I'm off to London! The London Regional Group of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting have kindly invited me to give a talk on on technical translation issues on 26th September 2007. Here is a copy of their publicity for the event:

From words to data - changes in the technical documentation industy, and how they impact on the translation world

Wednesday, 26 September 2007, 18.30 for 19:00 start
Venue: University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street (nearest tube: Oxford Circus)

Changes in technology affect workflows and the way things are done in publishing and other written media. Increasingly, as translators, we are faced with strange and unfamiliar file formats. Where do they come from? And why? And how can we best translate them?

What other new developments are on the horizon? And how can we best prepare for them?

Nick Rosenthal is Managing Director of Manchester technical translation company Salford Translations Ltd, and one of the mentors on the ITI Peer Support Group. He will talk us through the latest developments on the IT front, focusing in particular on the world of technical documentation and other fields that are especially relevant to the translation industry, including issues such as content management systems, XML workflows, translating DITA files, and DocBook. These initially impacted on technical translations, but XML is being used as a publishing tool for film scripts, tourist guide books and a host of broader publications, so more and more translators need to have an understanding of the issues.

The event is free members of ITI's London Regional Group (there is a fee of £10 for non-members). Booking is essential! To reserve your place please contact: Betti Moser, betti@apriltext.co.uk.

For details on how to join the London Regional Group of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, see http://www.iti-lrg.org.uk/

The 2007 DITA Europe conference will be in Brussels, Belgium. I've attended the past two DITA Europe conferences in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, and they have been very informative conferences, offering excellent value for money. Brussels is a lovely old city with amazing architecture and delightful restaurants*, and it will be an exciting venue for the DITA Europe conference in November 2007.

DITA offers a very cost-efficient route for technical translation, and if you have manuals and help systems that you translate into various languages then DITA can offer significant cost savings. Personally, I find DITA sufficiently exciting that I am happy to give up a few hours each month to work on the DITA Translation Subcommittee, which aims to ensure that as DITA developes and evolves, it continues to be a highly effective format for technical translation.


* I'm currently trying to work out a way to incorporate a trip to my favourite restaurant in Brussels, the wonderfully named Madam Olsen, which is half antique shop, half north African restaurant. And which is under 500 metres from the where the conference is being held.... but is sadly normally closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

FrameMaker 8 and conditional text: Adobe have now posted Sarah O'Keefe's summary of the new conditional text handling in Adobe FrameMaker 8, and it looks extremely interesting. FrameMaker's new way of handling conditional text is more mature, more complex, able to handle element-driven conditionality. For anyone with an eye on single-sourcing documents in FrameMaker 8 (for example, one manual that has different publishable variants for the Mac or Windows versions of a utility), these powerful new features will be extremely welcome. And they will persist through translation as well, so your French, German and Dutch manuals will contain the same conditions after translation. For a lot of FrameMaker users, this may be a compelling reason to upgrade to FM 8.

FrameMaker alive and kicking: After much whispering, Adobe have now formally announced the imminent arrival of FrameMaker 8. This new, updated version of FrameMaker is rumoured to involve a pretty extensive rewrite of the code, and includes some features that those of us involved in the technical translation world have had on our wishlists for some time.

Headline news for me goes to the fact that with the new Version 8, FrameMaker finally gets Unicode support. As an experienced technical translation company, Salford Translations does a lot of translation and typesetting of manuals written in FrameMaker (we translate both structured FrameMaker and unstructured FrameMaker). Whilst FrameMaker is great for manuals in western European languages such as French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish, the absence of Unicode support made DTP work in languages such as Polish ..... interesting. There were always solutions, but they were always that: solutions and work-arounds. Introducing full Unicode support to FrameMaker solves the underlying problem, and will be widely welcomed in the international technical communications sector.

Another welcome addition for me is the addition of direct support for the Oasis DITA standard. I sit on DITA's "Translation Subcommittee", helping develop this open standard in ways that ensure it is translation-friendly, and having direct support for DITA in FrameMaker is going to be a good thing. (There has been an add-in available for FM for a while now, which offers the ability to import DITA documents into FrameMaker, but direct integration is always better than an add-on).

Finally, the long overdue inclusion of a usable track changes feature will make FrameMaker 8 into a more powerful tool for technical authors, especially for those working in teams.

My friend Sarah O'Keefe, author of the excellent "Publishing Fundamentals: FrameMaker 7" book (and widely regarded as a top FrameMaker trainer and guru) has more info on her Palimpsest blog at the Scriptorium website.