What keeps me up at night? Nothing related to localization, although Client A's API reference often makes me wake up earlier than I'd like.
In five years we've come a long way in localizing it.
There's ROI to localization, but not necessarily to every facet of localization.
In five years we've come a long way in localizing it.
- Back when it was only a few hundred pages, Tech Pubs maintained it in FrameMaker and published it as a PDF. Localization was a headache because Acrobat played up with some of the characters in Chinese.
- It got too fat for that, so they dumped the PDF and went from FrameMaker to HTML to CHM using WebWorks. WebWorks was a localization nightmare, so I was glad when they outgrew that.
- Then they authored in RoboHelp and went straight into HTML/CHM. That was a little better, but Asian support in later versions of RoboHelp was elusive or costly or both.
- Now Tech Pubs doesn't do any writing in the API Ref. They maintain about a dozen Perl scripts for extracting HTML files (over 3000 now) from text-based header files, then compiling a CHM.
There's ROI to localization, but not necessarily to every facet of localization.