Under Community Review

Multilingual Excel File Type

The introduction of the Bilingual Excel File Type was a huge leap forward!

But customers often require the translation in Excel to several languages, often including some translations already.

In this case either you create an individual project for each language with the bilingual file type or you solve it with the normal excel file type and need to copy/paste all the languages in to your target file.

It would be very timesaving to have an Multilingual Excel File Type for these cases.

Julia Skowronek

  • I also support the idea, but as Adrian Boloveschi mentioned, I can't also imagine how should Studio be able to create such multilingual file, given the fact that target files are created PER LANGUAGE... This is exactly the same situation as in the "Multilingual JSON" idea.

    I guess Studio would need to implement some new type of "project-level filetype" (as opposed to current filetypes which work at language-level, so to say) which would control settings of its "child" filetypes - e.g. this "Multilingual Excel" filetype would allow to set "Target language column" for each project language... and this setting would control settings of its child "Bilingual Excel" filetypes, which would need to be applied on language level, not on project level.

    And running "Export target files" task on a project containing such "Project-level filetype" would then create ONE Excel containing strings of each target language in its corresponding column...

    Well, not an easy task... I would personally recommend that solution should be created by those who author such evil multilingual Excels! Hopefully this would make them realize how evil and bad idea their multilingual Excels are :(

  •  - thank you for the extra details. I think this is a good idea, but probably not very easy to implement, because when you have several target languages, you are already talking about a project. So for this to work for "Translate Single Document" option without creating a project, it would require some big changes. Studio would need to first brake 1 file into several sdlxliff files and then at the end combine them into one target file. Even if you would have a project (several target languages), combining the target column from several sdlxliff files into one target file seems pretty hard to do at this point. But we will see what product management thinks about this.  

     - can you please submit the idea about regular expressions separately? Thank you.

  • Hi Adrian Boloveschi, it should be similar to the already existing Bilingual Filetype, but instead of indicating just one column for the target language there should be the option to 1. define the desired target languages and 2. to indicate a column for each of them. With this Information it may still create one sdlxliff per languange pair...and when creating the target file It should write the translations in one single file in the correspondent column. But that's just my theoretical approach...

  • Hi - interesting suggestion. How would you see this working in real life? I am having a hard time understanding what would this new MultiLingual File Type do exactly? Studio sdlxliff files are bilingual, so it would need to create one sdlxliff for each language pair? Hmm ...

  • If I may comment on this, I really like the idea as I handle these files almost daily. Also what I would like to see is the option to work with regular expressions because sometimes the files requires is and it is not possible to work with that withing Bilingual Excel file type.