Language Scribing Overview
WCAG AA accessibility requires granular language tagging.
The Well-Formed Document Workflow has a manual method of creating alternate language styles using the ISO codes to create additional language styles. In the Word file, you can create new language styles with the following name pattern.
Pattern In Word: [scmlstyle]@lang=[langcode]
This example shows how the metadata for Spanish language text could be identified in Word and carried through to sam, ScML, and InDesign.
- In Word:
lang-i@lang=es - In sam/ScML:
<lang-i lang="es"> - In InDesign:
lang-i-language-es
If you are more comfortable working in a sam or ScML file, the metadata and lang styles can be added directly there instead. This metadata should round-trip through the Well-Formed Document Workflow. (To extract this info out of InDesign, you must be using Scribe Tools 4.0 or later.)
Scribe recommends having authors Scribe the language information when possible to avoid missing instances of different languages. When this is not possible, the following procedures can be used to find and Scribe the most-common uses of foreign language in English-language books.
Procedure for Language Scribing in Word
- Create the necessary language styles needed for your project in Word.
- Towards the end of the scribing process review all italic text for phrases that have to have language metadata applied. Apply the language styles created.
- If you are aware of non-italic text that needs to have language data applied, you should handle that as well.
Notes: lang-i in bibliographies can prevent the bibliography tools from working as expected. If you expect to use language scribing heavily in the bibliography, we recommend doing so after copyediting instead of before.
Procedure for Language Scribing in Sam
Review Special Characters
Review the special characters list in the Digital Hub for languages that fall outside the Latin alphabet. These can be searched for within Sublime.
Review Character Styles
Review italic terms, various "-i" styles, and various lang terms in a new Sublime file.
Find:
<i>[^<]+</i>|<[^>]+-b?i>[^<]+</[^>]+-b?i>|<lang[^>]*>[^<]+</lang[^>]*>|<[^>]*lang[^>]*>[^<]+</[^>]*>
Copy into new file, permute by unique, remove English text and filter out proper names. Add lang attributes as needed to the original file.
Review Paragraph Styles
Review bq/sl paragraphs in case of full paragraphs in another language.
Find:
<[^>"]*(bq|sl)[^>]*>[^\n]+
Copy into a new file, turn off word wrap, and skim for non-English text.
Review Book-Specific Styles
Certain books such as Bibles or language books may have additional paragraph or character styles that are being used to identify languages. Review additional content for languages based on type of publication.