Translating an English Dreamweaver Project into Chinese

[Scotty_B]

I create technical documentation for complex machines. I author illustrated procedures in Dreamweaver CS4, and deliver them in a "web site" that runs on a manufacturing plant's network.

I have managed many translations into Spanish. My approach is to give a native translator my English Dreamweaver files along with a copy of Spanish Dreamweaver and have them recreate the original English project in Spanish Dreamweaver. This has been an easy and successful approach.

Now I have clients that want me to do a project and translate it into Chinese (Hunan Province). I called Adobe and asked if they had a version of Chinese Dreamweaver, and they said no. I asked if the Simplified Chinese Updater 4.04 would allow me to create a Chinese version of the project I created in English Dreamweaver and they said they didn't know.

I already have the English procedures authored, and I have been assigned Chinese engineers from the plant who are willing to do the translation.

Is there a way for me to replace my English text in Dreamweaver with Chinese Characters? How would I get them to be in the correct places for a Chinese person to read?

[bagih]

如果没有理解错的话，是将你的程序作品翻译成简体中文吗？

[Scotty_B]

I could not read what you wrote. I copied it and pasted it below so you could see what I saw:

如果没有理解错的话，是将你的程序作品翻译成简体中文吗？

[bagih]

Sorry, just reply that the Chinese language.
: Do you mean that the project translated into Chinese? If it is, I can help you.
Automatic translation is the Chinese people can not be accepted. Only human translation was the most accurate.

[LifeinAsia]

We went through a similar issue several years ago when we were doing a project for a company in 3 languages with weekly updates (Korean, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese). We received the translation files then copied/pasted into the templates.

We took the default templates then added comments for where to put each section. Something like:
<!-- [SECTION A START] -->

<!-- [SECTION A END] -->

Each week, one of the employees would copy the template to the new file name (different name each week for archival purposes), then cut & paste the translated texts into the appropriate sections. None of the employees working on the project could read Chinese, but they could see exactly where it should go. (Of course, the translations also had similar section amrkers!)

What you really need to be careful about with Chinese is that you can often get garbage when cutting/pasting (similar to the issue you see with bagih's post). The best method we found was to save the Word files we received into ASCII .txt files, then cut & paste into DreamWeaver from the ASCII files.

[Scotty_B]

Thanks for the advice!

It sounds like the approach you used was to:
1. Develop your original project in Dreamweaver (English)
2. Translate it into Simplified Chinese using MS Word
3. Save the Word files as ASCII.txt files, and paste them into Dreamweaver (English) in the correct places.

I was planning to give my translator a copy of Chinese Simplified Dreamweaver CS4 and have them translate my original English material directly into that tool. That same basic approach worked great for the Spanish translations we did, and I was hoping to replicate that success.

Does anyone have experience working with Chinese Simplified Dreamweaver CS4?
Would the translation effort be easier using Chinese Simplified Dreamweaver CS4 or MS Word?
If Word is better, would I need to give my translators MS Chinese Simplified Word 2007?

Thanks in advance for responding.

[LifeinAsia]

They can probably use any word processor for the translation. Most likely, they already have one that they use and are comfortable with. Just save the file into ASCII format before cutting & pasting into DW.