Balisage Paper: Unveiling Linguistic Harmony: Asserting Interlingual Synchronicity in Documents
Geert Bormans
C-Moria BV
Geert Bormans has long been an angle-bracket jack-of-all-trades. He loves the beauty of a well-architected solution or a pure and simplified process. Geert makes a living as an independent consultant providing XML or Linked Open Data solutions, mainly to the publishing industry. He does so with a broad geographical flexibility. Presently, Geert dedicates a significant portion of his professional time to the publication platform for legislation and official publications of the Swiss Federal administration. Geert likes an interesting challenge. By preference such challenges involve alpine ground, six strings, or markup.
Srikanth Venkata Subramanian
Cognizone BV
Srikanth Venkata Subramanian is a Front End Developer at Cognizone, a leading software development company specializing in Semantic Technologies and Linked Open Data, based in Belgium. Srikanth is a creative and self-starting Front End Developer with 6 years experience in building and maintaining responsive applications in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. He is proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular and React plus modern libraries and frameworks. Srikanth is versed in working in an Agile environment.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. Used with permission.
Abstract
Publishing texts in multiple languages always involves issues of coordination of both content and structure. The Swiss Chancellery must deal with documents in four official languages, and they face special problems in the production of compilations that merge amendments into existing legislation. Although the source documents are prepared in MS Word, they are issued in derivative products such as PDF, HTML, and Akoma Ntoso. To aid coordination between versions, the authors are developing a reporting system that does rule-driven sanity checks on parallel documents, starting with the XML of Akoma Ntoso. Each rule is represented by XSLT processes, and the selection of rules to be applied is controlled by XProc, with the results displayed as messages interpolated into an HTML rendition of the source document.