Exporting for translation

[jivana]

In Flare 6, is there a way of exporting the project for translation without using MadCap Lingo? I am a very new user to Flare and we want to do it to test this process only to realise that other than Save As, there does not seem to be a function in Flare that does it. But I wonder is Save As producing output that translators could work with?

[RamonS]

What you could do is build Word output, have that translated, and then import the Word file into a new project. Or you can build WebHelp and have the translator work with the HTML files. The problem here is that one wrong move and the topic may be ruined when a tag gets deleted or truncated. The simplest way is to copy and paste to and from flat files, but that is a lot of work and I do not recommend it.

[ChoccieMuffin]

It depends on how you're having it translated. A reputable localisation agency will do it all for you, extracting the translatable text for translators to work with while protecting all the html code so it doesn't get broken, they'll also use a translation memory so you get the benefit of re-use of duplicated sentences, and you'll get back a translated Flare project. If you're getting an independent translator to do it, you may have to do a bit more fiddling round with stuff to end up with the translated Flare project at the end of it.

[Lucia]

Why isn't using Lingo an alternative? It allows a very simplified workflow and you don't have to worry about loosing content or formatting.

[jivana]

Thank you for your input, all.
It turns out that our translators can handle Flare projects and do it all for us, however we will end up with a separate project for each language.
It would be way cooler to have them all in one project, which is what our legacy tool was doing. But I am sure there are drawbacks to that.
Lingo is not an alternative for us, as it costs extra $$.

[alt_jennifer]

I'm just curious...your legacy tool was putting the translations in the same project as the English? How was it doing that -- setting up a mirrored directory for each language within the Content folder? Or putting translated text in Conditional tags in the same topic as the English?

I don't mean to be nosy, but I wasn't aware there was a tool out there that would do this automatically. If you have only one foreign language, maybe two, it could be practical. But if you had to work with 10 foreign languages, the Flare project could easily get out of hand!

[jivana]

You're not being nosy at all.
The tool is HelpStudio, it is made by a company called Innovasys.
You would set up your multi-language project by having a separate project settings sheet, separate phrases that are already localised (like 'click to shrink'), etc.
Within the project, you would select the language to work in from a drop-down box. Content that is new in the source language gets flagged as 'untranslated' in the target languages.
You would export your source language xml, and the translators would send you the translated XML back. You would then import that back to the respective target locale.
The project itself is mainly one file, the different languages are not really visible in the file structure. You can then choose to build whatever language you wish, or all of them, which means it would build one after another. A pretty quick process all the same and a neat feature. I was surprised Flare does not support it, but becauee it does not, I guess it makes it easier to offer other features.
Sorry about the late reply, I was overseas for while and other things on my mind...

[alt_jennifer]

Oh no problem, I'm always seeing posts/replies late myself!

That Help tool sounds like a lot of software localization tools. It's definitely a nice feature to have, to be able to export any language by selecting it in the dropdown, and to have all the content stored virtually in the same project file. Flare definitely doesn't support that type of functionality -- any setup of a multilingual project would have to be done manually, and it would get complicated very fast. Not only with conditional tags, but also the linking! We usually give each language their own Flare project, just to avoid headaches, confusions, and enormous file sizes!