THL Toolbox > Essays> JIATS Pre-Conversion Markup Procedures
JIATS Pre-Conversion Markup Processes
Contributor(s): Alison Melnick
JIATS XML Markup: Pre-Conversion Markup Processes
The following processes and steps are listed in descending order from those that take the highest percentage of time in the process.
When marking up a JIATS article for XML conversion, the most time is spent creating a glossary table for the article itself. The glossary table lists all foreign language terms found in the article, their source languages, and a descriptive categorization for the type of term (proper name, place, organization, etc). When the article is converted to XML format, the glossary table serves as the source of all markup for non-English terms. (English-language terms are marked up individually in the word document before conversion.) The markup process becomes more complex when an author uses multiple terms with the same English translation, or multiple English translations for the same term. The amount of time this takes will vary depending on whether there is a pre-existing glossary table for the article (in which case the table must be checked for accuracy and missing words must be added to it), or if the table is being created from scratch. Regardless, this is the most time-intensive part of the markup process.
A related step is the conversion of differently transliterated Tibetan terms into the standard Wylie format. Frequently authors will use other non-Wylie transliteration, or Wylie transliteration with different capitalization (such as capitalizing the root letter of a syllable). This step requires going through and locating all occurrences of the term, making sure they are made to be uniformly Wylie, and then checking to be sure that the glossary table (if one has already been created for the article) also has the standard Wylie spelling. Most frequently, consultation between the author and the person doing markup will occur in the process of figuring out specific translations for terms found in the article.
Correction of errata is another issue that takes a significant amount of time for each article. This includes changing straight quotes to smart quotes, making sure transliterated a chung (’) are facing the correct direction, removing extra carriage returns, etc.
The actual markup in the word document itself (for English language terms, author names, bibliographic entries, etc) takes very little time. Since this step merely requires a universal search at the first occurrence of a term, and then replacing terms with the necessary marked up versions, it is the simplest part of the process.
