NEW in Rise: Export for Translation

Hello all,

This post is about using memoQ for translating Rise files.

I took a look at this forum because one of our customers was experiencing difficulties with all the tags included in their files, and the fact that the XLIFF content contains paragraph-based segmentation as opposed to sentence-based segmentation.

First, it must be said that the Rise developers made a big mistake when they architected the product output to include HTML embedded in XLIFF. The two file formats do not play nicely with each other. While it is true that XLIFF is a translation industry standard file format, embedding of HTML was not envisioned in the specification.  The Rise developers would have been much smarter to output in plain XML with embedded HTML. This really should be rectified in a future version of Rise.

With that little rant behind me, I have some good news. memoQ can do a pretty nice job of separating the translatable content from the surrounding tags while also separating the paragraph-based segments into their individual sentence-based component segments. To do so, it is necessary to use a cascading filter, which is a special feature of memoQ. A cascading filter essentially filters the input file for one format first, then for a succeeding format.

In this case, the first filter to be used would be the built-in XLIFF filter. That provides the basic parsing of the content. Then, it is necessary to protect the embedded HTML tags by appending on a second filter using the Regex Tagger. The Regex Tagger uses regular expressions to create generic protection for similar HTML tags that contain differing attributes. To separate out the individual sentences from their parent paragraphs, the option "Segment text if no <seg-source> is present for a 'trans-unit'" should be selected.

This results in nicely segmented source content in the translation editor. But it also produces a lot of superfluous segments that contain only tags. memoQ can help here, too. These segments are superfluous for translation, but must be kept intact so that the ultimate structure of the output file is retained. They need to be protected from inadvertent alteration.

Once the translation environment is open, the special memoQ regex expression "^\itag$" (without the quote marks) can be used in a search to isolate all segments that contain only tags. Then, the CTRL-L key combination can be used to lock the segments. A further setting in the "Go to next segment" can be used to jump only from unlocked segment to unlocked segment, thus ease of use for the translator is ensured.

This has been a pretty technical contribution. If the folks from Articulate would like, perhaps we could cooperate on a webinar to present this solution to interested users who have been struggling with using translation tools  for processing the Rise XLIFF file output.

Best regards,
Richard Sikes
Senior Solution Architect, memoQ