Under Community Review

Redesign external review

Hi!

External review is often required by some clients. Sadly, the bilingual Word approach is far from being stable and reliable.

Three options:

1. Design a new feature from scratch (Excel please !)

2. Add a warning message, something like "Don't use on large projects!!"

3. Get rid of this feature ;-)

Julien Poireau
  • in reply to Adrian Boloveschi

    Hello Adrian! I think the way to make this feature more robust is to keep away from Word ;-) I'm pretty sure many people will confirm the External Review is not very stable. The steps I take are pretty standard: re-export to Word, copy/paste the old column in the new file. It usually works fine. It's just frustrating... That's why I really wish SDL could find a neat trick to review/import content in SDLXLIFF files (I know Retrofit works really well, but some of my clients want to review in bilingual files).

    Regards

  • in reply to Adam Warren

    Hi Adam! I agree Excel is not ideal. But even when the SDLXLIFF hasn't been altered in any way, import can fail (because, you know... Word...). For no obvious reason. One of my clients learned the hard way: almost 100 files wouldn't import. She had to export again for review and spent 2 days copying and pasting the content. Maybe an SDLXLIFF basic editor (no TM, no TB) would be the solution here...

    Cheers!

  • Hi Julien,

    Indeed, if you can provide more details on what struggles you have had with it, maybe there is something to be done to make that feature more robust or there is something in what you do that can be adjusted - as in "best practices". Ideally though this conversion should be on the dedicated discussion forum - we are on the Ideas space now. So please post more details, error messages, steps you're taking, etc, here: https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/studio

  • Excel is not the best choice because one cannot change capitalisation. What is unstable, please, about the external review? Is it perhaps difficulty in "reinjecting" the bilingual draft  into the SDLXLIFF file? I find more difficulty with retrofitting, which is very uncertain, though a good idea. The conditions for such "reinjectability" need to be clearly spelt out: in the case of the bilingual review file, the SDLXLIFF file must not be altered in any way between the export to the Word format and the "reinjection".

    With kind regards,

    Adam Warren.