Translations best practices with DITA

[BogdanM777]

Hi guys,
I am a little bit obnoxious, I am sorry, however I want to get up to speed fast with your tool, so that I can use it properly.
I would have another question related to translation.
I am also doing translation for my company, and I was wondering if there are any best practices in that regard.
I checked the Internet, and I found only some mentions to that, however related to best practices for when you give the project to a translation company, that will process the project with some software.
Well, in my situation, I am the software, and I do the translations in 4 languages so to say "manually".
I was talking to my colleagues in the company, and it was an idea to have one project that contains 4 different translations (English, French, German & eventually Japanese), however till now, working with Adobe RoboHelp, I had 4 different projects, each in its own language.
Would it be wise to use, let's say the element <ph product="language"> in order to have different languages. In my opinion it would be very hard to maintain and to follow having such a stuffy project, no?
From your experience did you find any other solution to this issue of mine?
Or can you recommend me a book to study on that subject?
Thank you very much.

[BogdanM777]

I forgot to add the notification by e-mail.
Sorry.

[Radu]

Hi Bogdan,

We are not very familiar with how translations should be handled with a DITA project.
I would also consider that you need a separate DITA Map project for each supported translation and to have some kind of mechanism to keep in sync the topics which were translated and the topics which were not.
Our forum does not automatically notify users for each post so ideally you should write about this on the DITA Users List:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dita-users/info

or on the LinkedIn DITA Awareness Group if you want to receive feedback from the DITA community.

Indeed most CMSs have special support for aiding translations but we do not use a CMS internally so I do not know how exactly they accomplish this.

Regards,
Radu

[BogdanM777]

Thank you so much for your feedback Radu.
I saw some plus points about DITA that it should handle translations or translation needs very nicely, and I was wondering if there was anything already in place that you would be aware of.
I will check the links you sent me.
Thank you.

[mhGLEIF]

Hi guys,

I am also doing translation for my company, and I was wondering if there are any best practices in that regard.

There are some docs at the OASIS website, e.g.

https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/d ... ranslation