Chaining translations?

[SolenaLeMoigne]

I know this looks like a Very Bad Idea, and to my view it is, but it might just be my job to make it work.

Bit of background: We're translating our user documentation from French into a bunch of European languages. Our local representatives in, respectively China and Taiwan, are asking for the documentation in English, so they can translate them into respectively Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

I am trying to convince them to find a French to Chinese translator instead, but they are not exactly enthusiastic about it. So in case they don't acknowledge going through English is not the most efficient or safe way of doing things, what would be a way to automatically link the translated into English Flare project with two English to Chinese Lingo projects?

In times of translation, the flow would be the following:
Flare French -> Lingo French to English -> Lingo to Flare English -> Flare English -> Lingo English to Simp. Chinese & Lingo to Trad. Chinese -> Lingo to Simp. Chinese & Lingo to Trad. Chinese -> Flare Simp. Chinese & Flare Trad. Chinese.

Ok, it's frightening, but what would be a way to make this work?

[RamonS]

Find a translation agency that fulfills the wishes of its clients? I understand and share your concerns, but if going with someone else is not an option then the way you describe is the only choice left. Make sure that the English source project is rock solid, that is the best advice I can give you. Also, make sure that for the English and Chinese translations the translators have some decent domain knowledge. Otherwise you get translations that may be formally correct, but convey a meaning that makes no sense.
Example: I once worked on a project that had a real-time monitoring application that was called "Monitor". It was nothing fancy, just a Windows form with a big list of activities and some filters. One sentence in the help was something like "Turn off the Monitor when you no longer need it." The translators were all fluent in their various languages, but they had zero domain knowledge. So the translation ended up telling the user to turn off the computer monitor.
My advice is to find someone who understands the source and target languages, but mainly has excellent knowledge of the application and industry. That could be an existing or future customer. Once they translated to the best of their abilities get a language expert to edit it and have the original translator review it. Converting the words and sentences from one language to another is one thing, but translating from one language to another is a different and much more difficult task.

[SolenaLeMoigne]

In my experience, translation agencies are usually receptive. The passive resistance comes more from the local representatives of the company itself than from the translators. It's not a criticism, it's just the way things are.

I completely agree with you, "Rock solid" is a good description of how the resulting translation ought to be. I will personnally check the translation into English and thankfully, the locals who know our industry are validating all translations, so the final texts should be acceptable.

From your explanation I guess there is no automated way of doing this, so it'll rely on elbow grease and process, process, process. Ok, let's go.

It turns out that the flow would actually be more like this: (be prepared)
Flare French -> Lingo French to English -> Lingo to Flare English -> Flare English -> Lingo English to Simp. Chinese, Some software Simp. Chinese to Trad. Chinese -> Lingo to Flare Simp. Chinese, Some software Trad. Chinese
We'll se how it works out.

Not translating from French also delays the entire project by a good three weeks, but if they're happy to go that route, it's their choice. After all, I am still explaining to everybody what the advantages of translation memories are.
Things can only improve, it's a lovely challenge!

[SolenaLeMoigne]

More on this. After a bunch of issues in the xliff tagging generated by Lingo, we've decided to go a shorter route and translate the Flare projects directly in SDL Studio 2011. So the workflow becomes the following:
Flare French -> Flare English -> Flare Simplified Chinese -> Flare Traditional Chinese
Still pretty ugly, and I have good hopes we can locate a French to Simplified Chinese translator in Beijing, that should save us one middle language and three weeks.

[Msquared]

Just wondering . . .

This may be a very English-centric view, and if so I apologise. You are translating into all these European languages, and a couple of Chinese variants too. Do you not have a need for an English translation for your documentation?

Or is the issue just that you need an English translation, but you don't want it in the dependency chain for the Chinese translations?

Interesting that you've decided to leave Lingo out of the sequence here (I'm wondering whether I will gain by using Lingo to package my content for translation, which is why I'm nosing around in the Lingo forum). Again, sorry Madcap, I'm coming to the same conclusion. But perhaps that's because Flare is so good!

[alt_jennifer]

Yes, I would have suggested you simplify your workflow by excluding Lingo, presuming that either you work with a translation agency that knows Flare really well or you know how to pull in the right files for translation yourself. Assuming that those types of things aren't an issue in your case, avoiding Lingo definitely does streamline the process, especially one as complicated as yours.

[SolenaLeMoigne]

You are translating into all these European languages, and a couple of Chinese variants too. Do you not have a need for an English translation for your documentation?

We need the documentation in all official languages used in the countries in which our products are sold, so the translation into English always happens. The translations into Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese depends solely if we want to sell that product on that market, which is not always the case.

And for the record, the incorrect XLIFF tags were caused by running a Lingo 6 project through Studio 2009. Don't do that, period.