Help files in different languages

[Peter Pan]

Are there any users who create help files in different languages? What strategy do you have to synchronize help files in different languages?

Some time ago I made the suggestion to the program author to let the user add tab pages to the topics in a H&M project. Actually a topic has two pages: 'Topic options' and 'Help text'. Additional topic pages (which of course should contain also the language specific keywords) could be added for additional languages. This would free the user from errors when maintaining separate H&M project files for different language versions of the same project.

[Tim Green]

This would be useful in some cases. However, in my own experience the separate language versions are always produced by different people, so having integrated multi-language source would actually be counterproductive rather than helpful.

[Peter Pan]

Having the original language and the translation in one single project file would also be helpful to the translator.

At least it should be possible to have conditional keywords and conditional TOC.

[Tim Green]

Having the original language and the translation in one single project file would also be helpful to the translator.

Hmm...not sure about that. As a professional translator as well as a help author I personally find it much easier, and safer, to open two instances of H&M. Among other things, helps are generally a work in progress and this makes it possible to receive updates while I am working. Furthermore there is the security issue -- if something crashes I only lose one language instead of two (although nothing like this has ever happened to me with H&M, but you never know).