authoring and maintaining multilingual documentation

Question

I need to author and maintain multilingual technical documentation, where each document is made up of some "standard" portions and some specific to the product (industrial equipments): standard portions could be warnings, quotes from laws or regulations, common sentences, or the like.

Each "portion" (i.e. a sentence, a paragraph, an image with its caption, an annotation or a paragraph with an icon) is translated in 13 languages, and each translation should be versioned and completed with references to the author.

Hence each document would result as a "composition" of those portions: a language-specific instance of the document is one using the portions in that specific translation.

Is there any specific technology, standards, or tools for doing that?

Answer 1

The standard is Dita and being it essentially XML-based there is plenty of tools to work with, both standalone XML editors (OxygenXML, XMetal XML, Adobe Framemaker, for full reference: maintained list of editors) and extensions to well-known CMS (Drupal, Joomla) and ECM (Alfresco, MS Sharepoint already have; other like Nuxeo can handle by configuring the XML grammar according to the DITA specs).