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HCMC Journal

PWFC 2025-10-06 to 2025-10-10

to : Martin Holmes
Minutes: 1180

On Monday, started the initial integration of some translations into the XML. The very first document threw up a number of issues. I re-encoded the forme works in the original using CSS flex, which is really the only way to handle forme works reliably, then integrated the translations. The image for the document was missing from the server, so I named and placed it there, then implemented a <prefixDef> to handle server links to images. Then I added thumbnails linking to the original image to the proofing output so that it’s easier to see the document you’re working on. I fixed a bunch of other CSS and rendering issues at the same time, and added a feature to turn on and off specific languages in the proofing view of the document. Then I shared this progress with AN and KH, and got their feedback and some corrections to my encoding. Then worked on a second document, and discovered another wrinkle: the <foreign> element carries @xml:lang but is not to be hidden or shown except when its surrounding language is. This required more tweaks to the XSLT and CSS.

On Tuesday, modified the encoding of another document with complex forme works to provide another example, and then turned to integrating a third translation, this time an English-Japanese one. After encoding that one, with some tweaks to the original encoding, I entered this progress into the workflow spreadsheet, and then backed up that spreadsheet.

On Wednesday, integrated a typical wrapped multi-component <fw> element into the <rendition>/@rendition schema components, and added documentation. Then encoded a bunch more examples; there are about 137 remaining cases of <fw> elements which may require this wrapping in the current texts. I also address the issue of <abbr>/<expan> combinations, through XSLT and CSS (in a very simple way for now), and corrected quite a bit of bad encoding I found. Finally, I discovered that of the documents linked to page-images, many are linked to unreadably low-res images for some reason. Wrote the KH and AB to find out how these images were generated; we will need to replace them. Then worked on integrating a longer translation, and came up with a number of questions, some specific to this translation, others more general with bearing on the process of translation integration.

On Thursday, worked with AN to go through the longer translation and surface some of the more interesting issues. We both fixed aspects of the transcription and translation, and I made a number of improvements to the HTML rendering. Then I sent an email to the team to kick off the discussion of translation strategies and policies, which this document helps to bring to the fore. Lots of emails on arrangements for hirings and onboardings.

On Friday, laid out more proposals for translation workflow in an email, and then worked on enhancing the rendering of proofing views of documents, adding appendix content, making links work as popups from the appendix through JS, tweaking lots of CSS, and adding default handling for all the TEI elements encountered, instead of letting them fall through by default. I think we are now in a much better position to create documents for translators to work with.