Planning and creating help in two languages

[geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA]

 Susan Brown asked about managing changes in an online help
 system that will be written in English and subsequently
 translated into French. Coincidentally, that's what I'm
 doing now, and lacking a budget (or helpers), I have to do
 it manually. Here's how I'm planning to proceed... comments
 and suggestions for improvement are certainly welcome.
 (Please copy your responses to me privately--see the SIG
 line--I'll be gone as of this weekend to the STC
 conference, and will probably miss responses posted solely
 on the digest. I'll try to summarize the week of the 19th.)

 I've created a binder for each of the two modules of our
 software, with a table of contents that lists all the help
 topics and their context strings. This table also includes
 checkoff columns for tracking the project (e.g., draft
 written, draft approved, translation, compiled and tested,
 complete).

 I'll be doing all the writing and compiling myself, working
 with a contracted translator, so I'll use the same context
 strings in both languages to help me find and work with the
 corresponding text in each language. As Susan's translator
 suggested, I'm going to cut and paste the translated text
 into a tested and near-final copy of the English file, then
 save this as the French help file. It's tedious, but it
 helps ensure that nothing gets missed... a keen sense of
 self-preservation tells me that I don't want to have to
 debug two hypertexts at the same time (one is plenty,
 thanks). BTW, the online help will be distributed in
 skeleton form (i.e., topic titles only, minus the text)
 early in the beta testing cycle so the testers can critique
 the help structure before I commit to a final version.

 Since the technical reviews will all be on paper (no
 workgroup software here!), I'll keep all my old (marked-up)
 printed copies of the text in the binder, each one dated
 and coded to indicate (via the context strings) the chunks
 of help text (the topics) that changed; this is the print
 equivalent of version management software. We've used a
 similar approach successfully for our print publications,
 so it should work well here. Changes to the French version
 will be included in a separate section of the binder in the
 same manner, but because the technical review will already
 be complete in English, changes to the French should be
 primarily grammatical rather than substantive and shouldn't
 affect the English much. Checkoffs to ensure that any
 belated changes have also been made in the French version
 and approved by one of our French developers will appear on
 the English review copies.

 The table of contents provides a quick visual overview of
 how the project is going... in fact, the table looks an
 awful lot like a Gantt chart. If I can design a manageable
 degree of clutter into the final version of the table, I'll
 include the timeline directly in/on the table. If not, I'll
 keep it externally. I'm tempted to use our database
 software (Paradox) to do the tracking, because it would be
 more efficient, but this will depend on me finding the time
 to do the programming. (If I gave up e-mail for a few
 weeks... <grin>)

 Warning: I haven't fully tested this system yet, so I plan
 to do a dry run with fake text to ensure this approach
 works for me before I go into full production. If you like
 my overall approach, I recommend that you do the same. The
 basic approach should be fairly robust, but it will require
 some debugging depending on the complexity of your project.

 --Geoff Hart     @8^{)}     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
 Disclaimer: Speaking for myself, not FERIC.

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