Cannot open xliff files from RISE

Aug 12, 2022

Hello,

I want to translate my course and am following the steps recommended, but I can't open the xliff file that was generated. I want to translate it myself and understood that it would download in some type of chart form. What should my next step be? Thanks for any help you can provide.

Rachel

7 Replies
Rachel Owens

Thanks very much for your reply, Phil. So if I translate it in notepad,
will I be able to plug it back in easily? Or would it be easier to just
manually change the text in the duplicate course?

I also saw something called smartcat, which claims that it will open the
file, translate it and allow me to make edits. Do you know if this is
worthwhile?

Thank you!

Rachel

Thor Melicher

Hello Rachel -

Translating a Rise 360 XLIFF file by hand is a bit tricky for several reasons:

  • The XLIFF file coming from Rise 360 doesn't use white space so everything will appear to be on one line when opening in Notepad
  • You can't simply overwrite the source language with the translate language - instead, you have to duplicate the <source> tags and change it to <target> and place the translation in the <target> tags
  • The HTML tags added by Rise adds more complexity - these are important to have so the same formatting is kept as the original course 

So, the short answer is yes, it can be done by hand, but there would be a lot of trial and error on your part.  If you want to explore this further, you can rename the extension from .xlf to .xml and then use something like Notepad+ which can work with these types of files (XLIFF follows the XML format).

As for Smarcat, personally I haven't used it before but if they have a trial version it wouldn't hurt to try it.  I have some other ideas if you would like to reach out to me via direct message.