The Localization Consultant Amid His Buckets

After a few hours hunched over Beyond Compare, I've sorted the deltas between version 3.9 and version 4 into several buckets:

1. New Content, based on filenames appearing for the first time in this version - 718 files
   
2. Content Unchanged, except for the datestamp at the bottom of the page - 727 files
   
3. Content Changed, but with changes that do not require translation (HTML tags, formatting) - 1517 files
   
4. Other, including content with translatable changes and anything else - 319 files
   

My hope is that the vendor can hand off to the Japanese translators only those pages in which there is real translation work, then internally take care of #2 and #3 with search-and-replace and other engineering techniques to bring the 3.9 pages into parity with the 4.0 pages. For that matter, I could probably do the engineering myself, except that: 1) it's boring work; and 2) the vendor needs to update translation memory with the results.

We'll see how this goes. It doesn't help that the original English files have a lot of formatting errors in them, and that errors in the Perl scripts wipe out the content on several dozen pages and toss them into the CHM blank.