A Linguist's Leap into DITA and the Open Toolkit

In a world where translators are still being asked to translate websites starting from snippets of text pasted into a Word document, PDFs of screens and even printouts of all the pages of a website, we can only hope that someday all content will be created in a structured environment like DITA XML for example.
I've created several text-rich, multilingual websites using DITA and the Open Toolkit and recently wrote an article about this for the US magazine Multilingual Computing. The article explains how easy it is to build your translated version of a website if your source text is authored in a structured way using XML. Translators have the tools to work with XML files so they can benefit as well as their clients. If you would like to receive a copy of the article, send an email to info@dita2web.be.
article abstract:
website: www.dita2web.be
reply to: info@dita2web.be

Hi, I checked your website in Dutch on a Mac and found many unreadable characters, as you are not using the HTML codes, e.g. ï in the word Linguisten. I am not sure where in the process you should make a change; probably in the transformation rules that create the HTML output.

Hi,

Thanks for the comment. I just checked and it seems that my internet provider, who is hosting the website, did something at their side. I'm seeing this also on my Windows platform -- slightly embarassing because normally this works fine and the localization capabilities are one of the benefits of the OT.

Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

 

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