translation troubles - xliff, mxliff... and course duplication

Apr 26, 2022

Hello, 

My question is a bit of a mixed bag, as this is my first Rise project that requires translation. Of course, it needs to be an "all out" effort with 8 languages. 

- I saw too late that I would have needed to duplicate the course 8 times, and now re-upload the xliff file to the corresponding version. What???? I have no idea where that requirement is coming from, I frankly have to say it doesn't make sense to me. As I'm now sitting on ONE duplicated course (that I had intended to clone 7 more times...) - what's the next step / workaround? How can I make the xliff files match the course? I can't really go back and ask the translators to take a new xliff file and ask for a do-over. 

- The second issue I'm facing is that I received (so far) mxliff files. It looks to me as if our translation management system only supports mxliff as output, not xliff. Is there any way to convert the files to xliff? mxliff contains both languages, which of course wouldn't work for the upload if Rise only expects xliff. 

9 Replies
Thor Melicher

Here's a thought that might work if you haven't tried this already.  Be careful, you may lose your 'original' course in the process so do this first:

1. Create another duplicate of the 'master' course you did your XLIFF export from.  This will be your backup.

2. From the 'master', import your first XLIFF file. 

3. Make a duplicate of the course that you imported the XLIFF into.

Repeat steps 2 through 3 with the rest of your XLIFF files.  Just be sure to go back to the 'master' each time.

As for the mXLIFF format, I haven't come across that before but if you have a small snippet you can share, I would be happy to take a look to see how multiple languages are being added to the file. 

Although XLIFF files are a bit overwhelming to look at, if you change the extension to .xml and drop it in your browser (Chrome, Edge, FireFox, etc.), it's much easier to see what is going on.

Christopher Santos

Hi Susanne,

To ensure the xliff files match each course version and upload successfully, you’ll need to export an xliff for each language version. You should have eight course versions, 1 for each language. You can find details here: Rise 360: Translate Your Course.

To help identify which XLIFF files go to the correct course, you can rename the title of each duplicated course to indicate its target language.  So when you export an XLIFF file for each course, you'll know which file goes to which course by the name.

As for mXLIFF, I haven't personally encountered this kind of translation file.  In searching, this seems to be a format specific to Memsource.  Rise only accepts xliff files, so hopefully, Thor’s suggestion on converting the mxliff file type will help!

Susanne Wrage
David Tait

I'd be very keen for a fix to this problem too. Thor's solution is workable, but has the potential for any number of mishaps.

It makes sense that we should be able to import an xlif in to a copy of the course. Does anyone know of a way to modify the xlif to allow for this?

David, I did not go down that path - I'm not enough of a programmer :-) What I ended up doing is to import the translation into my original file, and then copy to a new course. That got rather messy, as it was hard to keep track of which of my clones was the original course, especially when I got a second / improved version of a translation and needed to reimport. I think that creating a copy for each language will take care of that. What other mishaps are you thinking of? 

Susanne Wrage

I ended up uploading the translation into my original course, then make a copy, then upload the next translation into the original course... which is a version control nightmare. I hope that I won't need to make any updates before the course is updated in English after 12 months. Lesson learned: next time, I will create a version for each translation, and then deal with the files separately. It's not pretty, but it's the way for now.

I don't have enough programming background to try and change the course ID in the xliff file. I don't even know which editor to use, and where to look... Following the steps that somebody posted here for the HTML edit for Arabic (right-to-left) was feasible, but I'd like to leave it at that.