9.7 Translation workflow

There are a few possible scenario's depending on:

• do the translators work directly in Daisy or do they use their own systems? The first case will mostly be used for smaller document-bases where the translations are done without help of external translators. The last case requires exporting the content and providing it to the system of the translator, and importing it again after the translation is finished.

• do translations happen continuously as documents are created, or do translations happen in batch, e.g. once every few months. The first is useful for normal websites, the second for product manuals that only need to be updated for each release.

Scenario: use of external translation agency + do translations in batch:

• Content in reference language is written in Daisy

• Content is exported from Daisy to a set of files using the translation management import and export.

• Since daisy helps you keep track of which documents have had changes, you can export only what is needed.

• Files are provided to translation agency (via a webservice, FTP upload, email, ...)

• workflow within the translation agency: files are segmented, translation memory is used to prepare the translation, human translator finishes the work.

• Get back translated files, import them into Daisy

In this scenario, there is no need for use of workflow within Daisy, except maybe for review. There only needs to be a person responsible for triggering the export to the translation agency and doing the import when the results come back.

Scenario: translation work is done in Daisy (continuously or in batch):

• content is written in reference language

• translation work can be triggered in multiple ways:

• author or another person starts workflow task when a translation is desired

• pull: translator checks uses the wiki's translation management tool to find out which translation work to be done (missing & out-of-date translations). This can be enough for simple cases where the work does not need to be devided between multiple persons.

• push: a process regularly queries for missing translations and creates workflow tasks.

• How do we know which translation work needs to be done? There are a number of scenarios:

• One scenario is that an article gets written just once, a translation workflow is started, and once that's done, everything is finished. If the source variant would change, it is the responsibility of the person's doing those changes to start new translation workflows.

In all of these scenario's it is useful to avoid queueing translation requests twice (e.g. you want to generate a new batch of translation work while the previous batch is still being processed).  You can use syncedWith=>lastModified > [last export time] in your query to export only documents which have been changed since your previous export.