title_body: How to manage translations when self-publishing (in-house translation)? I intend to publish a book in Kindle in both English and Japanese.  Right now, I have the English version written in a Microsoft Word document.  I would like to start translating the Japanese version soon (while the English version is still being worked on).
  
  Is there any software or generally accepted method for managing this process?  I'll be doing the translation myself with the help of an editor, but I'm afraid that I'll start losing track of things when changes are made to the English version (i.e., such changes won't be reflected in the Japanese version).
  
  One option would be to wait until the English version is 100% complete, but I'm wondering if there are any effective methods for translating while the "original" is still in development.
upvoted_answer: I recommend you consider to move to an explicit mark-up system (LaTeX, reST/Sphinx) that allow you to:
  
  
  split the work in smaller files that are automatically combined
  use revision control (Mercurial) on the files so you can see what changed between versions (roll-back of changes, easy differencing, have multiple people work on the same file with conflict resolution support)
  have the possibility to include more extensive comments (that will never show up in a printed version).
  
  
  You can continue to edit the files in word, you should just not use its What-You-See-Is-All-You've-Got features for layout and styling.
  
  This might seem overhead if you never used tools like LaTeX/Sphinx. Having persistent predictable output is something that will be invaluable for anything serious (more than 10 pages I would say). I have seen academics trying to do their thesis in Word (and more recently LibreOffice) and be driven up-the-wall by documents breaking after a section or picture was moved around or missing hyphens while exporting to PDF.
  
  Revision control systems like Mercurial allow you to save often, mark specific revision and compare those against the latest (or each other) and push your whole writing effort to a (private) remote copy of the full repository (with all the revisions) in an efficient way. This is much quicker than keeping track of revisions by hand ( e.g. saving as book_20131225.docx) or making off-site backups in any other way.
  
  The people at TeX-LaTeX StackExchange are very helpful and for revision control you can ask on StackOverflow.