[Journal] Translation of the journal

[Paul Kelly]

Hello everyone

On Tue, 29 May 2007, Jacolin Yves wrote:

> One package must be added in the document source which manage all the article
> (ie OSGeoJournal_vol1.tex), it's the babel package (change "Biblography"
> to "Bibliographie", "chapter" to "chapitre" to give some french exemples).
>
> Do you think that hyphens dictionaries are link to this package?

I've just been reading through the documentation for the babel package and 
I see that yes, it includes the hyphenation and should do everything 
needed. I think the source file encoding issue is a red herring - it is 
barely mentioned at all in the documentation and I think it is irrelevant:
you still have to put in accented characters using escape codes. There are 
two extra macros for quotes: \og and \fg for formatting French "guillemet" 
quote characters correctly. And it also does the figure/caption names in 
French and adjusts the spacing of a few things to conform with French 
standards.

As far as I can make out though you don't need to translate chapter into 
chapitre or anything like that - I think all the translation needs to do 
is change the actual article text and titles and leave the structural / 
layout commands exactly the same - that way the layout of the translated 
editions will be as close as possible to the original.

Another option would be to only load the hyphenation patterns with 
\begin{hyphenrules}{\french} at the start of the document (i.e. not load 
the full babel package), and keep all the spacing rules exactly the same 
as with the American English version - it might preserve the original 
layout slight more exactly but I don't think going that far is really 
necessary - using the babel package to automatically adjust the formatting 
to make the layout more appealing to French readers is more important 
IMHO.

So it looks like what Martin suggests is all that needs to be done, apart 
from of course escaping quote characters correctly. And I would guess the 
translated versions should have perhaps a box on one of the pages where 
there is currently blank space, explaining that this is a translated 
version, all the authors listed are the orginial authors and this edition 
has been translated into the XXXX language by the XXXX translation team, 
with a list of members. Or something like that.

I suppose this opens the way now for multi-lingual authors to submit 
versions of their article in different languages now?? Maybe if their 
native language is not English it would result in a better-reading article 
if a native English speaker translated it? But I would guess there would 
always have to be an English version submitted because of the review 
process and for the use of the editorial team operating in English, or ???

Paul