How to "translate" images?

[MarkoS]

Hi,

perhaps someone can give me a hint. In the online help it is written (Topic "File List Window Pane"), that you could use the "Replace..." Button to replace files, especially images files. But I never get my images in the File List Window Pane, although the File is set to Images or All files *.* The image files are in the ressource folder of the source and the target project on the drive. Do I have to set an option somewhere, to get them visible in the pane?

[forfear]

Hi Marko!

I think it refers to the ability to translate the strings in Callouts from 'Madcap Capture' created screenshots only.
It will appear if you have the .props file for the image in the images folder of your project i think. the props file is a simple text doc with the attributes and words contained in a text file.

Unfortunately i posted a bug report that the translation of text in images in Lingo 1.5 does not work well yet since the images don't get exported correctly. The team is aware of it.

Do post a bug report on this please..its important to keep the team aware of this

[MarkoS]

Oh, I see, I had hope it is not bound to Madcap Capture. We don't use text or callouts in our images. We have screenshots of our GUIs of our products in different languages. Well, so we will have to change the images in the resulting Flare project.

Regard the bug report, I will check MadCap Capture for you ... and report

[RamonS]

So you make a screenshot that is nothing else as a bitmap and want to use some tool to translate the text in the bitmap? What you are asking for is OCR on a bitmap with automatic replacement of the text only sections in such a way as that it appears seamless. If you ever find an application that can do that, let me know, that would be really impressive.
What you could do is take a screenshot and then remove all text portions filling in the characters with the appropriate background color or just copying over a piece of "empty" background (especially when the background has a gradient). Then place text boxes onto the resulting image and fill in the text trying to match the used font style in the software as closely as possible. That way you could translate those texts more easily. But there is a problem here as well, when you have GUI elements that dynamically resize due to changing labels you are in for even more work than before as you now need to make a copy of the background and patch it accordingly. In any case, I expect the results to look not as pretty as a normal screenshot.
I'd look at this option when there are many languages and the time between GUI translation / translation test and release is too short to do all the screenshots.

Another alternative is to use screen portraits. You replace the elements of the GUI with boxes and grids and tables are boxes with horizontal lines. That way you get a mockup style screenshot that still shows all the elements, but has no text. Keep in mind that the user typically has the running application right next to the help, so showing an exact replica in the help of what they look at anyway may not be necessary. There is a nice bolg post on one of the tech writing blogs. Of course I cannot recall which one that was, but it explained the screen portraits very well.

[forfear]

i think this be the place

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[MarkoS]

@RamonS Oh sorry, No! Thank you for trying to understand me.
But for localising dialogs of software we use a software localisation tool. The translator gets the strings from all the dialogs of the program in a nice GUI, similar to Lingo and translates these strings. The results are ressource files which are automatically integrated in the build process and applied to the correct language version.
So we already have a translated GUI of our software. What we do is then: We put screenshots of the program into the manual (made with Flare) of the software. Of course the screenshots shall be in English language for the English version and in German for the German version etc. I hoped our translators or I can change the shots of the original language version into the localised version, in Lingo already. Now I do it in the resulting Flare project, not a difficult workaround. That's all

@forfear. I will do so, ty

[tonytong]

So you make a screenshot that is nothing else as a bitmap and want to use some tool to translate the text in the bitmap? What you are asking for is online ocr on a bitmap with automatic replacement of the text only sections in such a way as that it appears seamless. If you ever find an application that can do that, let me know, that would be really impressive.
What you could do is take a screenshot and then remove all text portions filling in the characters with the appropriate background color or just copying over a piece of "empty" background (especially when the background has a gradient). Then place text boxes onto the resulting image and fill in the text trying to match the used font style in the software as closely as possible. That way you could translate those texts more easily. But there is a problem here as well, when you have GUI elements that dynamically resize due to changing labels you are in for even more work than before as you now need to make a copy of the background and patch it accordingly. In any case, I expect the results to look not as pretty as a normal screenshot.
I'd look at this option when there are many languages and the time between GUI translation / translation test and release is too short to do all the screenshots.

Another alternative is to use screen portraits. You replace the elements of the GUI with boxes and grids and tables are boxes with horizontal lines. That way you get a mockup style screenshot that still shows all the elements, but has no text. Keep in mind that the user typically has the running application right next to the help, so showing an exact replica in the help of what they look at anyway may not be necessary. There is a nice bolg post on one of the tech writing blogs. Of course I cannot recall which one that was, but it explained the screen portraits very well.

thanks for your sharing, it's useful

[Paulie]

Hi there,

At my previous company, we came up with a pretty effective system for translating images that builds on some of the concepts that Ramon mentioned. This wouldn't work for all user interfaces, but it is worth sharing in case it helps somebody out:

Firstly, all of the text in the application UI was stored in resource files. A tool was created to convert the resource files into Flare Variable files, so that the UI text could be used in Flare and Capture. The advantage of this was that if the text in the UI changed, the text in the help would automatically update.

Secondly, in our case the UI was very simple, and easy to recreate using MadCap Capture. Rather than capturing screen shots, we instead created a mock up of the UI, then overlaid the required UI text using the Variable set that had been imported into Flare.

The topic and screenshots were then able to be incorporated into our translation process. When the application UI was translated, we could import the translated application resource file into the translated Flare project, and when the Capture images were regenerated, they were automatically translated.

We used this process to translate our content into several languages. I believe that the process is still being used and 12+ languages are now supported.

Obviously, this only works if the UI is simple enough to recreate, but in our case it was a simple, yet very effective solution that saved significant time when content was translated.