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

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Mining organizations can indeed leverage DITA’s robust support for multilingual content delivery to reach a global audience effectively. DITA provides features and practices that facilitate the creation, management, and delivery of content in multiple languages.

Localization Through Specialization

DITA allows organizations to create specialized content for different languages while maintaining a common structure. This is achieved through specialization, where language-specific elements and attributes can be defined. For instance, if a mining company wants to provide equipment manuals in English, Spanish, and French, they can create language-specific specializations to handle variations in terminology, sentence structure, or cultural nuances. This ensures that the content resonates with the target audience in each language while maintaining a consistent overall structure.

Translation Management Systems (TMS) Integration

Integration with Translation Management Systems (TMS) is another way DITA supports multilingual content delivery. TMS tools help manage the translation workflow efficiently. DITA documents can be exported to TMS systems for translation by professional linguists. Once translated, the content can be seamlessly imported back into the DITA environment. This integration streamlines the translation process and ensures that translated content is correctly incorporated into the documentation structure.

Example:

Here’s an example of how DITA allows for language specialization:


<topic id="equipment_manual" spec-lang="en">
  <title>Equipment Manual</title>
  <body>
    <section>
      <title>Operation</title>
      <p>This is an English version of the content...</p>
    </section>
  </body>
</topic>

<topic id="equipment_manual" spec-lang="es">
  <title>Manual de Equipo</title>
  <body>
    <section>
      <title>Operación</title>
      <p>Esta es una versión en español del contenido...</p>
    </section>
  </body>
</topic>

In this example, two versions of the same topic are created, one in English and one in Spanish, using the spec-lang attribute to indicate the language specialization.