Knut Atle Klausen

Maybe use the Bilingual Excel filetype instead?  This has an option to define a length limitation column from Excel.

How does that work? The billingual is in Word normally or am I missing something in your comment (probably, sorry :-) )?

Knut Atle Klausen

Looks like I'm missing something!  You said:

Knut Atle Klausen said:

My customer has some rather complicated spreadsheets and so it is not possible to use the regular character limit feature in the prosessing of these files for sdlxliff

If you use the bilingual Excel filetype then you can do the following from your spreadsheet:

Use these settings... note the length limitation column matches the column in the spreadsheet for the allowable chars against each segment:

Then you have these restrictions visible in the Document Structure Column on the right, and appearing as QA messages accordingly:

Ah, that is good to know, thanks. No, this customer send me studio packages and not possible to save as excel.

Knut Atle Klausen it sounds as though you ned to educate your customer... although you could probably quite easily use a little ingenuity:

1. copy source to target and save the target file,or save the source
2. now you have the Excel so you can recreate it in a more appropriate way
3. translate the file using the appropriate checks and update your TM
4. now add your TM to the original project and pretranslate it

In the QA checker you can have a hard limit for any kind of file type.

Or you use the the segments verification tab in QA checker and set the limit for longer by 0%—this way all segments may not exceed the length of the source.

It is not possible to do 1, as the file is blabla.xliff.sdlxliff, so all get is an xliff file. But I do get the file as a reference excel, so it could work copy from them and then make a sdlxliff, translate and use the tm as you say - but, it will take some time copy and paste, and then there might be something Studio belive is a penalty or something with tags, meaning I will not be able to run it through. But it might work. I will try next time. Now I just ask the customer to send back the spreadsheets and then I edit those, which is not a perfect soultion.

This looks like what I need, thanks! Both Segment verification and length verification looks promising. Are they behaving the same way in the translation process?

Yes. You get the messages after confirming a segment. So if you set them as error, it is prominently visible.

Obviously and just in case: you must configure all this within your Project Settings, NOT via File -> Options!

As for step 1/2: if there are no or just few tags, use Export for biilngual review to get a table. Then copy the table to Excel and process as Paul suggests.