Counting Costs

For the Windows applications, the Documentation department provides context-sensitive Help at the dialog-box level (no field-level Help), printed user guides, and on-line versions of the user guides in WinHelp format.

For the UNIX administrator and programmer, the Documentation department provides only printed user guides.

The Documentation department has been asked to coordinate translation. No one in the department (or the company) knows anything about translation.

Issue

1. The Documentation manager writes, "If you can't translate everything-context-sensitive Help, printed user guides, on-line user guides, and administrative/ programming guides-what will give you the biggest bang for your buck?" In asking this question, the manager wonders whether the answer differs depending on the marketplace (e.g., does the European market prefer on-line documentation? what about the Japanese?)
2. How do you confirm that the results of the translation meet your requirements? The Documentation manager writes, "Our only idea at this time is to have someone here who speaks French or German check out the translated results. The trouble is, finding people like that, who have the time to do a thorough job. To put this issue another way: we could pay a lot of money and the translated versions could be terrible, and we wouldn't know until the product had been in the marketplace for months. How do we avoid that?"
3. Once the initial translation work is done, the Documentation manager assumes that the translation vendor would do incremental updates for future releases. "Are there suggestions for how to manage this process? For example, how do most translation vendors expect to receive these changes?"

Address each issue in detail. Consider whether some or all of the questions are valid. Offer feedback and suggest solutions. Also consider suggesting how the Documentation manager and his staff might educate themselves in issues relating to international technical communcation.

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