Messy Bilingual XML files

Question

Hello everyone, 
 I have some messy bilingual files from a client and I'm struggling with how to process them. I'm using Studio 2017 SR1-14.1.10018.54792. I have access to Studio 2019 if that would help. 
 There are 3 parts I'm trying to accomplish - I realize I cannot do all 3, any suggestions would be encouraged. 
 1. I have English text in the 'source' element. I would like to copy this source English text to the target element and then translate (selecting only the 'target' element for translation) - OR 2. - simply 'place' the translated text into the 'target' element. Tricky part, down in row 641, the text is now multi-line, so the structure is different from the source. 
 
 3. Within this same file, there are already some segments translated. If either option above would work, how can I make it so these are not touched? 
 
 I am still considered a 'novice' when it comes to creating the file settings. I've seen some other posts that have prepared the XML files in Notepad before translation. The difficult part of that is I may have 20 source files per language, and 40 languages. I'm looking for some efficiencies. 
 Thank you, in advance, for any suggestions. 
 Best, Mindy

Paul · Accepted Answer

Thanks for the file. It's actually an XLIFF 2.0 file and not strictly a bilingual XML. So if you rename it to XLIFF even Studio 2017 should be able to handle this. However, it is also invalid as the sc element in there should have an id attribute. This is mandatory according to the XLIFF specification: 
 http://docs.oasis-open.org/xliff/xliff-core/v2.1/os/xliff-core-v2.1-os.html#sc 
 Your file has this sort of thing and misses the id: 
 < sc type = " fmt " dataRef = " boldStart " /> 
 I think there are also other problems in the file preventing it from validating correctly as I still had problems even after correcting this so really you should give this back to your customer and ask them to provide a valid file. 
 We are working on a new multilingual XML filetype that can actually handle this file without a problem because it doesn't care about all the rules around what's correct and what's not, it only needs to now where to find the translatable text for source and target. But this will only be available in 2021 and won't be released to the appstore for a few weeks yet. So until then your options are probably not great and would either require some regex search & replace work on the nat&iuml;ve files so you can handle as monolingual XML, or you ask your customer to provide valid XLIFF 2.0 files and then you shouldn't have a problem.

Paul · Answer

You might find this new filetype could solve your problems here: 
 https://community.rws.com/product-groups/translationproductivity/w/customer-experience/6039/multilingual-xml-filetype

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Messy Bilingual XML files