Draft

1.2 (2019-02-09)

Translation Notes

This is a draft specification. It is likely that changes will still be made before the final specification.

This page provides tips for people translating Mallard pages into other languages. Mallard was designed with localization in mind, and contains many features designed to support translation. Some of these features should be handled automatically by translation tools. See Internationalization Notes for more information.

Inline Markup

Mallard provides inline markup elements to support common needs in software documentation. Sometimes the markup in the original language is unnecessary in your language, or your language might need additional markup.

The em element emphasizes text. Mallard does not provide separate element for different semantic uses of emphasis, such as foreign words, introductions of terms, and titles of publications. In some languages, these uses don't all use font variations like italics. Non-latin scripts usually don't even have italics, although it is becoming more common to use an oblique font or other variant in those scripts.

If your language does not use italics or other font variants for a particular type of emphasis, you should leave out the em tag altogether and replace it with the correct text. For example, if the title of a publication is emphasized as <em>The Mallard Book</em>, but your language puts publication titles in quotations, you should replace this with «The Mallard Book», 『The Mallard Book』, or similar.

© 2011 Shaun McCance
cc-by-sa 3.0 (us)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

As a special exception, the copyright holders give you permission to copy, modify, and distribute the example code contained in this document under the terms of your choosing, without restriction.

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