Is it possible to create bilignual documents in Lingo?

[okonvick]

I have a project in English in Flare, which I would like to translate in Lingo so that the translation does NOT replace the original text as usual, but so that it is added below the translation on a per-paragraph level, as in this example:

Hello, world. This is a sample paragraph.
Hallo Welt. Dies ist ein Beispiel Absatz.

And this is another paragraph.
Und dies ist ein weiterer Absatz.

However, I'm not entirely sure this is possible with Lingo. Does any of the seasoned Lingo users have any advice? I'd be really grateful if this could work.

[RamonS]

I'm not sure if Lingo can do this, but why do you want the original and translation in the same project? You'd need to apply conditions to generate the English or the German output...or is it that you indeed want both languages be present in the output? If that's it, not sure what Lingo would bring to the table other than TMX and even that might be questionable because it is then not operating as designed.
It might be easier to give some better advice when you can share the motivation / use cases.

[okonvick]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I really need both languages present in the output. There are several use-cases for this, I'll describe one of them.

Imagine you can speak English and you customer, who is, let's say Japanese, cannot. So far, all the communication had to be translated or interpreted - emails, meetings, etc.

You need the customer to study and sign your Terms of Service - but since the customer can't speak English, you must provide the ToS in Japanese - but then you wouldn't understand a word of it. The best way is to present both of the languages in the same document (either in the form of paragraph after paragraph, or, better in a two-column table, where each column is for one language) and for excluding doubts, say that the English version prevails in case of inconsistency between the original and the translation.

That's the use-case. The reason I want to use Lingo for this is that having a TMX would really help, since we've been doing this only in Word so far and I don't think that's the best way. Still, I'm also not sure if Lingo can be used to achieve this, but I hope someone will know.

[RamonS]

Thanks for explaining, I now understand what you are going for. Lingo operates by loading two Flare projects side by side and keeping track of what changed in the source so that the changes can be made in the target. Maybe you want to evaluate add-ons to Word that support TMX. I spent 20 seconds startpaging it and there are even a few free tools out there. I haven't used any of them, so I shy away from mentioning a name.

The only other idea I can offer is adding a sequence number to the paragraphs. For illustration only, here is the English original:
(1) This is the first paragrpah.
(2) Cookies are tasty.
(3) I need more coffee.

Using Lingo, translate the entire document into a separate project as such:
(1) Dies ist der erste Absatz.
(2) Plätzchen sind lecker.
(3) Ich brauche mehr Kaffee.

Although this results into two separate documents, the numbering makes it easy for both sides to refer to exactly the same paragraph. Also, reading the entire document in one language is much easier than having a foreign language mixed in. The numbers are adding a wee bit of distraction, but by far less than entire sentences. I'm no legal expert, but I've come across plenty of contracts that had this kind of numbering already in it. That makes referencing sections much easier even when only one language is in play. The sequencing can be automated, it is nothing else than an ordered list in the end.
Also, if you need the same document translated to German, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Russian you do not have to search through pages to find all those sections that are in the preferred language. Mixing them together makes it quite easy to miss something.