RE: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities

Subject: RE: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities
From: "Cassandra Greer" <cassandra -at- greer -dot- de>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:24:07 +0100


Hi Nandini!

Being a translator myself, my first thought at the description of the
problem is that if your translator was using a CAT tool (comp assisted
translation) like Trados or DejaVu X (or others) when translating your
files, the format would not be the main issue for him/her and you would be
able to reuse a lot of material plus the tool would help find the changes
between versions pretty much automatically.

You first convert the Frame files to MIF and then the CAT tool would take
the MIF, convert it to RTF and then you work with the interface of the
particular tool (Trados in Word, DejaVu X in its own app, etc.).

When the translation is finished, you export back to MIF and then save as
Frame for the final check.

CAT tools can of course be used in conjuction with Word but if a Word doc is
too long (bunches of chapters in one file) and/or has lots of embedded
images, Trados tends to have resource problems. FM chapters are separate
files. This makes it easier for the CAT tool. Also all the cross-refs,
bookmarks, etc are retained with a most a bit of tweaking at the end. So
basically, this means that the translator can work on his own machine in
Word 2000 even, save his translated files to the server and you can open
them on your machine with your installation of Frame to check. It is,
however, nicer if the translator could have his own copy of Frame for
checking purposes (and checking does not require full-blown Frame training)
in Frame but this is not absolutely necessary.

A CAT tool costs just about as much as Frame (Trados the same, DejaVu X a
bit more) but the time saved and the reuse of previously translated material
is worth it. A translator nowadays needs to be at least familiar with these
sorts of tools anyway. Trados has a Japanese version. DejaVu X supports
Unicode so Japanese should not be a problem. I use both Trados and DejaVu X
but prefer the latter.

Summary of the mess above, you can keep your Frame and the translator can
keep his Word if he uses a CAT tool as the go-between.

my 2 euro cents

Cass :)


> Hello everyone!
>
> Yes, I read the FAQs. Agonized before posting my first
> message with so many responses. However, considering
> most of the posts I saw were old, circa 1999,
> with FrameMaker 5.5 compared to Word 97, let's visit
> this again.
>
> I need your help in convincing management to continue
> to use the newly acquired FrameMaker 7.1 to which I
> have transferred Word documents in English. The
> question is whether to buy Frame for the Japanese
> versions of the documents and pay for the software and
> training of a translator who is used to translating
> >from Word. Using PDF is not acceptable. Using Frame
> for English versions, and Word for Japanese is also
> not acceptable. I will have to switch to Word, or the
> Japanese translator to Frame. I will apprecieate your
> feedback on the following:
>
> Between Word 2000 and FrameMaker 7.1, which is better
> for technical writers? I know the answer, but need to
> convince some folks who have received the following
> reasons to use Word (We use Word 2000, but may move to
> Word 2003 if such regressive improvement on tools is
> approved.)



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