We have a translation agency in Sweden we use and they are having challenges to get the translation xliff file to work. Has anyone used this successfully?
Trying to move away from the Word files as the formatting gets messed up on export and then when you bring them back in you have a lot of work to do. Different fonts within a paragraph, bullet points shifted are two major things I have to correct.
I know folks have had difficulty with it as described in articles such as this one, but that doesn't seem to match what you're saying. I'd be curious to know if they were doing it manually or using a translation tool - as that article mentions if you're using the XLIFF to look at using a translation tool vs. manual. Are the formatting issues you mentioned what you saw in Word translation or within your XLIFF set up?
Have you also been able to confirm that you're using all local project files as working from network/shared files could be a part of the issue?
I am working locally on my hard drive or an attached external hard drive. Teknotrans is a company we use for translation of all our various publications (very high volumes) and up until now have been doing our Storyline translations via the Word document format. You can see a very old post by a colleague Robert Eriksson on trying to use xliff files years ago.
As for the formatting in Word, I attached an example here of one that was sent out and then returned. You can see formatting issues on the English side where there is bold text for only part of a word, partial underlining and other problems. After doing these over and over I found it was easier to go through and fix things in the document before importing, but still you must check every slide. Often the font changes within a paragraph, but that might be the people adjusting the translations but I don't know for sure.
Yes I am looking for feedback if anyone has been successful handling translations using xliff. I am working alone on e-learning development and going back and translating each one to 10 other languages is a real drag when I could be developing new material.
Thanks for the example, and the formatting changes are something we've seen but are most commonly associated with changes in the translation document by a user, not something that happens as a part of the import into Storyline. Understandably that's still problematic if you have to check for an individuals changes throughout the document, and we've also seen odd behavior come in when those files are shared via a network/shared drive and thats known to introduce corruption or other odd formatting issues. So you'll want to ensure that folks download and open that file locally.
They just zip all the different language versions into a single file and email it.. But then they are often extracted on a network drive and loaded from there. In the example you can see the errors on the English side that they of course did not touch. I will try and test some more export examples if I can find the time. But all the story files do end up on the network drives when finished. I will have to load them back to the hard drive and then export again to check.
Network and shared drives are full of gremlins...so they may have touched the English side. If you're able to share with them the steps here, those are a good way to talk about how to work collaboratively on .story files and any files that'll be connected into the course.
7 Replies
Hi Rick,
I know folks have had difficulty with it as described in articles such as this one, but that doesn't seem to match what you're saying. I'd be curious to know if they were doing it manually or using a translation tool - as that article mentions if you're using the XLIFF to look at using a translation tool vs. manual. Are the formatting issues you mentioned what you saw in Word translation or within your XLIFF set up?
Have you also been able to confirm that you're using all local project files as working from network/shared files could be a part of the issue?
Hi Rick!
What kind of challenge are they having? It seems like you may be searching for community feedback here, but I wanted to pop in and ask.
We also have a support article here regarding some troubleshooting that may come in handy.
Ashley,
I am working locally on my hard drive or an attached external hard drive. Teknotrans is a company we use for translation of all our various publications (very high volumes) and up until now have been doing our Storyline translations via the Word document format. You can see a very old post by a colleague Robert Eriksson on trying to use xliff files years ago.
As for the formatting in Word, I attached an example here of one that was sent out and then returned. You can see formatting issues on the English side where there is bold text for only part of a word, partial underlining and other problems. After doing these over and over I found it was easier to go through and fix things in the document before importing, but still you must check every slide. Often the font changes within a paragraph, but that might be the people adjusting the translations but I don't know for sure.
Leslie,
Yes I am looking for feedback if anyone has been successful handling translations using xliff. I am working alone on e-learning development and going back and translating each one to 10 other languages is a real drag when I could be developing new material.
Hi Rick,
Thanks for the example, and the formatting changes are something we've seen but are most commonly associated with changes in the translation document by a user, not something that happens as a part of the import into Storyline. Understandably that's still problematic if you have to check for an individuals changes throughout the document, and we've also seen odd behavior come in when those files are shared via a network/shared drive and thats known to introduce corruption or other odd formatting issues. So you'll want to ensure that folks download and open that file locally.
They just zip all the different language versions into a single file and email it.. But then they are often extracted on a network drive and loaded from there. In the example you can see the errors on the English side that they of course did not touch. I will try and test some more export examples if I can find the time. But all the story files do end up on the network drives when finished. I will have to load them back to the hard drive and then export again to check.
Network and shared drives are full of gremlins...so they may have touched the English side. If you're able to share with them the steps here, those are a good way to talk about how to work collaboratively on .story files and any files that'll be connected into the course.
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