Multi-language support

Introduction

This section of the documentation is intended to provide an introduction to the Daisy features for managing multi-lingual content, both of the repository and the front-end.

Multi-lingual content can take many forms. Two major categories are:

1. you have a set of documents, some of which are in language A, some others in language B, and so on, but their content is unrelated, the documents in the different languages are not translations of each other. For this case, you will typically not make use of language variants.

2. you have a set of documents of which (almost) each document is available in several languages.

The remainder of this documentation mainly applies to the second case.

Features for multi-language support

There are many language-related features imaginable. Daisy does not yet support everything, but does provide the most important things.

Here are some examples of such features:

• repository and document structure related: support storing multiple language variants, support content which is shared by all variants (not yet in Daisy), support language-specific fulltext-indexing behavior (not yet in Daisy)

• management related: keeping track of the translation status, being able to query outstanding translation work.

• content related: markup for indicating non-translatable content or other hints towards translators (not specifically in Daisy, though could be based on HTML element classes).

• editing related: updating translation status (this is supported in Daisy, remainder not yet), split-screen editing, language-aware spell-checking, integration with terminology systems and translation memories, ...

• publishing related: deciding what language to show

• workflow related: external: export content and provide it to translation agency, internal: possible use of Daisy's workflow.

Basic concepts and terminology

Introduce language variants, reference language, ...