Designing DTDs with internationalization in mind.

I am looking for advice in designing DTDs with internationalization in mind.
We encountered the following problem (among others):
<P>At the beginning of each Service Call, perform the <XREF
target-id="InitAct" style="title">.</P>
That could come up in the final output as either: "At the beginning of each
Service Call, perform the procedure..."
or: "At the beginning of each Service Call, perform the control..."
If translated in French for instance, the "the" of "perform should be
translated either with "la": "Au début de chaque appel Service, effectuer la
procédure..."
or with "le": "Au début de chaque appel Service, effectuer le controle..."

So, if the translation tool/environment is not WYSIWYG (and speaking of
translation, a lot of translators are free-lance and use cheap SGML
editor,... like TextPad!), it is impossible to translate.
I am sure that there are different ways of dealing with this kind of
problem. But I was wondering if there is somewhere a discussion group, a
book, ... a web site on how to avoid this kind of situation and how to
design DTDs with localization in mind. Also related, I found (in particular
in XML/XSL, but also SGML and stylesheet) that the issue of where some
"text" should go (in the XML instance file or in the XSL file) is not
obvious. And if it is not well designed, you could end-up with the
equivalent of dynamic messaging which is difficult (if not impossible) to
translate...

François RICHARD
Xerox Corporation - MC&SE
Web & Translation Systems
EMail:   Francois.M.Richard@usa.xerox.com
Intelnet: 8*222 8439
Phone:  1.716.422 8439
Fax:      1.716.422 7832

Received on Monday, 11 January 1999 08:39:02 UTC