Working on xliff files exported from Wordpress WPML (Studio 2019)

Question

Hi, 
 I&rsquo;ve already read through several discussions about this but they don&rsquo;t seem to help me and most of them were exchanged several years ago. 
 One of my clients is sending me some xliff files extracted from Wordpress using WPML and they are not exploitable in Studio. 
 Here is what I get: one big segment, a lot of text not to be translated, etc. 
 
 Was there some improvement on WPML side (as they seem to claim) in the extraction of xliff files? 
 Is there something my client should do during the extraction to avoid this? Would he better send me another format? 
 Is there something I can do in order to exploit such files on Studio? (not too time-consuming, as I get hundreds of those) 
 Would that work better with another plugin? (I was told about Polylang). 
 Thanks for your advice, 
 Johanne

Paul · Accepted Answer

Johanne Dupuy 
 Johanne Dupuy said: - How do I create a filetype? 
 This is probably a good place to start: 
 https://multifarious.filkin.com/2014/06/01/custom-xml/ 
 Johanne Dupuy said: - Then, how do I use it with the xliff I've received from the client? 
 Once you've created your filetype you use it in the same way you use any file in Studio. It just becomes the filetype you use for these XLIFF. 
 Johanne Dupuy said: - Then, there seems to be quite a few things to correct with regex even after doing this. Is there a methodology that would have been written somewhere? 
 How do you know this? Until you either provide a file for us to show you, or create the filetype yourself, you won't know what is left and requires some other solution... unless of course you are experienced enough to be able to recognise what can be handled with the filetype and what cannot.? 
 Johanne Dupuy said: - Will all this help only for removing the non-translatable text or also for creating smaller segments? 
 It will help with all of this. 
 Johanne Dupuy said: And a bonus question: if the problem is the WPML plugin, would that help if the client send me directly an xml format instead of the xliff obtained from WPML? 
 You'd probably still need a custom filetype, but I imagine XML would be a lot easier to work with. Wordpress do not create XLIFF following any sort of guidelines on how it was intended to be used. They take the easy way out and dump large chunks of content as html into single Translation Units as CDATA and completely ignore any other guidelines. After so many years it's very disappointing that they have still not addressed this, but frankly I doubt they ever will.

Paul · Answer

Johanne Dupuy 
 You're right that this has been discussed many times in here, and the problem you have described has also been discussed and solutions provided. Unfortunately Wordpress XLIFF hasn't really improved in all of this time. I think this is probably because it's simply too easy to dump the html into a single Translation Unit in an XLIFF and leave the poor translator to sort it out! 
 Wordpress did have a beta beautifier available at some point but I don't think they continued to make this available... at least based on the files we still see today it doesn't look like it. 
 Johanne Dupuy said: Is there something I can do in order to exploit such files on Studio? (not too time-consuming, as I get hundreds of those) 
 All you really have to do is create the filetype to handle the embedded content and this has been discussed many many times in this community. There is no getting around this and you'll have to learn how to do it. Once you have done this once you should have no problem handling the files. 
 To give you an idea... and based on your screenshot... you would be best off creating a custom XML filetype for the XLIFF and translate the target element. This is quite straightforward and will solve your problem. Maybe review these posts all of which discuss the very thing you need to address at some level: 
 https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/studio/33789/parsing-html-tags-in-custom-xml-file/ 
 https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/studio/34087/why-embedded-content-in-cdata-is-not-processed-in-a-custom-xml-filetype-used-for-xliff-from-wordpress/ 
 https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/regex_and_xpath/32024/wordpress-xml---cleaning-up-with-a-regex-but-how-to-apply 
 https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/f/studio/28353/analysing-editing-of-wordpress-xml-files-online-shop 
 There are many more but I think these capture all the things you need. And don't forget... you probably only need to do this once for all the hundreds of files... so should not be too complicated if you know how to create a custom filetype or are at least happy to learn? 
 Johanne Dupuy said: Would that work better with another plugin? (I was told about Polylang). 
 Polylang is a Wordpress plugin that helps to create bilingual or multilingual websites. Probably not helpful for your translation usecase.

Paul · Answer

Johanne Dupuy 
 We have a new filetype on the RWS AppStore that should improve your experience with these files a lot: 
 https://community.rws.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/w/customer-experience/6039/multilingual-xml-filetype

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Working on xliff files exported from Wordpress WPML (Studio 2019)

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