RE: [Freecats-Dev] Wordfast ... / BDWF (again)

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

As we're all waiting for Keith Godfrey's feedback (the speed of the latter
depending on whether he crosses the ocean back to its floating home in
Hawaii by air, rowing boat, yellow submarine or else), it's not surprising
the list IS very quiet again, anyway...

Yves Champollion mentioned (nearly two weeks ago) an interesting point that
I nearly overlooked:

> > From: "Henri Chorand" <address@hidden>
>
> > This would mean (let's take an example here):
> > The <I>little</I> cat is grey.
> > It would be represented in the TM as:
> > The <X>fat</X> cat
> > (where <X> and </X> are arbitrary tags; in fact, we would
> > need the following (sort of):
>
> I also had this brilliant idea :-) and this is how I handle tags,
> but here I mean the tags found in tagged documents (stuff
> from Trados Stagger, Rainbow Horizon etc). Note that I had
> to number tags in order of appearance (like <X1>, <X2>,
> <X3> etc) because many languages have a reverse syntax,
> and the software must re-distribute tags in the proper order.
>
> Much tougher is when the translation adds tags (or attributes)
> NOT present in the source. The only way out, for this minority
> of cases, is to have an <X!="<tag full syntax here">, a generic
> tag that nevertheless keeps the original tag's syntax. And there
> are other tough cases too.

We know that a variety of tagged formats are going to require extra
precautions. Here is how I see it:

Choosing for our working format a well-established, "all-purpose" format (at
least in the word processors world) like (slightly adapted) OO Writer format
means that, through our conversion filters, we will be able to map a variety
of tags (as much as possible) as follows:

- For "simple" formatting tags (e.g. bold, italics): let's map any tag from
the original format into its corresponding tag in our working format (as
long as its equivalent does exist).

- For other ones, more exotic (e.g. DTP): it all depends on whether the
translator needs (may need) to work with them or not.
- If the translator does not need to touch it: it should be embedded in some
"Don't Touch" (external type) tag.

My experience as a translator shows that some of our clients give a lot of
DTP files that they prepare and provide as (specific) RTF files in which DTP
tags are simply marked as such via a Trados character style.
Among these tags, we have to "play" (during translation) with a small number
of these - mostly new line, hyphen and unbreakable space (all of which
should be dealt with properly with a "simple" conversion filters, provided
we can recognize the type of prepped file).

So in my daily work, I have not yet met a DTP tag with which I'm supposed to
work, as a translator, and which does not have a (simple) equivalent in a
word processor.

I would like to know if other translators encountered a worse situation.


Henri