The Setting
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH (German Technical Cooperation) is a government-owned corporation for international cooperation towards sustainable development with worldwide operations. In more than 130 partner countries in the South and East, GTZ is supporting around 2,700 development projects and programmes, aiming at improving the living conditions and prospects of the people in developing and transformation countries.
As a worldwide active corporation, a common understanding and a uniform use of language is of utmost importance for GTZ. To this end, the "World of Words at GTZ" was compiled, a collection of definitions and explanations of terms specifically important to the work of GTZ. The "World of Words at GTZ" features the five working languages of GTZ.
The Task
To simplify the administration and maintenance of the "World of Words at GTZ" as well as to make updates timely available the public, GTZ opted to change from a printed version of the glossary to an internet publication.
The Solution
mbi GmbH was commissioned to develop an application that would create the corresponding web pages.
As a first step a MS Word macro was programmed that would extract the text passages in the different languages (English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese) into a data base. Subsequently the texts were converted into HTML. The generated pages are provided already in their final layout, ready for publishing on the internet.
Existing hyperlinks, text marks and synonyms are directly adapted and implemented in the HTML format. In addition there is the possibility to index the terms.
