Best Practice for Multiple Translations

[Garrett_Russell]

Hello All,

I have been a MadCap Lingo user for well over a year now. Up until now we have only had translation requests for certain documentation sets to one language. Now, we have a request to have one set of documentation (maintained in one Flare project) translated to 5 separate languages. My question for seasoned Lingo users is this: what is the best workflow for translating one Flare project to multiple languages?

I am curious if it is possible, and in turn, the best practice, to create one bundle for translators in a single Lingo project, despite the target language of that Lingo project, get that bundle translated to 5 separate languages, and then import that bundle into the 5 separate Lingo projects for each individual language?

What I am trying to avoid is having to create 5 separate bundles from the 5 separate Lingo projects (all topic, snippet, variable, and graphic files being translated will be the same).

I know this may be a reach but I don't believe it would be possible to create one bundle from one Lingo project, have that translated to 5 different languages, and then import it back into a single Lingo project where I can then export the 5 separate languages back into Flare.

Any guidance, direction, or personal experience anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Garrett

[Uwe Schwenk]

Garret,

your concept will not work for Lingo, because once you add languages to the project Lingo will create a separate set of files for each language as shown in the attached sample screenshot. While you can create one bundle containing all languages and then sent this to the vendor to let him sort it out, I would caution on this because you also should consider loooking forward. What I mean by this is the fact that while you are now asked to translate into 5 languages, further down the road, you might only update one or two languages since businees situations change. So the best way of handling is consists in exporting the languages one by one.

MadCap Lingo numbers the exports so you need to keep a close eye on the numbers if multiple languages are involved. If you delete all previously created bundles close and then restart Lingo, the counter will reset and start at 1 again after you open the project in MadCap Lingo. What I am doing is creating a little cheat sheet and export the languages in a certain order so I always know for example German is 1, French is 2, etc. Additionally, after each translation project is complete, I zip up the Lingo Project and afterwards delete all previous exports.


Hope this helps.