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J
jfreib4
Inspiring
September 30, 2006
Question

Incorporating Translation Review Comments into Source File

  • September 30, 2006
  • 1 reply
  • 417 views
Hello,

I have been asked by my French colleagues to have three of my help files translated from English to French. My company has had a couple of help files translated in the past, so we have a procedure in place, but we always stumble over one part: when the translation agency sends the first-pass translations to our foreign offices (in this case, France), what is the best way to incorporate the French reviewer's corrections back into the RH project without introducing a lot of problems?

In the past, the agency used a program called EditLet (?), which allowed the reviewer to log onto a web interface, make corrections, and send the topics back to the translation agency. This worked fine, but it was a big effort for the translation agency to host this program, and apparently it corrupted a lot of the background HTML coding, which the tech managers at the translation agency had to manually fix.

We also explored exporting the RH project as a Word file and sending this to the reviewer. The reviewer could edit the file using Track Changes, and send it back. But there is no easy way to bring this corrected Word file back into RH without overwriting existing content (we just want to import the corrections). We could also manually copy and paste from the corrected Word file in the RH project, but that is time-consuming.

Any ideas?

Thanks! I appreciate any suggestions!

**Forgot to mention: I am using RH X5 to generate HTML help files.

Regards,
John
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1 reply

RoboColum_n_
RoboColum_n_
Legend
October 3, 2006
Hi John. TBH I don't believe there is a real cast iron solution to your problem. All the methods you quote work and are used by others but each represents its own problems. I'm not familiar with EditLet. Are there other tools the translation company could host? The problem here is the still the propriety code of RH. Whatever app you use it likely to generate different code to RH which can cause problems when imported. Using Word to review (Ugg!) also works but you can tell from my exclamation what I think of that . Is it possible to get the users to add comments to the HTML code itself using comment tags? If may not be user friendly but they could add their comments without upsetting the delicate RH HTML. Just a thought.
J
jfreib4Author
Inspiring
October 3, 2006
Hello, Colum,

I didn't think there would be a real easy way to do this, either...

Using comment tags is an idea, but I don't know how savvy the reviewers are with HTML.

Thanks for the feedback. I will send it along to the translation agency I work with.

Regards,
John
J
JP Cornelissen
Inspiring
June 12, 2007
Hi,

Long time this topic was posted, but I add an answer anyway.

This is for when your translators use Trados. Trados can save translations in a bilingual (*.bif) file. It is an html-like file that contains for each translation unit (or sentence if you like) a tag with the original and a tag with the localized text.

It is not easy to read without Trados Tageditor (which is used by the translator) as it is similar of looking at the source of a html file. But, you could locate the faulty translation in that file and 'fix' it. If you then send these files back to the engine, they can run the 'cleanup' feature from trados. That generates the normal translated files, and while doing so, it also updates the translation memory with the fixes you made in the bilingual file.
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