InDesign IDML: Ways to include / exclude text to / from translation ?

I'm investigating different ways to include / exclude text in an IDML file. What I found is:

  • apply a "condition" to several portions of text; this text can be excluded,  i.e. it's not shown. However, text with this condition has to be hidden so that the necessary context is missing which is weird. Moreover, text with a wavy line underneath confuses people because they think of spell check markers.

  • hide layers with text that shall not be translated. This also can hide necessary context. Moreover, creating InDesign files with many layers is not contemporary any more; today, you try to keep your InDesign files as small and stable as possible - one file, one language - especially if you create/initially fill your InDesign files automatically.

What I couldn't find is:

  • apply a condition to several portions of text in order to explicitely have them translated. This would be much more convenient if only a small fraction of the existing text has to be translated [because the other text comes from databases and is already translated].

  • exclude or include some portions of text based on their applied paragraph or character style. This would make most sense and would be the easiest and most robust way to tell the translators what to do.

What do you think?

Have I overseen any mechanism to include or exclude text in InDesign IDML files?

Any comment and any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

Rudi

Parents Reply
  • Okay, the IDML and the ICML file types simply don't allow for this kind of filtering. The most you can achieve is to assign a paragraph style to a DSI and then filter using the Advanced Display Filter. You can't filter by character style, although using the App CleanupTask you can lock content enclosed by definable tags - unless they are outside a segment. So all this is not really what you seem to be looking for.

    You can either export to ICML or somehow extract the contents of the Stories folder in the IDML - then you have proper XML files. You now have to create a custom file type based on XML2 (the only one SDL/RWS wants to continue developing). Since you are obviously computer-literate, it is very simple to extract only the text you defined as translatable using Xpath. The question is how you display the context to the translator.

    You don't want to have a mix of languages in the TM, so you don't want any target language text in the source field of the editor, locked or not.

    I guess the solution is the XML preview. You have to write a bit of XSLT here. I am not speaking of formatting text to resemble the text-in-layout as in InDesign, just a concatenation of the content of the Content elements in the ICML.

    This will suffice for my usecase. Maybe it's at least a step in the right direction for you.

    (I looked at other CAT tools, and I did not find any that offer the kind of filtering you are looking for, so I guess there is not that much demand. But if you want to write an idea in the ideas section of the forum (https://community.sdl.com/ideas/translation-productivity-ideas/) You can be sure of my vote.)

    Daniel

    EDIT: I just found that my XSLT file causes an error when using XML2, but works fine in every other application including Studio using the Legacy XML file type. Maybe a bug in the XML2 file type?

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