Innovative on the road: Michael Müller Verlag with its production framework for travel guides
Several years ago, we set up an XLIFF process for Michael Müller Verlag, a publisher of individual travel guides, which still enables them to translate travel guides based on Word 2003.
You will find out why this is the case and what is behind it in the next sections.
Who is Michael Müller Verlag and what was the project about?
Michael Müller founded the publishing house in 1979 to pass on his experiences as a backpacker. It is above all the realistic, subjective and evaluative information away from the tourist routes that has made Michael Müller Verlag what it is today: one of the market leaders in the travel guide segment, publishing one of the most popular travel book series on the German book market.
MMV's travel guides are available as printed books, as an APP and as e-books - and have been since 2008, long before e-books became a common publication format.
This entire publishing program is created from a production environment developed by the publisher itself.
At the center of this production environment is Microsoft Word in version Word 2003.
In order to continue publishing in this environment and, above all, to ensure that the downstream translation process of the travel guides into various languages can function, c-rex.net supports the publisher with conversion services on demand.
Read how it all began and what role c-rex.net DTS and the XLIFF format play in it.
How it all began
At our first meeting many years ago, the founder of the publishing house, Michael Müller, told us about the beginnings of travel guide publication.
After writing many simple macros myself, I started building my own development team in 2007, working on a "travel guide operating system" as a kind of CMS for print, e-book and cell phones. To date, we have built a bundle of software modules as a production framework.
Word OPS: Online Publishing System (means online with Word)
This is a Word-Add-On for semantic tagging based on Custom XML that assigns a unique ID to each tag.
This module represents the main functionality of the MMV framework. Back in 2007, work began on binding unique IDs to custom XML to implement mapping of content from Word to an SQL database. This allows multiple metadata to be bound to each selected text.
CGS: Collaborative geo-information system
With this web service, the authors the travel guides (at home or on the road) have to prove the correct location of the POIs (Point of Interests) mentioned in the travel guides on an OSM map or satellite view.
Digital publisher
This module merges the CGS information with the Word-XML, including the semantic tags.
This is done according to the rules of Custom XML-Tags, which denote unique IDs for the e-book or app content. It is possible to generate an e-book container or SQLite database for use within an app.
App production: mmtravel App
Already available since 2008 for Nokia, since 2010 for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, since 2015 with a continuous integration workflow according to the one-source philosophy based on .Net/Xamarin.
These are the four main components of the production environment at MMV:
The remarkable thing from our point of view: Michael Müller recognized the importance of single source publishing and semantic content tagging at a very early stage. The system was programmed, maintained and further developed with a lot of own work. It is still used today for the creation and regular revision of travel and hiking guides.
And from this context comes the explanation for sticking with Word 2003.
Markus Müller explains: Because Word Custom
XML was discontinued in 2010 due to patent difficulties with the Canadian company i4i, we are still stuck with Word 2003. for our production. Microsoft's ... expensive blunder hit us, too, of course. After all, we had already invested several years of development into the project.
And this is where we at c-rex.net came in.
The role of c-rex.net
The guides are translated into different languages using the Translation Memory Tools SDL Trados.
At some point, Trados no longer supported Word 2003 's Custom XML Tags. There were quite a few errors or data loss when reading the data. Understandable, because why would a translation system continue to support something that no longer existed? Especially when this information was in a very old data format?
A solution had to be found, and one that did not involve a complete change to the publishing environment, but one that could get the translation sub-process working again.
Automated content preparation and conversion to XLIFF as a solution
Content in Word 2003 can be saved as an XML document. And with that, the c-rex.net DTS standard solution can be used for translation.
As for any other XML-based format, we prepare the content accordingly and define rules for conversion to XLIFF format using the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS).
We take into account whether content (e.g. information for the point of interest) may be translated or not, and that we generate a clean and valid structure for the TMS.
XLIFF is supported by every TMS as a data format - and this format solved the problems.
Conclusion
By a simple intermediate step in the translation process, the transformation of a complex data structure into a simple structure suitable for translation, c-rex.net has solved a major problem for MMV without calling into question the entire publication system or having an extension developed in the 5-digit EURO range. MMV now uses c-rex.net DTS, a cost-effective solution based on the pay-per-use principle.
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