Participating Frequently

Question

Compare FM manuals, extract new content for translation and merge the translated content back

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 11, 2021
5 replies
282 views

Hello, Framers!!

Quick question:
I have a huge English FM User Manual (w/ more than 500 pages) and it was translated into Portuguese last year. Today, the English User Manual is updated and I would like to compare both English versions (old x new) and extract the new content for translation. Then, I would like to merge automatically the translated content back into the old Portuguese manual. -- Is it possible? -- Do you know any plugin or script that can handle it?

Thanks in advance!
- Paulo Moreno

This topic has been closed for replies.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Ok, whatever, but how could a company expect a translation not to have those sort of expenses associated with the process? They did it before for version 1 of the Portuguese translation already, right? What sort of magic pixie dust do they think can be sprinkled on the process in round 2???

paulom.dtpAuthor

Participating Frequently

They already paid for full-DTP on round-1 and they don't want to spend the same money to DTP the whole manual again on round-2, because only some specific parts of the manual were changed, but thanks for your time trying to help me with this. I really appreciate it. 🙂

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

What's to automate? Just run the book update and you're probably done - you had to do the same thing with the new English version, what's the difference?

paulom.dtpAuthor

Participating Frequently

When you translate text into another language it tends to expand or contract, taking up more or less space than the original layout. Translating English into other languages normally results in text expansion, which means your text will take up more physical space and you may also need to adjust your formatting (line breaks, spacing, etc.)

The more complex your layouts are, the more susceptible they’ll be to breaking due to text expansion or other variations in the DTP translation Grid designs are particularly fragile and any design without much whitespace to work with can cause problems. That is the case for manuals that carry several images or a specific layout. This type of files usually requires desktop publishing (DTP). In the translation industry, desktop publishing means formatting documents correctly after they have been translated.

The need for DTP varies, with some projects requiring little or not DTP at all, while other with complex formatting requiring many hours of work (which is the case here).

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Ok, I'm confused - what are you talking about? You have the content in 2 FM versions - English & Portuguese - the English FM content has been updated. You send them the new English FM content (in ways as described by Winfried - the translation company will tell you what they want); they do the compare & translate the differences. They then stick the translated differences into a new copy of the prior Portuguese content & send it all back to you. You bring that back into FM & you're done! Publish away!

paulom.dtpAuthor

Participating Frequently

The process is exactly what you mentioned, but after create the new Portuguese manual in FrameMaker it will be necessary to perform the post-translation formatting step before publish the manual. Unfortunately, the client is using unstructured FrameMaker documents and I understand it is not possible to fully automate the post-translation formatting step, right?

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Umm, that's what he said - they already paid for the full doc set to be translated last year, correct? The translation company would have that "version" in a translation memory file with the English source. Now you send them the new English source content, and they do the comparison to see what the differences are that require translating. You only pay for the differences, not a complete re-translation of the new source material.

paulom.dtpAuthor

Participating Frequently

Exactly, Jeff!! The translation company will charge only the differences in terms of translation, but it will be necessary to re-do the DTP of 500 pages again from scratch and the client does not want to pay for full-DTP.

I remember that I used a tool called "ManualMaker for FrameMaker" many years ago, but it is not available anymore. So, I hope that I can find any other similar tool.

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi Paulo,

This is not FrameMaker's job, but the job of a translation memory system.

Such a system will compare the new source text with the source text from a previous translation project. All text which was already translated will be inserted. You will have to pay for this pretranslation, but usually about 10 % of the costs for new sentences. (The translator has to check, if references in pretranslated sentences are still correct, or if terminology changed.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translation_memory

When you have files in your book which did not change, your translation agency can tell you and exclude these from the project. Usually files like title, TOC, index, etc. do not need to be translated again.

FM 2020 can also export files to XLIFF. This format can be directly imported into a translation memory system, but the common format is MIF. Just discuss this with your translation agency what they prefer.

When you choose a different agency for this project, you have to ask the first agency for the translation files. Usually something like TMX.

Best regards

Winfried

paulom.dtpAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Winfried!

Thanks for sharing your ideas about CAT tools and TMs, but I forgot to mention that the client does not want to pay full-DTP for the entire manual. They only want to pay the necessary time to update the sections on the existing Portuguese manual where the content was added/removed/changed.

I hope it is clear now.

Thanks,

-P.

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