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we have an rather extensive set of Documentation for our software currently written in german. Now we want to translate this documentation into english for our foreign customers. For this we will use an external translation service.

But we want to keep the english and german version in sync as close as possible, as it will be updated in future accordingly to updates of our software. In this case we want to give only the changed pages of the documentation to the translation service.

Currently we use Atlassian Confluence to manage our documentation, but it has no support for internationalization.

The next approach that came to my mind was using some external tool to write/manage the documentation and then export it to confluence.

Things I found:

So what is the best way to manage our software documentation in german and english simultaneously?

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Vertigo
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1 Answers1

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At the moment, localization support in Wikis actually seems to be very poor. See for example http://www.kilkku.com/blog/2012/09/the-final-obstacle-to-wiki-tech-comm-localization/. You would need an efficient way to prepare the source language files for translation. This seems to be a major problem with Wikis.

In addition, with an extensive set of documentation, to even have a chance to keep multiple languages in sync, you or your service provider should use a translation memory system that can handle your file format. Translation memory systems divide the source text into segments. Normally, a sentence corresponds to a segment, as an option, segmentation can also be done at the paragraph level. The translator works on these segments. In case of an update, the translation memory system detects new and modified texts automatically. Everything else can be pre-translated from the memory.

Now, I've been managing localization projects for more than 15 years, but I've never heard of a translation tool that handles LaTex files. On the other hand, Docbook or DITA are supported by quite a few of these tools. For example, Maxprograms Swordfish is affordable and handles DITA as well as Docbook. In addition, with both formats, there seems to be the option to output to Wiki again (for example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita2wiki/) - though I don't know how well established these methods are.

Susanne Muris
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