A simple challenge to you: How do you alphabetically sort your translated XML or HTML content?
I’ve been to many L10n/I18n conferences, workshops, and sales events, and have read many, many articles in various industry publications over the years. And yet, when it comes to the part when you’re supposed to tell everyone how you alphabetically sorted all that translated HTML and XML that was so wonderfully handled by the best in modern technology, everybody ducks.
Why? The reason I suspect is that there are no out-of-the box solutions out there that really work for every language anyway, and when it comes to the sorting part, well then it’s down to human intervention? Am I right?
So, how do you do it? Assume you’re translating HTML and need to resort an alphabetically sorted index or glossary for an online manual. How do you proceed? Is there a tool you use? Or is it a manual process? How much does this process cost?
Do you translate XML? How do you sort the transformed content? Do you render it from the XML file directly? Use a database? XSLT? Do it the hard way? Ever used the index-sort-as element in DITA? Again, assume I want a sorted index or glossary.
What do you recommend? If you have examples and details, let us know and I’ll record them here. Or even better, write an article about how you alphabetically sort your content and submit it for publication in Multilingual.
