MadCap Software Forums

My company is currently evaluating new HATs and Flare is at the top of the list. One of the major reasons
for making the switch is that our product is going international and we
need a way to create help for more than one country. To keep the help
clean and coherent for our users, it seems wise to create different
output files for each country based on a single help project.

Currently we use XDK (yeah, I know you haven't heard of it) to create
compressed help files. We link each topic to forms or fields in the
software via context IDs. As we move forward with our
internationalization efforts, new processes and terminology is required
for each country we are expanding into (all English-speaking at the
moment). As far as I can tell, XDK is unable to create different outputs
based on the needs for individual countries.

I'm trying to determine how we might accomplish this with Flare.
One of my thoughts is to use conditional text
and generate separate outputs for each country (which would,
theoretically, allows us to use the same context IDs for each output).
Is there another way to accomplish this? Obviously, we aren't the first
company to deal with this sort of issue. Does anyone have any ideas on
how to accomplish this task using Flare or other MadCap products?

Thanks-

James

Welcome to the forums, James.

If you're only talking about specific words at the moment rather than phrases, paragraphs, and other larger structures, you could do it all with variables. Flare allows you to set the output for each variable in the target file, so for each target make the appropriate changes to the variable mappings and you're off.

HTH.

It looks like we may be faced with longer pieces of information. How would we deal with paragraphs or even complete topics?

Do I assume that this will be a "translation" into the various forms of English? In that case you may want to take a look at Lingo.
If it is only specific sections / topics that would need changes, but not all topics then you may want to try conditional text / topic conditions. That may be OK for several dozen topics or so, maybe a bit more depending on how complicated it would get. It really depends on the extent of the differences which solution would be the best.

I'm not sure yet if we are going to be "translating" specific English words, although we may do so. If we go with Flare, we will definitely be looking into Lingo as well.

Ultimately, I'm just trying to verify that we will be able to easily produce multiple outputs from one source. It seems like that's the case. The way we do it seems to depend on what type of information needs to be translated/changed. Correct?

Correct. It is a matter of amount / scope.

If you ever have to do maintenance to documents, Lingo lets you track updates to changed topics only. so that's very nice.

Personally IMHO, if you do translation on a fairly regular basis (you don't need to be a specialised translation contractor to own lingo) but if you do do this work fairly regularly, to keep up with product updates, and use Flare heavily, Lingo is defintely darn worth your time for consideration.

Its got some minor issues at 1v.5, but i think the team is aware of it....but if you're translating help systems maintaining integrity of hyperlinks, indexes, multiple TOCs, see also links, master pages, snippets, variables ...etc..then this is NUMBER UNO. it'll drive you nuts to go through it without a specialised tool to reduce the possibility of errors during the translation process.

http://www.clientsidenews.com/downloads/CSNV8I8.zip