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Will Retrofit ever get fixed?

Will Mowat

Maybe I shouldn't, but I like using Retrofit when checking my work because it gives me a WYSIWYG view of the file that's sent to the client:
I "Save Target As", correct the Word doc, then use Retrofit to import the changes into the sdlxliff file.

But but but... Retrofit is unstable. Will this cinderella feature ever find its prince? It needs TLC!

When Retrofit works, it's fantastic. When it doesn't, or only partially (maybe 5-10% of the time, but ALWAYS when it's least convenient!) it's a pain in the ****, because then you have to insert all the corrections in Studio manually. When I invoke Retrofit, I become all religious, lighting candles, chanting incantations and praying to St. Gotteschalk, Patron Saint of Linguists.

Should I abandon Retrofit in favour of a different checking method? But which? Or will SDL get around to making it behave properly?

I hate features that create more (unpaid) work than they solve...
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  • 0 in reply to Will Mowat

    Will Mowat said:
    would you not agree that this is no substitute for the WYSIWYG display in the target format

    Absolutely and this is exactly why Retrofit is useful.  But my point was this:

    Paul said:
    Retrofit is designed for light editing, so if you're using it for more than this you may well have problems.

    If you are making major changes to the structure of the document then you may well have problems.  This is why I said use the Studio editor before so the incontext review (the WYSIWYG display in the target format) is only for light corrections.

    If you do find the need to make larger changes then it's probably better to realign the source file with your new target and that way you'll have more flexibility to get your translations into a Translation Memory.  You'll already have the corrected target file because you did it manually.  And if you did make substantial changes then recreating the target file from Studio might not provide what you want anyway because this will obviously be based on the source.

    Perhaps I could have tried to offer more help if you could give us some defined examples of when it goes wrong, preferably even files.  We're always happy to look at these things if you can help us to reproduce problems.  Maybe it's something we can fix in the software, maybe it's something we can explain to you more appropriately.

    But this...

    Will Mowat said:
    When I invoke Retrofit, I become all religious, lighting candles, chanting incantations and praying to St. Gotteschalk, Patron Saint of Linguists.

    won't help us to help you... unless we do the same thing and invoke Saint Isidore of Seville, Patron Saint of developers and various other IT related users.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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  • 0 in reply to Paul

    Thanks Paul. I'll mull and get back to you in 11 months' time... Relaxed︎ The Retrofit problems (two main ones: Studio tells me the edited file is unreadable, or only some of the edits show up) occur without any changes to the structure of the segments - simply after straightforward edits. It's not possible to predict when this is going to happen, hence my recourse to mysticism. If I come up with something, you'll be the first to know. All the best, W.