Jerry Silver, Director, Product Management, XMetaL a Justsystems Company
"Optimizing Multilingual Content Reuse with DITA"

Organizations in both the private and public sector which have the need to publish content in multiple languages are challenged to manage that content in a practical manner. In order to reduce translation costs, these content publishers need to maintain the relationships between source content, translated content, and the published works that contain that content.

Large publishers can save 30-60% or more of their localization costs by managing revisions at a smaller level of granularity than the whole document. In other words, when a change occurs, if only the content that changed is translated, then the publisher avoids "retranslating" content that did not change, thus avoiding translation costs by only paying for words translated the first time vs. words submitted. By translating XML topic-oriented content objects instead of complete formatted documents, publishers can substantially reduce translation job setup charges and desktop publishing charges. Even large publishers that already take advantage of translation memory technology can save 20-40% of their costs by using XML to streamline and automate localization and production workflows.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) has emerged as a powerful new XML-based standard for topic-oriented information development and an important enabler of multilingual content management and reuse. This presentation will introduce the audience to DITA concepts and explain how the architecture can be applied to improving the localization process and reducing translation costs.

Target Audience:
This presentation is suitable for any attendee interested in applying industry standards to improving their localization processes. The focus will be on the business benefits of DITA (and other enabling technologies), although some technical background on the DITA standard will be provided