Managing conditions in Lingo

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KJohnsonDBTK
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Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by KJohnsonDBTK »

How do you manage conditions in Lingo? I want our vendor to translate only content that meets certain conditions and skip content that meets other conditions. I'm not seeing any way of displaying the conditions applied to content from within Lingo. The Lingo help only mentions conditions shown in the File List, which is partially what I need (translate files that meet some conditions but not others), but I'm not finding anything in the help about conditions within the content. How is the vendor supposed to determine what content to translate and what to skip if the conditions of the content can't be managed?
jasonsmith
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by jasonsmith »

This is normally handled by flagging elements that are not to be translated in a file-type definition file used by the translation software (e.g. Trados). I would suggest contacting your translation provider to discuss details.
KJohnsonDBTK
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by KJohnsonDBTK »

Here was the vendor's response.

"The problem with the way Madcap tags these conditions is that they are basically attributes of regular HTML tags, which means in order for a translation tool to be able to exclude these conditions, we’ll need to build a complete HTML parser from scratch, them manually exclude these conditions"

Mapcap support basically confirmed that. There isn't any way to identify content within a topic that should not be translated based on a condition. What seems amazing to me is that support said they've not had a request like that before. Isn't there anyone out there single sourcing content but only translating subsets of the source material?
Msquared
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by Msquared »

Just to say, we do exactly that, but the problem isn't mine, so a solution isn't a high priority for me, although it may well be for someone else in another company, and I would be happy to work with that solution. :-)

I single-source content for our own product and for two different "lite" versions that are shipped with third-party hardware/software. This content also generates WebHelp and PDF targets. So that's six different outputs from one project.

The third party pays for translation of the WebHelp for both "lite" versions into around 15 languages, so technically, they don't need any print-only content translated, nor anything that is tagged for our own product only. So that's two of the six outputs only that need to be translated.

I don't deal directly with the translators. I just send the entire Flare project to the third party, telling them which targets are required. When the translated projects come back, some languages have got everything translated, some have omitted the content for our own product, some have omitted the print-only content, some have omitted both and just translated just what's required for the two WebHelp targets.

So I guess that some translators have a better understanding of Flare and/or single-sourcing than others, or work with tools that offer better conditional support. I think most of them use Trados.

In the interests of keeping the cost of translation down, I can see that it would be extremely useful for Lingo to offer support for conditionals. For example, if you could specify the target or targets that needed to be translated, Lingo may be able to eliminate snippets and even complete topics, which may not be conditionally flagged themselves, but may only ever appear in content not to be translated. Example: Our copyright text is a snippet, as is the third-party copyright text. Neither is conditionalized, but our copyright text will never appear in the third party content, so that snippet won't need to be translated.
Marjorie

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EileenP
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by EileenP »

We are having exactly this problem -- our help topics are full of useful author comments that are tagged as hidden and therefore not included in the output. In order to exclude these from the Lingo translation bundle it looks like we'd have to delete these from the source project -- which just isn't acceptable.

Has support for conditional tags been added to Lingo since this thread first started?
jasonsmith
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by jasonsmith »

Could you add your author comments as annotations? I don't know if Lingo picks These up fór Translation too.
KJohnsonDBTK
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by KJohnsonDBTK »

According to tech support, Lingo can exclude annotations. That's what they told me to use, but that won't work in my case because some of my conditions are necessary output - just not necessary for translation.
mstamps
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by mstamps »

This is a very important issue for us. We're planning our first set of translations for our help documentation, and we've used a lot of conditional tags in Flare. Unfortunately, it appears that Lingo cannot identify these conditional tags to exclude content that we would not plan to translate. Can anyone confirm this?
ReneL
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Re: Managing conditions in Lingo

Post by ReneL »

This is also very important for us. A typical topic of us contains all kind of texts about a certain product functionality: some targeting the end user, other texts only the implementation consultant. MadCap actually encourages to bring everything together in a topic and to use conditions for different outputs: web or printed, end user or implementation consultant.

It works wonderful in Flare, but if you start to translate such a topic...

We only have to get the documentation for the end user translated. But in the Translation Editor all texts are listed without an option to filter them on conditions.
Using annotations would mean lots of extra work: adding an annotation for each conditioned text by the author and hovering all annotations by the translator. Using the Live Preview would mean searching for conditions by hovering all tags. All are inconvenient work arounds.

I believe this is really a functional gap in Lingo.
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