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Filter by text format

Dan Lucas

I recently made a business trip to Japan, during which I discussed the state of the industry with some of the largest agencies in Tokyo. Like everybody else, Japanese agencies are struggling to offset price pressure by improving efficiency. One of the ways they are approaching this is of course to squeeze out redundancy and repetition.

The result is that they are handing off files to freelancers like myself that may have a couple of thousand segments but that may have only five hundred or a thousand characters to translate. This is a tiny fraction of the total character count, which could easily be 50,000 or 80,000 characters.

This creates a problem in terms of finding, literally, the parts I need to translate. In almost all cases, the project manager either highlights the text to be translated or changes the color of the text to green or blue or red. I am now spending a good deal of time paging back-and-forth through the file in Studio trying to find the right segments.

It would be extremely useful for me to be able to filter segments on formatting elements such as highlights or text color. That would allow me to immediately isolate which segments need to be dealt with, and inverting the filter would also be useful by the way.

What do others think?

Regards,
Dan
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  • Hi Dan,

    I think you should prepare the files better in the first place. Presumably this is all Microsoft Word, or do you have Project Managers skilled enough to do this in any other product? If it is then why not search for the stuff that should not be translated and apply the hidden attribute to it in a search and replace? Then you'll only see the stuff that needs to be translated in Studio.

    If you get packages already prepared and all the text is in there then I'd agree with you, and perhaps something could be created using the API for the Advanced Display Filter, or probably a better solution would be a new Batch task to isolate the stuff you want across an entire project. Both options a developer could achieve with the existing APIs. Would you pay for it? Maybe others would too?

    Regards

    Paul

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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  • in reply to Paul
    Paul, thank you for your comments. This is generally Microsoft Word and the project managers vary both across and within firms. I have no influence on how they prepare files. I understand that I can apply the hidden attribute to text, and I routinely do this for some files (those with two-column tables, for example).

    However, the context surrounding the segments to translate is often valuable and therefore I prefer not to hide it. While I can flip back-and-forth between Studio and other documents, I like to have in front of me so that I can search and compare within Studio itself. Also, my left wrist can only take so much alt-tabbing...

    Yes, I would be prepared to pay for this. The question is how much. There are thousands of Java developers on freelancer.com who would be happy to knock me up a little script or mini-app for very a reasonable price (and indeed I ordered a Python utility just the other day). I suspect that prices in the much smaller Studio ecosystem would be significantly higher.

    To me, it seems that a simple extension of either the filtering function or the search function (so that it can find formatted text) in Studio would benefit more people over the long term.

    Dan

  • Hi Dan,

    all depends on the file format the client delivers to you.

    Here I take into consideration file formats: MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

    As already suggested by Paul, in these cases the technique would be “playing” with “hidden” text.

    If they are a MS Word file format with, and if the “translatable texts” is formatted or highlighted in a particular colour, you may run in MS Word a “find and replace” command changing all text not associated to a particular text/highlight colour to a “hidden” formatting. Then load the file in SDL Studio with the MS Word file type leaving unchecked the “Extract hidden text for translation” of the File Types > Microsoft Word *** > Common Options window. This will load in SDL Studio Editor view only the translatable text.

    Obviously, when generating the target translated file, you must remember to change again (find and replace) the “hidden” formatted text to normal visible text.

    If they are a MS Excel file format, and if the “translatable text cells” are associated to a particular cell colour, you may load it in SDL Studio with the MS Excel file type using the File Types > Microsoft Excel *** > Exclusions Options window check “Skip cells formatted with selected colors” and checking the pertinent colour to exclude from translation.

    An alternative should also be to hide rows/columns in MS Excel which contain text not to be translated and then check the “Hidden content (columns, rows, sheets, objects)” of the File Types > Microsoft Excel *** > Common Options window to exclude them from being extracted.

    In both cases, this will load in SDL Studio Editor view only the translatable text.

    Obviously, when generating the target translated file, you must remember to “unhide” column, rows, sheets or objects previously hidden.

    Concerning MS PowerPoint file format, the procedure is substantially similar to that explained for MS Word.

    I hope this may help.

    Claudio