Localization Question

[Sharon_G]

Hi All,
I'm hoping that someone who already has experience with localization will be able to share some advice.

I've been using Flare for some months now and have been successful in getting it to output PDF, HTML Help and WebHelp from the same source. The goal is to be able to stop using FrameMaker and RoboHelp and our Documentation and Training Departments use a single tool. This obviously will make single sourcing in English more efficient, but where I'm expecting to see quantifiable cost savings is in our localization costs.

At present we localize into French, Italian, German and Spanish (FIGS). Our current localization vendor does not use Lingo and we do not have it in-house.

Does anyone else deal with this kind of setup, and if you do can you answer the following.
- When you send your project for translation, which files do you send?
Ideally I'd like to just send the html topic files and do the DTP in house with the translated files - however, at least initially I know that there will be other files such as variables, snippets, and perhaps page layouts and skins?
- Since the current vendor is not familiar with Flare, would it make sense to look for a vendor who is and who can provide more advice?
- If you have moved to using Lingo (or your vendor has) how easy is it to go from a TRADOS translation memory to a Lingo one? Is it possible to convert?
I'm sure I'll have more questions as we move along in the process, but if anyone has any initial words of wisdom to share, I'd really appreciate them.
Many thanks,
Sharon

[ktbCA57]

I'm new at using Flare... but I have a long background in localizing both software and documentation.

The idea is to make your job easier - so that all you have to do is coodinate the work and make sure that it's right... since your current vendor doesn't have compatible software, I would do a search for one that does - or one that is willing to purchase and learn Flare. If you do THAT much localization, then it would be worth their while to do so.

However... I'm curious to know if (in a pinch) finding a vendor that can use Frame (I know they are out there), if somehow you couldn't work something out that way? any comments from anyone on this idea?

Thanks,

kb

[Sharon_G]

Hi kb,
Thanks for the reply. I've been doing L10n for many years as well and can tell you that most vendors in the tech space are very familiar with Frame. One of the things that I have learned when searching for a vendor is to ask them about the toolset that they support. It's also good to know whether they have an in-house DTP department that takes care of producing the final documents in the correct form after the translators have done their work.

I'm in an odd position at the moment because we have worked with our current vendor for quite a while and their translators have become familiar with our products. I need to find out what the trade-off would be to go to a new vendor who has Flare expertise but does not know our application. I know that the learning curve should be relatively quick if we have good TMs and existing docs to hand over as resources. But that's what I'm investigating. If you have any words of wisdom on the subject, I'd love to hear them.

My ideal situation would be one where all I needed to send to the vendor would be the content files and our group could do the DTP in-house in FIGS versions of the project. Do you have any experience of this with Flare? I suspect that there are files other than the XHTML topics that need to be localized initially, but I haven't been able to find a list of what they are. Any ideas?
All suggestions gratefully received.
Sharon

[GregStenhouse]

However... I'm curious to know if (in a pinch) finding a vendor that can use Frame (I know they are out there), if somehow you couldn't work something out that way? any comments from anyone on this idea?

The is how our process works - Frame --> Flare for English and all translations. It works quite well as we can compare versions using Framemaker so only the delta is translated. I guess you could roundtrip (Flare to Frame or Word, translate, then import back to Flare again). That would probably work with some effort setting up the target and import files.

You could send the relevant files from the "Content" folder away for translation and re-generate the target yourself. You'd be putting a lot of trust in the translator though not to mess with tags. Potentially the files you get back won't open and could have a rather messy job fixing tags by hand. Also I don't see how this approach would work with updates - you'd need to find out which files have changed, and somehow update the text and bring across any tag changes.

You could also send away the end result in the output folder for translation (e.g. HTML files). This would be a quick and dirty "one-off".

I haven't used Lingo, but it sounds like this is the path you really need to take. Is it possible to provide training to the vendor? Maybe see if Madcap can answer some questions for you, such as similarities to and integration with Trados.

Cheers
Greg