Unveiling Linguistic Harmony: Asserting Interlingual Synchronicity in Documents

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.