I'm currently investigating how to switch from a home-made help authoring software to Flare+Lingo.
We have our user documentation composed by more than 11K Html pages and we currently support 7 languages.
Our help authoring workflow looks like: author the master in German, translate from German to English and, in the end, translate from English to the remaining languages. All the translations done across the years never went into a documentation translation memory of ours.
Because of this, we've understood we can't make use of any alignment process to build out of the current translated contents a usable Lingo Project.
The idea is to use Lingo-based workflow only for new contents which would turn in the process described by the following steps:
- Create, for each language of our user documentation, a corresponding Flare project (e.g. Flare_EN, Flare_DE, Flare_IT, Flare_FR, ...)
- Create a German-to-English fake Lingo project (Lingo_DE-EN)
- Mark all the entries to be translated in Lingo_DE-EN as "Translated" - even though they haven't been touched at all -
- Export the Lingo Project to generate a faked English project (Flare_DE-EN) with content still being German
- Overwrite the contents in Flare_DE-EN with the contents previously imported in Flare_EN
- Update the Flare_DE with new contents
- Update the Lingo_DE-EN project using the "Update Project" functionality in Lingo to track the changes in the source Project
- Execute a real translation in Lingo for those new items only
- Re-export the project from Lingo to the Flare_DE-EN
So my question is: how can I make sure Lingo export only the files that have seen changed by Lingo after running "Update Project" and leaves already exported contents untouched?
Last but not least if you see pitfalls or you could point me to a better approach on managing our documentation beast with Flare+Lingo feel free to drop me a note.
Thanks in advance for reading and, hopefully, for contributing.
Riccardo