NEW in Rise: Export for Translation
Jun 13, 2018
By
Kelly Meeker
If you need to create courses in multiple languages, you’re going to love this new Rise feature. It allows you to export your course text to an XLIFF file* and then reimport it once it’s been translated. Like magic: all your text is replaced by the translated text. It’s that easy!
*XLIFF files are a translation industry standard, so if you’re working with professional translators, then you shouldn’t have any issues. But what if the translations are being done by a fellow coworker or friend? No problem! If you do a quick Google search, you’ll find a ton of free tools that allow you to easily edit XLIFF files.
183 Replies
Hi Jenna,
I haven't seen text appear bold after translation, was this on the entire course or just the labels?
Also, for your Chinese labels, it sounds like they didn't update or did something else happen like the text appeared oddly? If you could share some screenshots or more detail about the steps you went through that'll help us track it down.
Hi Ashley,
This feedback came from the vendor we use for localization. For the Chinese labels I know they weren't able to import without receiving an error. I'll see if I can get them to join the conversation. Thanks!
Hi Ashley,
I'm employed at the vendor that was on this project and I can add a bit more information on the problem. For the Chinese label issue, I was trying to upload a translated XLIFF file for Chinese labels and got the following error message: "Error: Incompatible format." We uploaded similar XLIFF label files for Polish and Portuguese without any issue.
For the Polish, it's a problem we have also seen in Storyline 360. In the case with Rise, it happened when special formatting was used, such as for a quote. I have attached an example. Changing the special formatting from Statement C to Statement D fixed this issue. There were 3 or 4 instances of characters being individually bolded throughout the course.
Hi Kenneth,
Thanks for sharing some more details. What translation tool were you using for the Chinese Labels? We've heard some similar issues using SDL Trados Studio 2017 and MemoQ.
For the bold fonts, it seems from that image it's only on the special characters? Were you applying special formatting, or relying on what Rise adds based on the block type? When you've seen the same thing in Storyline, what format was applied there? I'm glad switching the statement type fixed this, but I'll take a look at the statement C setup too.
Hi Ashley,
For the Chinese labels we were indeed using SDL Studio 2017. Studio and MemoQ are market leaders in the CAT tool space.
Regarding the bold fonts, we did not add any special formatting. I also noticed that the bolding appears on some, but not all, special characters. The problem we encountered in Storyline also occurred in blocks of text without special formatting. In addition to being bolded, characters appeared as different sized fonts in the same word. The problem in Storyline was intermittent and not always reproducible. Our experience there was that files might look fine on our side, but if another person opened the same file they might encounter these issues, or we might encounter them after executing an import of translated content.
I have added two additional examples of the Polish bolding in Rise. Example 2 uses the Quote B style. Example 3 is a little different, in that case, it seems that the Rise display system is not properly reading the close font tag. Bolding should end where the comma is in the first sentence, but it just continues to the end.
Adding the third example in a separate post since it wouldn't seem to let me attach two files.
Thanks, Kenneth.
I know our team is looking into the issues with SDL Studio 2017, so I'll keep you posted on that here.
Thanks for the images in Rise too, I tested out myself with some random Polish text (courtesy of Google Translate!) and I didn't see bold text, but the accented characters were actually quite smaller. Can you let me know what font you're using in Rise? I'll share both examples with my team so that they can take a better look!
Sorry for the delay in reply, Ashley,
It looks like Merriweather is the body font on this module. Lato is the headings font.
Best,
Ken
Hi Kenneth,
Have you already looked into the steps here to resolve the odd character issues?
Hello,
We are having the same issue mentioned by Cameron Campbell and others. When our translation agency opens the XLIFF file in Logiterm (by Terminotix), the text has HTML formatting mixed in with the text. The same is true if you use the free tool from Brightec as recommended.
Hopefully this can be addressed as it's not feasible to translate when the HTML tags are mixed into the text.
Hi Ashley,
Thanks for this suggestion. I had not tried it before. If I understand correctly, although Rise has the Merriweather font available (for example), it's not complete and lacks non-Latin characters. This would certainly explain the problems we have been having. I followed the process with Merriweather font and created a custom font called "Merriweather Full." Unfortunately, it didn't solve the problem. Would you suggest trying this with other fonts?
Thanks for chiming in to share your experience Yannick.
You're in the right place for an update when we have one to provide.
Hey Kenneth,
Thanks for the update.
Were you able to upload this font to Rise as well, which is outlined here?
Hi Leslie,
Yes, I followed the steps and uploaded the full Merriweather font to Rise as a custom font called "Merriweather Full." The font loaded properly, but the behavior in the module did not change.
Thanks for the additional information Kenneth - I've added this to the report filed so that our team can take a look.
Hi Kenneth,
Can you clarify what the "Merriweather Full" is? I see that Merriweather supports a Cyrillic and Cyrillic Extended character set - which of those did you download and install as a custom font? Or, was it another font language in Merriweather?
Hi Ashley,
Thanks for following up. I see now that I missed a step in the procedure, the point where you select "languages" in the custom tab at Google Fonts. I just selected font types there last time. I will do this and report back.
Hi Ashley,
I created a new custom font that includes Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic, and Cyrillic Extended and called it Merriweather Complete. Unfortunately, although the behavior changed slightly, the letters with diacritics still show differently. This time they are smaller, rather than bold (see attached file). It's my understanding that standard Polish characters with diacritical marks are technically part of the "Latin Extended" family, so it may be worth trying to make a font with just that and see if I get a different result, but I'm not sure how the mere presence of Cyrillic in the font set should impact anything.
Any further thoughts at this point?
We completely agree with your next idea - to try the Latin Extended alone. Keep us posted how that works for you!
Here's another issue for you. We've exported a number of courses and we've been able to translate with no problem. But now, we have a course that's giving us problems. When we tried to import the translated xliff, we get a message that says:
"Import failed: Check formatting or re-export translation."
Just to make sure we hadn't changed something during translation, we even tried exporting the xliff file then importing it right back into the course without changing anything and we still get that same message. So, it appears that the xliff file is formatted incorrectly upon export.
Are there any characters we should avoid using that might be causing problems reading the translated file back in to the course? Any other ideas what might cause this?
Thanks!
hi the links on this page do not work?
Hi Aaron,
What links are you trying to access?
I know in the initial post that Kelly shared above, that is an image of what you will see within your Rise course. I wasn't sure if those may have been the links you were trying to click on.
Just let us know what you need some help with and we'd be happy to help you out.
Hey everyone! I’m happy to let you know that we just made translating content in Rise even better. You can check out the release notes here.
We fixed an issue where XLIFF translation contained components that some translation tools couldn't process.
The new version of Rise is live now, so just simply export your XLIFF translation again and let us know how your tool handles it!
Dear Crystal,
We tried to test the .xlif with 2 fields translated (not all of them) and got the failure message when importing the translation back. (please see attached)
UPD - we also tested it with all fields completed fully. Still cannot import.
What causes the failure?
Thank you!
Hi Irina,
If the Rise XLIFF translation option isn't working correctly for you after the fix, I'd like to have our team take a look. I'll start a case for you and they'll send directions on how to share your Rise course.
Keep your eyes peeled for an email from Support@articulate.com!