How to "translate" unsupported file formats?

This Forum is for general issues about MadCap Lingo
Post Reply
TWF
Jr. Propeller Head
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Nov 14, 2023 6:42 am

How to "translate" unsupported file formats?

Post by TWF »

I'm new to Lingo and can't figure out how to handle file attachments, when I need language-specific files attached to a topic. I don't use Lingo to translate those files as they are in format that Lingo doesn't support (.tum which is our companys own format used with our software).

I have a Flare project in Swedish and I'm going to use Lingo to translate all the content to English. This is what I try to do:

1) In the Flare project (which is in Swedish) I have a file "example.tum" in Content/Files folder. The file contains text in Swedish. In a topic I have a link text "Ladda ned fil" which is a hyperlink to the file "example.tum". This way our customers can download the file from our website.

Now, I need to publish the same website in English and offer a different file attachment ("example_en.tum") to the customers that use ourwebsite in English.

2) I use Lingo to translate the topic to English. I'm able to translate the text "Ladda ned fil" -> "Download the file". But I'm not able to change the "example.tum" file to English version of it ("example_en.tum" which contains text in English) as I can't import it to Lingo. So when I export the project from Lingo and open the exported Flare project in Flare, the hyperlink in the topic points to "example.tum" as expected. And that file has the content in Swedish even I should offer the one with English content to the customers that use our website in English.

I know I can remove "example.tum" file from the English Flare project and replace it with "example_en.tum" file, but when I later make some changes the Swedish Flare project and after it update the Lingo project, "example_en.tum" file disappears after exporting the project. I think the reason is that the file is not included in the Swedish Flare project.

My question is: where should I put the "example_en.tum" file to get the translated text to point to it? Should I have some "en" folder in the Flare project and has the file in it with same name than the Swedish version of it ("example.tum")?

Hope that you understand the problem from my long descpription and could give me some help with this :) I think there must be a simple solution to this but I'm missing it. I have no problems to translate regular text or images or file attachments that are in supported format (like txt).
Post Reply