Localise filenames?

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John Johann
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Localise filenames?

Unread post by John Johann »

Apologies if this is glaringly obvious :-)

For those localising their CHM or WebHelp help, do you also localise the filenames in the H&M sibling?
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Tim Green
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Re: Localise filenames?

Unread post by Tim Green »

John Johann wrote:Apologies if this is glaringly obvious :-)
For those localising their CHM or WebHelp help, do you also localise the filenames in the H&M sibling?
That is not recommended unless you are doing the localization work with translation memory like Trados or Across.

If you need to synchronize your updates with Help+Manual you absolutely need to keep the topic IDs identical across all your language versions. If you don't, you won't be able to synchronize the projects for translation with Help+Manual when you update the original project. Since you are comparing projects in different languages you can't compare the content; Help+Manual needs to have the references to the topic IDs to be able to tell you which topics have changed. There are also internal IDs for each topic that never change, but you really need both.

With translation memory you don't have this issue, since all text that has already been translated will be automatically identified and re-translated from the translation memory, no matter where it is and what the topics are named.

However, localizing the file names would only ever be useful at all in WebHelp. In CHM the user never actually sees the file names of the topics. :)
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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John Johann
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Re: Localise filenames?

Unread post by John Johann »

Was hoping you'd say that.
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Tim Green
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Re: Localise filenames?

Unread post by Tim Green »

John Johann wrote:Was hoping you'd say that.
Another BIG benefit in having the same file names for all language versions is that the calls to your help can be reused in all versions. Also, switching languages in WebHelp then becomes very easy -- you just need to switch out the folder portion of the URL, if you have all the languages on the same level on your web server. For example, to switch between English and French you would just need to change something like /help/english/myintroduction.html to /help/french/myintroduction.html.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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