Miranda Sambidge 

Miranda Sambidge said:

I have a bilingual XML file, is there a way of automatically excluding any text that isn't English from the source section when processing the file in Trados?

Probably.

Can you provide a sample of the XML as this is the only way you'll be able to get concrete answer to this question.

Thank you Paul! Any chance I could send you an email with the file? Not sure I can share it publicly unfortunately as we have a few NDAs in place with the client. Thank you! 

Miranda Sambidge 

Sure... pfilkin at rws dotcom

Miranda Sambidge 

Thanks for sending me the file.  I have a couple of questions.

• the file contains language code attributes like this for example:
  countries="BR,CN,DE,RO,PL,FR,ES,PT,NL,GB,HU,IT,RU,TR,ZA,JP,KR,ME,MX,IL"
• also this attribute:
  translate="no"
  

I cannot see any language code for Arabic, nor can I see any Arabic text in the file... only English and Chinese.  Please can you confirm which country code should be used for Arabic (I expected AR but cannot find a single reference to this) or at least how these country code attributes should be used?

Can you also confirm if the translate="no" attribute should be acted upon as this will also have an impact on the xml filetype I create once you confirm how I'm supposed to decide which segments go into Arabic.

Thanks Paul! Let me take a look and get back to you! 

Hi Paul, I'm so sorry for this delay! I was checking with the client exactly what was required, I think I've got my head around it now!

So, the client uses country codes rather than ISO language codes, so "ME" in the file refers to Arabic, which is why "AR" doesn't appear. They also said that the "translate=no" can be ignored as it was a tag that was set up but wasn't finished so it's not a function that they use.

The set up for the rest of the file is as follows:

- If the country code "ME" is in the list of country codes, the text needs to be translated into Arabic (text specific to the ME market)

- If there are no country codes mentioned before the text, then it needs to be translated into Arabic (text that is global, and applies to all markets)

- If there is a list of country codes and "ME" does not appear, it does not need to be translated into Arabic (text that isn't for the ME market)

Is there a way we can set up a settings file to cover the above?

To explain, we translate these files into many languages. So could we amend this settings file so that we can use it on French/German etc files (if we change "ME" to "FR" and "DE" in the settings file)? Or is it not that simple?

Thank you for your continued help Paul! I hope that above helps explain the file a little better! 

Miranda Sambidge 

My turn to apologise... I cannot find your email or the file you sent me.  Possibly because the name in here is different to the one you used to send it to me?  Can you send it again please?

Thanks.

It is yes! I'll resend it now!

Miranda Sambidge 

Thanks for the email... one more question.  When you have something like this:

Where do you want the translation to go? Do you want to overwrite the English?  Do you want to create new elements, one for each language so you end up with a file containing all the languages mentioned under countries?

This is really a brilliant example of how NOT to prepare files for localisation, but nonetheless I would be asking this question to know what the client needs to receive back.

Thanks Paul, so the client generates one file per language, so we'd be looking to overwrite the "some text for translation" with the translated text in just one language. These aren't multilingual files, so we'd get one source file per language and overwrite the English with the translation. I hope that made sense?! Sorry I know these are pretty confusing!