Protecting SW strings?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Mats Broberg reports: <<When localizing products at our company, I need 
to both translate the SW strings inside the product... and translate 
the manual. Since the manual refers to things you can do in the 
software, a subset of the SW strings are always used in body texts, 
captions, tables etc when referring to the software and to screenshots. 
Obviously one needs 100 % identity between how the strings are 
translated in the camera SW and how they are translated in the 
manual.>>

Definitely, and congratulations to your company for caring enough to 
sweat the details.

<<The former approach was that we first translated the SW strings in 
Excel sheets, then - when I used strings in the documentation - I 
marked up these with "bold" or something like that. When the 
translation company was to translate a manual, they told the 
translators to check the Excel sheets every time they found something 
marked up with "bold".>>

I've never understood why people use Excel for working with words. If 
you've already got Office, put the strings into Word instead. That lets 
you do a few things you can't do in Excel: do a proper spellcheck, use 
a kickass Find and Replace function, and use Revision Tracking. The 
latter is possibly most important, because using the "find next change" 
function lets your contractors quickly find all changes--much less risk 
of missing a change. For each change they find, they can then act 
accordingly (e.g., update their translation).

All these tools are godsends to an editor or writer. And if you store 
the information in tables, you can export the tables as tab-delimited, 
unformatted text: just save the file as "text". You can then import it 
easily into Excel if your system is set up to use Excel, or into any 
other system that supports this file format.

<<However, seeing that we translate camera SW and manuals to 17 
languages, and there are about 15,000-20,000 localized SW strings and 
250+ manuals, even just a few translators forgetting to check the Excel 
sheets now and then results in several manuals where some of the 
strings in body texts, captions, tables etc does not match the strings 
in the screenshots>>

If you use the approach I suggested, break the file into several tables 
or use multiple files, since Word doesn't always handle such large 
tables well. In terms of "checking the sheets", there are two issues 
here. First, there's the translator's professionalism; it's _their_ 
responsibility to check for changes and update any translations already 
underway. Second, there's the issue of updating any translation 
memories so that subsequent translations reflect any changes.

The trick is to ask _them_ how you can make this easy and foolproof. 
They should be most familiar with their translation tools, and thus, 
most able to point you in the right direction. Of course, if you and 
your colleagues are equally knowledgable, then you can define a good 
technique and enforce the use of that technique by anyone who wants to 
keep working for you.

<<In the source XML data for manuals, we changed all strings in the 
manuals to dynamic variables. At the point of formatting, these 
variables retrieve correct translations from a string library 
(converted to XML from the Excel sheets). Before going to the 
translation company and TRADOS, these variables get "notranslate" tags 
and are converted to "internal strings" in TRADOS. The syntax is, eg., 
"N0001.Browse_for_folder" where "N0001" is a dummy namespace so that 
different translations of "Browse for folder" on different platforms 
can co-exist in the string library.>>

Here, I'm way outside my depth, since I don't use TRADOS. Hope someone 
else can help! But based on the problems you reported, it sounds like 
this isn't the way to go. Something kludgier but easier to implement 
(placing the responsibility for dealing with changed terminology on the 
translator) might be the best solution.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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