A suggestion when dealing with formatted MS Excel bilingual files (SDL Studio 2017 – SR1)

Good morning,

it is a known issue that when loading in SDL Studio a bilingual MS Excel file we lose possible formatting in source and target segments.

If I am not in error, I have not found a possible solution in “our” common Translation Productivity community.

Now suppose you have a bilingual MS Excel file like this one. In this sample I have just copied the source text column in target text column, inserting in target column "Possible exisiting translation" and aplying a light green cell background.

Screenshot of a bilingual MS Excel file with source text in one column and target text in another, showing light green cell background for target text.

If I load this file using the Bilingual Excel File Type (with or without checking the "Preserve Target Style" option) I obtain this:

Trados Studio Project File Type Settings window showing options for Bilingual Excel file type with columns for source, translation, and length limitation.

Trados Studio Editor window displaying the loaded bilingual MS Excel file with source and target text columns, but without the original Excel file's formatting.

losing all inside formatting inside the original Excel file. And this because the Bilingual Excel File Type, process all text as a sort of “Plain text”, right?

But, and when possible, if you load the same file using the Microsoft Excel 2007-2016 File Type excluding unwanted columns, you obtain:

Trados Studio Project File Type Settings window with options for exclusions by color and column in the Microsoft Excel 2007-2016 file type.

Trados Studio Editor window showing the loaded bilingual MS Excel file with preserved formatting such as bold and italic text in the target column.

Which preserves all character formatting inside cells/segments which will be exported when generating the final translated Excel file.

I hope this may help those who are dealing with this issue (and sorry if this was an already suggested solution that I have not found in Translation Productivity forum).

Regards,

Claudio



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[edited by: Trados AI at 1:41 PM (GMT 0) on 28 Feb 2024]
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  • Hi  

    I like that you post your solutions for these problems... would just like to add a couple of comments to this one.

    1. Using the monolingual filetype solution was the usual solution for these things and always means you have to have a copy of the source in the target column.  This means pre-existing translations will be missing.
    2. If you keep the pre-existing translations then you will have a mixed source/target in your source which is undesirable.
    3. The preserve target style does retain the styles in the target file, but you do lose the style for inline tags:
      Screenshot of a bilingual MS Excel file with columns labeled 'File name', 'Source text', and 'Target text'. Red arrows point to missing target text in rows 4 and 7.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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    [edited by: Trados AI at 1:41 PM (GMT 0) on 28 Feb 2024]