Changing the original UI language of German into English

[Nigel0D45]

Hi I am working on a book that was written by a german company in English but all the paragraghs, table designs and loads more are all in German.  Is there a way to change everything to English?

[Nigel0D45]

Sorry meant to include this is a framemaker question and i am now running FM2019. 

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Are you saying that the FrameMaker UI is in German? If so, you'll need to install the English version of FrameMaker, and re-enter your license information.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

I am not sure, what is in German. Do you mean the paragraph language, so that all words are underlined as they are misspelled?

Or the automatic numbering, e.g. table and figure title: Tab. 123 and Abb. 123 instead of Table 123 and Fig. 123?

You have to change this in the paragraph designer. You can change the language for all paragraphs: With the small cog in the lower left corner set everything to As Is. Change the language. Then change everything with the Global Update Options again in the menu of this small cog wheel.

Remember that the table formats do not store the actual paragraph formats of the first row, but the actual formatting. Therefore open all tables, check that the correct paragraph formats are applied and save the table format.

To change anything in the header/footer, go to the master pages and adapt the content.

Check also the variables.

Best is, if you create a template for each language. Then you can import everything into other files.

Best regards

Winfried

[Nigel0D45]

Hi the following is an example from the table catlog

Abkuerzungsverzeichnis 

From the Paragraph catalog

Handbuchinformationen

I can manually go through and rename them all but very time consuming.  Is there a way to translate them all?

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

Do you mean that Handbuchinformationen is in the autonumbering of a paragraph tag? Or is this the name of a paragraph tag?

And where is Abkürzungsverzeichnis? The table tags do not have any text.

If this is autonumbering or variables: Yes, I think that you have to translate this. FrameMaker cannot do an automatic/machine translation.

If this is too much text, then you might ask your translation agency.

If these are names of paragraph or table tags, then you also have to rename this manually.

You might do a test and save a copy (without the content) as MIF and then open with a text editor. There you can search for these terms and rename them globally.

Of course you must be careful. When you rename Abkuerzungsverzeichnis to xyz globally, and then there is also a tag e.g. Abkuerzungsverzeichnisstruktur, then you might get problems. But it's a copy and just a test.

Best regards

Winfried

[Nigel0D45]

Thank you Winfried i thought it might be the case that it was going to be a manual thing.  But i will investigate the use of MIF and see what i can do.  Thank you for your reply

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Ah, your tags are labeled in German...

I strongly suggest purchasing Rick Quatro's FindChangeFormatsBatch, which will allow you to map old names to new ones, and remove the old names from your catalogs. It works across nearly all named things in FrameMaker.

See https://techcommtools.com/my-fm-secret-weapon-findchangeformatsbatch/ for an overview

-Matt