Translation of documents containing non-translatable terms

[Lothar_Voigt]

We have to translate some documents containing non-translatable terms, e.g. trade marks like Adobe or terms from HMIs like Open or Close.

How can I tag such terms directly in FM, so that the CAT tool (e.g. SDL Trados) marks them as not to be translated or even does not offer them for translation to the human translator?

• A special term list does not help, because within a context some terms have to be translated (e.g. the term Open in bodytext), but within another context the same terms should not be translated (e.g. the term Open in HMIs).

• I know, other tools provide "inner elements" like X-Trans for tagging terms. What does FM offer?

Many thanks in advance.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi Lothar,

You could create a new character format with everything "As Is", but the language set to None.

Then the CAT tool should ignore text with this character format.

This depends on the specific CAT tool. Therefore I would test this first.

Best regards

Winfried

[Stefan-Gentz]

It depends … 🙂

If you are working with DITA, you can simply wrap the words into a term or ph element, and set the attribute @translate to "no". SDL Trados Studio's DITA filter will lock the word accordingly.

If you have a custom XML application, you can create your own attribute for this and then configure your SDL Trados filter to respect this attribute and lock the word.

If you have "unstructured" FrameMaker documents, you can create a character style and assign it to all the non-translatable terms. You can call it whatever you want, e.g. something like "UntranslatableTerm". In SDL Trados Studio's MIF Filter, you can go into Project Settings > Filter "Adobe FrameMaker 8-2017 MIF" > Styles and then add the name of this character style to the "Styles to be converted into inline tags" list.

[Lothar_Voigt]

Many thanks for your quick answers.

The document structure is old (~15 years). And it's definitely no DITA. It's a customized structure definition.

If you have "unstructured" FrameMaker documents, you can create a character style and assign it to all the non-translatable terms. You can call it whatever you want, e.g. something like "UntranslatableTerm". In SDL Trados Studio's MIF Filter, you can go into Project Settings > Filter "Adobe FrameMaker 8-2017 MIF" > Styles and then add the name of this character style to the "Styles to be converted into inline tags" list.

This sounds very interesting. I think, we will give it a try. Let me repeat the steps:

1. Create a new character style in the FM files.
2. Name it whatever you want.
3. Tag the non-translatable terms in the FM files with the new character style.
4. Feed Trados with MIF files.
5. Move to the Trados MIF import options.
6. Select 'Styles'.
7. Add the new character style to the list 'Styles to be converted into inline tags'.

Is this correct?

And does 'inline tags' mean, these tags are not translated?

Just another question to satisfy my curiosity :

Is 'Structured FM' equivalent to 'Custom XML'? Or what kind of structure does 'Structured FM' provide?

[TomSchenck]

I create a variable for the terms that will remain in the master language and name the variable with "- Do Not Translate" at the end of the name. I tried character styles once, but need to apply another character style to that term.