. It also seems like it will make it harder to keep track of changes, as you'd have to keep copying them between projects, rather than having everything under one project.

- The docs also talk about adding language attributes to individual files or bits of text. This sounds a bit like what I do at the moment with CSS classes. But I can't find anywhere an explanation of what Flare actually does with this information? Can I tag all of my paragraphs in the single project and have it create multilingual output?

Any help or suggestions on lightweight approaches to multilingual docs are much appreciated!

Thanks
Richard

[RamonS]

As long as you stay with two languages only you are right, Lingo might not be delivering enough value for its price...that will come as soon as more languages are needed.

The "language attributes" are tags. You add tags to each language specific content (English and Chinese) and then explicitly specify to build output including English and excluding Chinese and vice versa. You are right, it is similar to the CSS switching, but with tags you do not even end up with language content not needed, which will cut the size of the output roughly in half and also will make full text search work better. You still keep all content in one project, but it will be entirely up to you to make sure that the tags are set properly.

What you can do as well is mimic Lingo and create two Flare projects, one for English and one for Chinese. That is the more robust approach because you do not have to be constantly on the watch for properly set tags. It will be up to you to do what Lingo does, means keeping track of what was translated and changed and maintaining a translation memory (a collection of already translated words and phrases that make translations faster and more consistent). Having two projects also allows for using spell checking and such more effectively as you will encounter much less noise, meaning that the English dictionary will flag all Chinese content as misspelled.

Read up on tag use in Flare, but I strongly recommend the two project approach as this will prevent other language content to show up by accident in output. You will also no longer need the CSS extras and js which might make maintenance a bit easier.
You can still link from one language version to the other if desired by adding a tool bar button that sends the user to the other language version.