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

November 10, 2023
|By Bryan Tipper

Pharmaceutical organizations can indeed leverage DITA’s robust support for multilingual content delivery, enabling them to efficiently create and manage documentation in multiple languages. This capability is vital in the pharmaceutical industry, where accurate and compliant information must be accessible to diverse audiences worldwide.

Language-Neutral Structuring

DITA’s language-neutral approach allows organizations to structure content in a way that separates it from its presentation. This means that content can be authored without language-specific formatting, making it easier to translate and adapt for different markets. Pharmaceutical documentation can use standardized DITA elements, such as <pharmaceutical-name> or <dosage-instruction>, and these elements can be reused across various languages, ensuring consistency in terminology and content structure.

Localization Files

To deliver content in multiple languages, pharmaceutical organizations can create localization files for each target language. These files contain translated versions of the content, tailored to the linguistic and cultural nuances of each audience. By linking these localization files to the original DITA source, organizations can generate documentation in different languages with ease. For example, a document in English can be transformed into German by pulling content from the corresponding localization file for the German market.

Example:

Here’s an example demonstrating how pharmaceutical organizations can leverage DITA for multilingual content delivery:


<topic id="patient_information" xml_lang="en-US">
  <title>Patient Information</title>
  <body>
    <p>ForDrug X**, the recommendeddosageis...

  </body>
</topic>

<localization file="patient_information_de-DE.xml" xml_lang="de-DE">
  <topic id="patient_information">
    <body>
      <p>FürMedikament Xbeträgt die empfohleneDosierung**...

    </body>
  </topic>

In this example, the English content is structured with language-neutral tags, and a separate localization file for German is created. By linking the localization file, pharmaceutical organizations can effortlessly deliver the same content in both English and German, ensuring accessibility to a broader audience.