Best Practices for Tweaking Machine Translations

[JC @ Salient]

Hello, I am working on the translation of a portion of a large project to Spanish. I have been able to successfully use Machine Translation to translate the topics and TOC from English to Spanish. My question is... is there a best practice or process for making small edits to the machine translated text? I am able to make the changes in the translation project and then generate. The output will have the edits. Is there a way to track these for future modifications? Is there a way to export my translated (Spanish) version to XLIFF and then import as a way to perform edits by a non-RoboHelp user (starting with the machine translated text rather than English)?  

[Peter Grainge]

To the best of my knowledge it is only the main language that gets tracked. The idea being you always edit that and then translate.

If you edit the Spanish project, the English one will not know about it so next time you translate the English project, the Spanish edits will be lost.

I'm guessing the edits are for correction of the Spanish language.

The only idea to explore is make those edits and then create a copy of the Spanish project. Next time you tranlate from English you could use a file diff tool to compare the old and new Spanish project. I fear it might be a bit clunky though.

You might want to check with Adobe Support. See https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/enterprise-support.other.html#robohelp for your Adobe Support options. The email link tcssup@adobe.com is recommended as it reaches a team dedicated to Technical Communication Suite products including RoboHelp.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[WoutJacobs]

Where do you post-edit your machine translations? If you import the exported XLIFFs in a CAT tool such as Trados and perform MTPE there, the edits are technically 'saved' to your translation memory. With future imports, your already translated segments should be exact matches and your edited translations should automatically show up.