Can educational organizations leverage DITA’s support for multilingual content delivery?

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Educational organizations can effectively leverage DITA’s support for multilingual content delivery to provide educational materials in various languages and reach a global audience. DITA’s structured approach to content creation and management makes it well-suited for managing multilingual educational content efficiently.

Modular Content for Reusability

DITA allows educational organizations to create content in a modular fashion, where content components, such as topics and snippets, can be reused across different documents and languages. This modular approach simplifies the localization process, as translated content can replace specific modules while keeping the rest of the document intact. By maintaining content in reusable components, organizations can ensure consistency and reduce translation costs.

Language Attributes for Localization

In DITA, language-specific attributes, such as xml:lang, can be applied to content components to specify the language in which they are written. This language attribute helps localization teams identify which content needs translation, allowing them to focus on translating only the relevant parts while leaving the rest of the content unchanged. Here’s an example of how xml:lang can be applied to a DITA topic to indicate its language:


<topic id="chapter1">
  <title xml_lang="en-US">Chapter 1: Introduction</title>
  <body xml_lang="en-US">
    <p>This is the introduction to the topic.</p>
  </body>
  <body xml_lang="fr-FR">
    <p>C'est l'introduction au sujet.</p>
  </body>
</topic>

In this example, the xml:lang attribute specifies that the content exists in both English (en-US) and French (fr-FR), allowing educational organizations to manage multilingual content efficiently and deliver it to diverse audiences.