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Studio 2015 and xliff files - formatting of fonts is grayed out. Trados support says this is on purpose. Has anyone found a way around it?

Ines Bojlesen

Adding custom formatting (like italic, bold, etc) to a xliff file in Studio 2015 is not allowed. It makes it impossible to italicize foreign words, etc. This is a major drawback. Any suggestions or solutions will be appreciated.

Thank you

Ines
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  • 0 in reply to Edmond Sabou
    Thank you both for your answers. I appreciate them.
    The source and target do not and not always have to use identical font formatting. If target text uses a foreign word (no translation exists for it), such as Compliance, the target text needs to be in italics, Compliance, to denote a foreign word.
    When you don’t work with the direct client but through an agency, i.e. first the Editor, then Project Manager, a DTP person and then the final client, you have no access to work on the final target text. I know that the agencies I work with would not appreciate to receive a list of words that need to have the font format changed. Can you imagine doing that in a 60K word project?
    An example would be, in this case even source does not use the correct format. The Zika virus going around, the Aedes aegypti. Let’s say that the source spelled it as Aedes aegypti, but I want my translation to be correct, and use Aedes aegypti. There is not way to do it, so I would be perpetuating an error.
    Trados/Studio is my tool of preference. I now get files converted to xlif, xliff by memoQ and Wordbee, and face this problem.
    I understand that addiging formatting to xml and xliff files is not possible at present. But my quest is to find a solution that would resolve this problem going forward.
    Best regards,
    Ines
  • 0 in reply to Ines Bojlesen
    I'm afraid I have to disagree here fully.
    The role of a translator is not to format the text. What we do is to bring meaning from source to target. Meaning is not equal to formatting.
    Once again - any added formatting will destroy the hard work put into the preparation of the document before it has got translated. I of course understand your argument to for example emphasize foreign words. This can be done via the workaround I stated above.
    You say "I understand that addiging formatting to xml and xliff files is not possible at present." - this is not a present situation due to tools limitation, but this is how this format works. The formatting is defined at different stage, far before we start translating. And the formatting may be defined differently for each single XML file (XLF is just a consequence of what has been in source file and will be "translated" into the source format after the linguistic translation). So because no tool can know HOW the format has been defined in all possible existing file types, for files like XML no formatting options can be present. This is not because the tool vendor will forbid you formatting (what I stated before would be similar to a formatting prohibition :)), but simply because it is really not possible to add a bold or italic formatting there. The CAT tool does not know what tag would be used for it. There is even a possibility, that the XML does not support italic (or bold-italic) at all! If the XML author did not intend to use this format, it won't be present in the definition, so if you would add any of such formatting, the complete file would become invalid.

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  • 0 in reply to Ines Bojlesen

    Unknown said:
    I understand that addiging formatting to xml and xliff files is not possible at present. But my quest is to find a solution that would resolve this problem going forward.

    Hello Ines,

    This is very unlikely to ever be possible.  The reason for this is because we have no idea where the XLIFF will be used and what the originating system will understand "Bold" or "italic" to be.  If we allowed you to add a formatting that Studio understood, and maybe even what memoQ understood, there is still no guarantee that the originating system will consider this formattingt to be.  It might not even support formatting!

    I'm afraid the ability to add quick inserts into the filetype depends entirely on the developer of the filetype, and when using a filetype like mqxliff for example it will be very tricky since only memoQ knows what the originating system was.

    Regards

    Paul

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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