How do healthcare organizations handle terminology translation and localization in DITA?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Healthcare organizations face the challenge of handling terminology translation and localization in DITA to make their medical content accessible to a global audience while maintaining precision and consistency. Translation and localization are essential for ensuring that medical documents can be understood and utilized by healthcare professionals, patients, and researchers across different languages and regions. DITA provides effective mechanisms to address this challenge.

One common practice in healthcare organizations is to create separate DITA topics for each language or locale. For instance, if a document needs to be available in English, Spanish, and French, there will be individual DITA topics for each language version. Each DITA topic contains translated and localized content specific to that language or region, ensuring linguistic and cultural appropriateness. The use of language-specific topics facilitates content management, updates, and translation reviews.

Example:

Here’s an example of how healthcare organizations create separate DITA topics for translation and localization. Suppose a healthcare organization needs to provide a patient information guide in English and Spanish. Two separate DITA topics, “patient-information-en.dita” and “patient-information-es.dita,” are created. Each topic contains content translated and localized for the respective language. This structure simplifies content management for different language versions.

<topic id="patient-information-en">
  <title>Patient Information</title>
  <body>
    <p>This is the English version of the patient information guide.</p>
    <p>It contains all the relevant medical information in English.</p>
  </body>
</topic>

<topic id="patient-information-es">
  <title>Información para el Paciente</title>
  <body>
    <p>Esta es la versión en español de la guía de información para el paciente.</p>
    <p>Contiene toda la información médica relevante en español.</p>
  </body>

In this example, two separate DITA topics are used for the English and Spanish versions of the patient information guide, allowing healthcare organizations to provide content tailored to different language-speaking audiences.