DAVENPORT: Re: Maintaing documents for multiple languages

[Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de>]

Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com> writes:

|   <subtitle lang="fr">
|   Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
|   </subtitle>
|   <subtitle lang="en">
|   Guide d'utilisation et de configuration des produits HP sous Linux
|   </subtitle>
|   
|   The main benefit of this is that you have a more readable system,
|   which can be properly parsed and edited by any SGML tool.  Moreover,
|   it reduces configuration managment problems (i.e., ensuring slice is
|   installed, etc).

I'm pretty sure, those techinques will do more harm than good.  The
"lang" attribute was invented to specify the contents of an element, not
to impose conditionals at the document level.  Misusing attributes might
work (with DokBook), but will fail with other DTDs for sure (TEI) -- if
you don't want to do dirty tricks:

<chapter>
  <title lang=en>Goethe in Italy</title>
  <title lang=de>Goethe in Italien</title>

  <para role=quotation lang=de>
    Auch ich in Arkadien!
  </para>
</chapter>

(Yes, I wish, that this quote will appear in the english text
_untranslated_.)

XML isn't the answer to all questions ;-)

BTW, mixing langauges in one file is considered to fail in the long run;
it might work with only two languages, but will get hairy with three or
more.

You'll need specialized tools that will "link" the componends via IDs.
Unfortunately, no free tools are available.  Emacs/PSGML is missing this
feature.

I'm looking for an alternative (it should run on Linux and if possible,
I'd like to avoid Java...).

-- 
                                             work   :        ke@suse.de
Karl Eichwalder                              private: ke@gnu.franken.de