Translating Indesign files

Well, yes, but only in a limited sense of

>to facilitate the inspection and construction

It has very little to do with your translation question,
i unless
someone writes a program that reads IDML, lets you translate stuff, and writes it back to IDML.

It certainly is not Adobe's answer to your pleas.

Ok. Are these 3rd party solutions needed anymore with InDesign CS4 and IDML. I thought that IDML addressed this problem:

IDML was designed to facilitate the inspection and construction of InDesign content outside of InDesign.

Is my thinking correct?

Chris

If you don't like to script, check this out, trial version is for free:

Sysfilter for Indesign®

Sysfilter for Indesign® enables you to transfer texts from your Indesign files to a word processor of your choice or into XML. After the translation you can use the filter to automatically reinsert the texts into the original document.

Highlights
Automatic transfer of text into XML, to MS Word and other word processors
Different formats for text transfer:
a) MS Word (*.rtf) / Translation-compatible format:

The translator can focus on the translation quality and need not interrupt the workflow to place the tags. The motto of this approach: "What you see is what you get". For example: Tables of the indd file are displayed as tables in the RTF file as well.

b) XML or Tagged Text Format:
The layout information will be preserved almost completely during the import process. If you choose this method the post-layout work will be reduced to a minimum.

Macintosh-compatible Mac INX <-> XML
Compatible with Adobe Indesign® 2.0, 3.0 (CS), CS2 (4), CS3 (5) or CS4 (6)

http://www.ecm-engineering.de/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=23_31&products_id=31&language=en

Well, most of the things you describe are scriptable. I've never found a way to script the process of story-concatenation; it requires too much human judgment to thread the story in logical order. I have the abandoned beginnings of scripts to do this for e.g. trifold brochures, but I decided that the script-dev work would take more time than just linking the stories together myself, even assuming that I'll be spending the next decade linking stories by hand. I've found that my scripting time is better spent in things like pre-import text cleanup scripts, language-specific scripts that force proper punctuation, and the like.

Also, so far as I know, the translator freelancer's version of SDL Trados is *not* free. If there is a free (not a time-limited trial) version of Trados out there, I'd love to hear about it. I could talk your ear off about SDLX here, but unless you're rabid with curiousity, I'll stay on-topic.

I'm currently downloading the StoryTweaker beta; it looks promising, assuming that you don't have any obligation to retain text in a translation memory.

Jose,

which version of InDesign ?

I have tool Export-Import InDesign Texts (for ID CS1 and CS2) - it export all selected Stories to one big RTF document and after translation - reimport it back
http://www.adobescripts.com/search.php?query=exporter&action=results

you can reimport text partialy

if you need it for ID CS3 - tell me

robin

--
www.adobescripts.com

Hi José

Our

http://www.rorohiko.com/storytweaker.html

should do just that. It's a beta version...

Cheers,

Kris

The translator's version of Trados is free and is one of the most basic tools for any serious translator...

Yes, but the we have the problem of requiring all the translators to have the Trados suite...

It would have to be using open formats.

Thanks anyway!

Best Regards,

José

If you save the file as INX you can open it in Trados, translate it there, and then clean-up and open back in InDesign.