You take great care to ensure your medical software documentation contains step-by-step instructions on how to use the software, with screenshots. The clarity and readability of these instructions are essential to the end user and the lack thereof could lead to critical and possibly life threatening errors.

It is important that the user interface (UI) terms in the documentation of the software are consistent with the software itself. For example, the documentation may have instructions to:

"Press the Setup button".

The French documentation will say,

"Appuyer sur le bouton Configurer".

However, when the French end user looks on the screen, there is no button that says "Configurer" because the software is in English. The most common way to deal with this is to provide the English UI term with the translation in parentheses immediately following.

"Appuyer sur le bouton Setup (Configurer)."

The French end user now knows what button to look for as well as what it means.

Down the road you may decide to localize the software. In this case, you would need to remove the English UI terms from the documentation and add localized screenshots of the software. For screenshots, you can replace all of the graphics in the graphics folder with the new ones and then go into the document to resize them as necessary. If you took care to make the screenshot dimensions identical to the English, no adjustments would be necessary.

With the UI terms, it will take a desktop publisher time to go through the localized documentation, manually remove all of the English UI terms, and handle the reflow of the document text. However, if you are authoring in Adobe FrameMaker, here's an ideal way to create your English document with localization in mind:

Create and apply one condition to the English UI term, create a copy of the English immediately after and apply a second condition, and then use a third condition for the parentheses around the second instance and the space between. Note, this is one of the few times it is recommended to use multiple conditions in the same sentence.

In this example, the three colors represent the three conditions, the underscore represents a space:

Press the Setup_(Setup) button.

During translation, only the second instance will be translated. This will enable you to use the show/hide conditional text feature to switch between English only (blue), translation only (red), or both (red+blue+green) in the localized document. This provides flexibility and will save time and cost when you are unsure if the software will be localized.