Best CAT for DITA? | Different options

Forum: CAT Tools Technical Help
Topic: Best CAT for DITA?
Poster: Rodolfo Raya
Post title: Different options

Hi,

Maxprograms has three tools that handle DITA:

• XLIFF Manager converts your DITA files to XLIFF and back. If you use XLIFF Manager, you can translate your XLIFF files in any CAT tool.


• Fluenta allows you to process recurrent DITA translation projects. It generates XLIFF for you and keeps track of previously translated DITA files. it has an internal TM engine that retrieves matches from the DITA project. You can use any CAT tool to translate the XLIFF files generated by Fluenta.


• Swordfish IV is a CAT tool that can translate DITA files.

All tools mentioned above use OpenXLIFF Filters to process DITA files. This library is able to handle the most problematic aspects of DITA:

• Retrieve all translatable text from all topic files mentioned in the main DITA map


• Text referencing using "conref" attributes


• Text referencing using "keys" with support for "keyref", "conkeyref" and all key-based attributes


• Conditional text inclusion using "ditaval" files (Swordfish does not use "ditaval" files)

When you receive a DITA map, you should use it to harvest the translatable content from the associated set of topics. If you can't start with the map, you will have to deal with individual topic files, probably a lot of small files.

If a CAT tool does not resolve text references via "conref" or keys, you will have to translate without context and that means that you may produce gender or quantity related errors or simply wrong verb inflections.

Also, if you can't do conditional filtering with "ditaval" files, you may end translating things that you should not touch.

Hope this helps,
Rodolfo