Hi community

I often get files that contain loads of contextual information that is not to be translated. Let's say columns A and B contain such context, column C contains the actual text to be translated.

Is there any automatic way I can mark column A and B as untranslatable, *but still make them visible* in the sdlxliff file in Studio? That way, I'd have the contextual information at a glance.

Marking them as untranslatable is simple via the Excel file type definition - just give these cells a certain font color and exclude that color in the file type definition in Studio. All I'd need now is an option to make the excluded text *visible* in Studio, but not translatable.

(I use a rather cumbersome workaround at the moment. I put columns A and B in a separate file, "translate" that file in Studio by just copying source to target and create a fresh TM with these "translations". I then use that TM on the *actual* file to be translated with columns A, B, C - ending up with columns A and B "translated" as 100% matches and automatically locked via the pre-translate batch task. It's a less than perfect solution however, because it's time-consuming, it throws the wordcount statistics out of whack and it's prone to errors because sometimes the contextual information is identical to the text to be translated - which means the actual text to be translated is mistakenly locked during pre-translate.)

Thanks in advance for any ideas.