MadCap Lingo XLF files and Studio 2017

I have an XLF file from MadCap Lingo from a client and I would like to tell the translator which subsegments of translation units have been pretranslated by the client and which not.

Is there a way to make this visible in Studio? I did not find anything in the AppStore related to MadCap Lingo XLF.

Please see the attached screenshot of my XLF file.

Parents
  • Did you actually try to put the XLIFF to Studio?
    I worked with MadCap Lingo XLIFFs (quite) some time ago and I don't remember having any issues...

  • It is not really an "issue", but the translator does not get a correct word-count of untranslated and already translated words, and it is hard to charge the client correctly, taking into consideration what MadCap declares as "100 match".
  • Please be more precise - what exactly you (don't) see in Studio? What would you expect to be different? Provide some screenshots showing what we are talking about.
    IIRC, the "XLIFF Bundle" produced by Lingo, contains also a TMX - you should be able to create a TM from that, which should then show you these "100% matches". If you were provided only by the XLFs, then ask your client to provide COMPLETE material, i.e. the entire bundle properly exported from Lingo.

    EDIT:
    Just found my old emails with Lingo related notes...
    Regarding the wordcount - it will never be the same in Studio as in Lingo, because different CAT tools count differently (depending on their understanding of "what is considered a word": https://multifarious.filkin.com/2012/11/13/wordcount/).
    For example, "Toggle on/off to show/hide Connections" is counted as 5 words in Lingo, while Studio counts it correctly as 7 words... (could be that Lingo got better since 2015 when I found this).

    And I also remember some chaos in the wordcount reports created by Lingo - these were different if they were created using two different ways; in one case they included fuzzies, but in the other case there were no fuzzies :-O. So it depends which way the report was produced...

    EDIT 2: Found the fuzzies thing:

    Lingo creates different stats reports in different situations:

    • stats created automatically during Lingo Bundle export (creates HTML format only) do not contain fuzzies
    • stats created manually by running "Calculate Statistics" command (creates both HTML and XML formats) contain fuzzies

    Go figure...

  • Hi Evzen,

    thanks a lot for your detailed feedback on how to deal with MadCap Lingo packages.

    What I am missing in Studio, is the leverage information and confirmation level information contained in the XLF file.

    <mrk mtype="seg" mid="1" MadCap:segmentStatus="Untranslated" MadCap:matchPercent="0"/>
    <mrk mtype="protected" mid="2" MadCap:segmentStatus="Untranslated" MadCap:matchPercent="0"/>
    <mrk mtype="seg" mid="3" MadCap:segmentStatus="ExactMatch" MadCap:matchPercent="100">Satz zwei.</mrk>

    All segments end up as "Draft" in Studio, although there are 100 percent matches in the XLF file.

    Studio only reads the information at trans-unit level which says:

    <target state="needs-translation">

    Studio does not evaluate information at subsegment level (<mrk>).

    Regards Frank

  • That's all perfectly correct... because the segment statuses and match percentages are not part of XLIFF standard, these are MadCap's own XLIFF extensions (just like SDL's SDLXLIFF).
    XLIFF 1.2 specification does not have any mechanism for storing statuses or match percentages, therefore there is no way to transfer this information to Studio using the standard XLIFF 1.2 file type.

    But I don't see any problem with that - analysis against appropriate TM (i.e. the one created by Lingo and provided in the bundle) should show all these as 100% matches. And you can simply mark all the existing translations as Translated (and perhaps also lock them, or whatever you wish).
    Or you can even try to pre-translate using the Lingo TM, this should give you exactly the same content, but with all the Studio statuses and match icons...

    Unless someone convinces SDL (probably using some $$$ ;-) ) to create Lingo-specific XLIFF parser able to read/write these MadCap-specific extensions, you won't get anything better, I'm afraid.

Reply
  • That's all perfectly correct... because the segment statuses and match percentages are not part of XLIFF standard, these are MadCap's own XLIFF extensions (just like SDL's SDLXLIFF).
    XLIFF 1.2 specification does not have any mechanism for storing statuses or match percentages, therefore there is no way to transfer this information to Studio using the standard XLIFF 1.2 file type.

    But I don't see any problem with that - analysis against appropriate TM (i.e. the one created by Lingo and provided in the bundle) should show all these as 100% matches. And you can simply mark all the existing translations as Translated (and perhaps also lock them, or whatever you wish).
    Or you can even try to pre-translate using the Lingo TM, this should give you exactly the same content, but with all the Studio statuses and match icons...

    Unless someone convinces SDL (probably using some $$$ ;-) ) to create Lingo-specific XLIFF parser able to read/write these MadCap-specific extensions, you won't get anything better, I'm afraid.

Children
  • Just found one my internal report about Studio issues with MadCap XLIFF from June 2015... posting it here for further investigation as I suspect it may be still valid...

    Lingo may report errors like the following during import of XLIFFs translated in Studio:

    File="../../../../../../Translations/FR/Release notes/FR_v3_1.zip/v3.0_Release_Notes.htm.xlf"
    Message="The XLIFF in v3.0_Release_Notes.htm.xlf is no longer valid, so you will need to contact the translator to repair it: Malformed <mrk> node found in Translation Unit 2 in the target element
    Parameter name: item"
    LineIndex="-1"
    CharIndex="-1"
    Subsystem="Bundle Merger"

    These issues are caused by SDL Studio bug mentioned by "Franz Bissinger" here: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/post/86373-5990950270337572865 (towards the bottom of the page):

    SDL Trados Studio 2011 (and maybe also Studio 2009) has indeed a bug when saving Lingo XLIFFs. It misplaces the <mrk> tags in the target segments. This causes an error for Lingo because it prevents Lingo from parsing the translated XLIFF files successfully.

    It's also mentioned by "SolenaLeMoigne" at https://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=16784... and at various other places.
    (and it seems to still exist even in latest Studio 2014...)

    This is what is wrongly generated by SDL Studio: