Localizing screenshots / screen captures w/Lingo

[simona]

Hi there,

where & when in your localization process do you replace the screenshots?

We keep our screenshots in one folder for each product version, like so:

- content/resources/images/current_product_version/...
- content/resources/images/future_product_version/...

and the images in these folders have identical file names apart from the language code, e.g.:
- screenshot1_de.jpg
- screenshot1_en.jpg

Since we are doing it all inhouse (me, myself and I kinda thing) I create the screenshots in both target languages DE and EN at around the same time, when creating the DE content. So the availability of bilingual screenshots is not the issue here.

But I cannot seem to replace the images in LINGO directly. And if I replace the images in the topics _after_ the LINGO export, I would have to replace hundreds of images each time I do a new export, again and again, every week, because the original source project (DE) and the LINGO working project both have DE screenshots in their topics. That's such a huge time sink, it cannot be the intended workflow, can it?

What am I not seeing here? How do you guys do this?

thx in advance

[simona]

Update:

I've also contacted MadCap support and they confirmed that the usual procedure is to first complete the master language version (DE in our case, EN for most of you out there, I guess) and then start localization. With each project update in Lingo the image files are overwritten, so in this workflow it is recommended to replace the images once, during the localization, and there are 2 options to do that:

1) use the new Lingo 8 image replacement feature within Lingo
2) manually replace images in the Flare project that is exported from Lingo

Our initial content creation & localization process, as well as our annual update workflow, are both totally different from that. We do it all inhouse. For us, this is an ongoing process that will initially last for more than a year, with regular builds - builds for internal reviews and builds with (partial) output already reviewed that is ready for publication. However, regular builds would mean that I have to manually replace images after each Lingo export, which is not a feasible option.

There is a feature request now that would allow the user to choose not to update the images during project update in Lingo, but as feature requests go I doubt that it will be there soon enough to help us with our current project. We plan to publish the first partial documentation in the summer of 2014.

As MadCap support helpfully pointed out, there is a workaround: "One possible shortcut is to create a folder of translated images with the exact same filenames as the source and once the project is exported from Lingo, replace all the images with the translated images of the same exact file name."

I'm looking into that right now, but if anyone has other helpful suggestions - please, do let me know. Are we really the only ones with an ongoing update & localization loop done in this manner? Are we really the first to run into this problem?

[KJohnsonDBTK]

I've just started my first localization project. I wasn't planning on using Lingo, although that may be changing. Here is the process that I'm using currently, although I have no clue if it is right or ideal.

1. Vendor localized our application first.
2. Once the application is done (close to done), they start on the documentation (content only).
3. While the vendor is working on the documentation content, I have gathered localized screen shots from the localized application. (The vendor cannot gather the localized screen shots because they do not have the hardware necessary to get all of them.)
4. My localized documentation is in a subdirectory of my English project. Sounds like for you that would be your DE project at the top level. (Pardon the strange layout here. I don't feel like fighting with the forum to figure out how to indent lines so you can see the logical layout.)
____Doc1
____Doc2
____Doc3
____zh_Chinese
________Doc1
________Doc2
________Doc3

I'm keeping the screen shots in the top level directories in English and storing my Chinese screen shots in the duplicate locations but under the zh_Chinese directories. All files names are duplicated. There are no language codes in the file names like you are doing. My hope is that once I get the translated Flare files back from the vendor, I can just drop them into the zh_Chinese directories and build the outputs that I need. I think then for the ongoing updates, I'll have a combination of updating the screen shots myself and getting updated Flare files from the vendor. I haven't figured out yet how to determine which screen shots will have changed though, since I can't read the translated Chinese. I think there is a chance I'll have to recapture all of them to be safe. I'm gathering from your post that if I used Lingo, perhaps it would identify which screen shots have changed. Frankly I'm not finding Lingo useful and I have another Lingo unknown with conditional text that is a bigger issue for me.

Not sure if any of that is useful to you or not. I'm not getting much guidance from our vendor, so I'm basically making it up as I go along.

[GeorgeBell]

I'm totally new to Lingo, so please forgive me if I'm asking a stupid question here, or if it is staring me in the face.

Where exactly is the "the new Lingo 8 image replacement feature within Lingo"?

I've tried to find information in Help, New Features, etc., etc., and am getting nowhere.