Hi. I am using Inkscape to create diagrams for technical documentation. I need to prepare the documentation for translation/localization and I want to make the text in the diagrams as easy to translate as possible.

Does anyone have experience translating diagram text in Inkscape? Is there a standard way to handle this?

One suggestion I received is to add a separate layer for all text. I tried that, and it certainly keeps the text rooted in a separate element, but I'm not sure how much easier this will make translating. Would you expect different languages to be in separate layers, which could be selectively hidden to produce different versions of an output bitmap image?

Thanks for your help!

Peter

That's how I have done it here: https://github.com/Moini/Linux-Flyer

It's a bit annoying that you cannot group texts with the objects that contain them this way, so you'd have to move each text in each layer if something in the base image changed. But you may have to rearrange translated texts anyway, because they vary in size.

There's also something called 'switch', that would allow you to display different languages on different systems. Inkscape doesn't support this currently, I think, you'd have to add this manually: http://tutorials.jenkov.com/svg/switch-element.html - but this is only relevant if you want to use the translated svg in a dynamical environment - e.g. on a web page, use the same file, but show different texts for different visitors.