How to import a bilingual Word document for translation

Question

I have some clients whose preferred tool is MemSource but Studio doesn't like mxliff and to make matters worse, because I cannot re-assign locales in Studio ( at the moment at least ), I get the unsupported culture thing because MemSource seems to define it as "gd" but Studio expects gd-GB. Argh. 
 Anyway, their second preferred option is a "bilingual Word document" but that doesn't seem to sit well with Studio either. On the face of it, this "bilingual Word document" format seems to be a multi-column table with string IDs, a Source colum, a Target column, some column for tagging the translation status and a Comment column, plus some header stuff. But when I try to open this in Studio, it treats the whole document as if it was plain text i.e. if there are translated segments, it also treats them as Source strings. 
 Does Studio handle this format for translation (not talking bilingual review) and I'm doing something wrong or does it simply not handle this format?

Paul · Accepted Answer

Hi Michael Bauer 
 
That is exactly why... your languages do not match.

Paul · Answer

Hi Michael Bauer , 
 
Having the unsupported culture should not prevent you being able to translate the file. You should be able to do this adding *.mxliff to your wildcard identifier in the default Studio XLIFF. But using this plugin is probably a better solution as the tags are handled better: 
 
 appstore.sdl.com/.../ 
 
If you want to handle their bilingual word file then of course you will see that every bit of content in the file will be translatable. Studio has no idea what a memsource bilingual file is. You might be able to handle it if you copy the source to the target column, then hide everything in the file apart from the target. But this leaves you with two issues: 
 
1. You can't use partially translated memsource bilingual word files 
2. I have no idea how sensitive these files are to being manipulated in this way (Studio bilingual files probably wouldn't like it!)

Paul · Answer

Hi Michael Bauer 
 I've never actually seen this before so I just created a memsource project with two target languages: 
 - Gaelic (gd) - Scottish Gaelic (gd-GB) 
 I then opened then both in Studio and added a TM. I have no problem with any of this and actually don't get any messages at all. It just works for both files. I have attached the files and my TM here: 
 memsource.zip 
 Can you test the attached and see what you get? If you still have the problem can you give the exact steps you went through so I can try and reproduce your problem? 
 If you don't have the problem can you share your files for me to investigate?

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How to import a bilingual Word document for translation