In order to provide high quality multilingual translation services, simply having a team of professional localisation experts is not enough. The choice of the right authoring tool and content development processes play a significant role as well.
Choosing the right authoring tools not only makes the translation itself more efficient, it also cuts processing time and costs. For a long time, Adobe RoboHelp was the tool of choice among help authoring tools. Recently, however, a strong competitor has emerged and is swiftly gaining: MadCap Flare.
MadCap Flare is an effective tool for multilingual authoring and publishing of Help systems and other document formats.
Here you can find the main benefits of MadCap Flare:
Industry standard markup language and easier translation workflow
MadCap Flare offers a completely open architecture and stores all content and project files into pure and compliant eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format.
This means end users can easily share, add, remove and edit content and project files in MadCap Flare.
Since all Flare project level files are in XML, an entire project can be sent out for translation, rather than just the output. Furthermore, the XML format makes all Flare projects and source files compatible with most of the leading computer-aided translation tools, allowing translation service providers to easily use any existing translation process that may have in place.
Easier localisation workflow and lower localisation costs
MadCap’s unicode-based environment is not affected by the choice of a language and offers easy and efficient localisation into many languages. The output is user friendly and ensures equally high quality for all languages.
Flare also comes with several built-in tools for team collaboration that make it highly efficient for big scope translation projects.
Furthermore, the tool includes a snippet library or reusable content that can be indexed and reused. This ensures consistency and significantly decreases localisation costs.
Minimising desktop and print publishing costs
MadCap Flare offers a high level of control when designing documents. The software offers full Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) support and can use external and multiple CSS files for different components, as well as CSS mediums (specify different style data for on-screen or print usage).
MadCap supports high end image and vector graphics and offers several options for content creation according to user requirements: print-ready PDF, desktop, web, and even mobile ready.
With all these advantages, MadCap Flare offers the best flexibility with the least amount of specialised technical knowledge and significantly minimizes publishing costs.
MadCap Lingo: Flare’s translation memory application
One of Flare’s greatest benefits is its Translation Memory (TM) application: Lingo. It can translate content created in many different formats and provides TM and terminology databases management. The integration of Flare and Lingo make the movement of content to and from translation much more efficient.
A well planned MadCap Flare project can significantly reduce the time and costs of translation and localisation processes when compared to other tools of the kind.
EVS Translations supports Flare projects from the start to the end.
Still, should you have a project in another format, EVS Translations can still help. We can process any file format and create any output that the client requires. For example, if you have a translation project in RoboHelp, we can either convert your files to Flare or translate your RoboHelp files directly.
