Most of the technical pain with FrameMaker translation into or from an Asian language is definitely caused by the fonts. Although FrameMaker is a rather easy to translate format (thanks to focussing a bit more on content than on layout), it deserves raised eyebrows for not supporting Unicode. What you end up having to do is to map the western fonts to a suitable Asian font. What's good for DTP people creates two problems for a translation provider: one issue you might get with special symbols that your client used (say for bullet points), which may be overlooked by the font mapping process. You often end up with "funny" bullet points or the occasional strange looking character in you publication. The other problem is that you might need translate the whole book if you want to get cross-reference right.

From a tool perspective, the Trados workflow seems rather complex and requires a fair bit of preparation (although the tips provided by Trados are useful indeed). The main problem, I feel, is to work on converted extractions from FrameMaker. There is nothing wrong with those "STF" files Trados creates - but they are easy to corrupt. For example if you think "ah - that is a RTF file, so I can translate it using my own tool (like SDLX or Deja Vu). Well... yes and no.. your problem will be the font-mapping, because you'd have to do that using Trados (and the Trados help files about the Font mapper, by the way, are not extremely comprehensive - to some extend they basically say: Instructions for Font Mapping: Use this Trados Fontmapper to map the fonts).

Anyway - I really like Deja Vu's performance with MIF files. You work from the MIF file directly and you can use the rather intuitive FontMapper that comes with DV. The other thing I liked was the way Deja Vu found translatable cross-references, which Trados had in a separate auxiliary file. But whatever tool you use: you just wouldn't be able to do without...