Export for External Review – a detour

When Studio 2009 was launched one of the first applications on the new SDL OpenExchange was the SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office.  This was an excellent application created by Patrik Mazanek that paved the way for some of the new features you see in Studio 2014 today.

The idea back then was born out of a requirement to export the contents of an sdlxliff file to Microsoft Excel but with no re-import to update the translation.  If you were an SDLX user you’d probably recognise that this was something you could do in SDLX, and the request that this would be possible in Studio was coming from many SDLX users.

Déjà Vu, another translation tool, had this concept of “External Views” where you could export the contents of your translation into a couple of formats, one of them being an RTF document formatted as a table containing the source and target text.  But the neat thing about this was that you could reimport the RTF and update your translation with whatever edits had been made in the RTF.  This was very cool, and as far as I’m aware no other tool had this capability at the time, short of working in Microsoft Word on a Bilingual DOC in the first place.  So when Patrik produced his first build of the converter and announced that he had included a similar capability using DOCX in addition to the Excel export this was very exciting!

Of course this has subsequently been developed further, and eventually added to Studio as part of the core product, but it can do a lot more now including handling comments and tracked changes in a very intuitive way.  It is indeed a great feature.  But what happens when it goes wrong, and if you can’t get the edits back into your Studio project?  Especially if you actually used this format to do the translation rather than just review one already carried out in Studio which seems to be a fairly common occurrence for anyone using subject matter experts who refuse to work with a CAT tool but are happy enough to work in Microsoft office.  Well, if it all goes wrong and you can’t re-import your document you need to take a detour!

What can go wrong?

First of all I should note that this doesn’t fail very often, particularly when used for its intended purpose… a review.  But it does often get used for more than just a review and I see the occasional post into a forum somewhere from a user who is unable to update the translation from this review file.  So before I look at the process of recovery let’s just take a minute to review some of the reasons why this process can go wrong and this might help you to identify why you had this problem in the first place.

• If the review file is opened in an older version of Word, or saved as RTF, then it will lose all the embedded xml we use to recognise the file (so, Word 2007 and above is recommended – DOCX only)
• If the reviewer opens the file you send them, or if you do this when it comes back, directly from your email client then the file is unlikely to behave as intended.  I don’t know why, but I have come across this behaviour.  So always save the file to the desktop (or the folder you want to keep it in) first and then open it to work on it.
• If you share Projects with another user by placing the Project files on a shared drive then the sdlproj file may have some of its information changed.  So if you create the review file, then another user tries to bring the review file back in on another computer then it may not import correctly.
• If the reviewer deletes or adds rows/columns into the bilingual table then the file will not import.
• If the reviewer deletes the little red tags this may also cause a problem for you, either on import or when saving the target file at the end.
• If the reviewer adds hard returns into the rows this creates a paragraph break and you’ll see an error on import.
• Changes should not be made in the translated file in Studio while the exported file is still being worked on by the reviewer.
• Files that you wish to export for external review cannot contain empty target segments.
• Inline elements/attributes that have been locked at source can inconsistently cause a failure to import.

This may not be exhaustive (in fact if you know another feel free to add it into the comments and I’ll update this list accordingly), but it does contain the most probable reasons for you having a problem with the re-import of this file.

The detours!

There are two simple ways to tackle this, if you can’t see a way to fix it easily by removing hard breaks or something equally as simple.  The first is to follow these steps:

1. Create a new export for review file from your Project
2. Accept all the changes in the review file you can’t re-import
3. Copy the contents of the target column from this file over the target column of your new one
4. Accept all the changes again because now you’ll have a sea of red!
5. Update from external review with the new one

This is usually enough to resolve the issue and many of you will already be familiar with this one.  But what happens if it still won’t work?  This brings me back to where I started with the Excel export in the very original SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office.  The difference of course is that now I want to convert the review DOCX to Excel and not the SDLXLIFF.  You may be wondering why?  Well, for the second detour I want to create a Translation Memory that I can use to get all my translations in the DOCX into my file.  There may be a few ways to do this, but here’s one I think is pretty simple.

1. First of all you accept all the changes in the review file you can’t import.
   
2. Next you copy the source and target columns of your DOCX and paste them into Excel.
3. Now add an additional row to the top of your Excel file and type in the name of the respective languages.  In my case this is Welsh for column A and English for column B.
   
4. You then fire up the incredibly useful Glossary Converter and use this very useful option to convert any file supported by the converter to a TMX (Translation Memory eXchange file):
   
5. Once you drag and drop your Excel file onto the Glossary Converter it will be converted to a TMX which you can upgrade to an SDLTM in Studio and add it to your Project.  I changed the language to the specific flavours to avoid any mistakes when I upgrade, so Welsh didn’t matter as there is only one, but English I changed to en(UK)
   
   The conversion itself only takes a second, although if you have a huge review file it may take a little longer.
6. All I do now is add the TMX to my Project Settings and it is upgraded on the fly to an SDLTM.  I then disable my main TM and just use the upgraded TMX for this next exercise.  I haven’t checked the update box for this but this is just because I’m not going to update this TM, I only want to use it to see what changes were made in the review file.
   
7. The next step will vary depending on what you want to do next.  If you want to check all the changes then you can just run the Confirm and Translate to Next Fuzzy Match command (Ctrl+Alt+F) starting at the first segment in your document.  This operation will check the contents of your current segment with the contents of your new TM and it will stop at each segment that is different.  These are the segments that were changed and you now have the opportunity to check them before updating your Main TM later on.
   
   In this segment you can see two things.  First you get the message in the TM results window that there is a Different target in the translation memory so you know this needs checking.  Secondly you can see the TM target has the additional word that was added in the DOCX for review and subsequently into the upgraded TMX.  If I’m happy with this I just press Ctrl+T to insert this corrected translation and then Ctrl+Alt+F to find the next change.
8. Now, if you don’t feel the need to check these changes and you just want to update your entire translation on the basis of this new TM then it’s even easier.  If you want the entire document to be entered into the target translation then clear your target segments and run the Batch Translation Task Pre-translate Files.  If you want to retain any 100% or CM matches for example then filter on these and lock them, then filter on unlocked and clear the translations.
   If you are an experienced user you may be wondering why I would do this and not just allow the TM to pick up the 100% matches and replace the draft translations and low fuzzies?  Well the reason is because of this:
   
   Notice that I am actually getting a 92% match here and not a 100% match.  The reason for this is that the DOCX uses this kind of text <Tag /> to represent a tag and not  a proper placeholder.  Now that my new TM contains this text there is a mismatch with the source.  The taggier the segment, the worse the match.  So if you have to do this exercise for very taggy files it will be a little painful to manually resolve as you’ll have to replace all the text tags in the target segments with the correct tags from the source like this:
   
   This is a royal pain in the bum, but don’t forget that this is not the usual process.  This is an emergency detour to resolve a problem with not being able to re-import the DOCX review file.  So it’s all about saving arduous copy and paste exercises to get the finished translation out.
   The other thing you might want to do if you have this situation is lower the pre-translation percentage value or you might not pick up any TM results at all… in fact if the segments are really taggy with hardly any text you probably won’t get a match even at 30%.  In these cases a copy and paste exercise to overwrite the text may be faster!
   
9. Once you’ve satisfied yourself that the translation is a good one, then all you do next is remove your temporary TM, enable your Main TM and run a Batch Task to Update Main Translation Memories and you’re ready to export your target translations.

Now this might seem like an awful lot of hard work, but it’s really not that difficult… just took me quite a few screenshots to try and explain the process so I think it’s clear.  If anyone is struggling I may add a video to this article later.