Translation issues

[Ingever]

We work with RoboHelp 7 and the English project needs to be translated into French. The translations are done with Trados. However when importing the translated .htm files, we're facing several problems. The lay-out of the topics changes, it's impossible to import the translated files. If I manage to import the translations, in RoboHelp the lay-out is not visible but when publishing the file you see the correct lay-out. However when you modify something in the topic, the lay-out isn't correct anymore.

I searched this forum for more information on what the procedure is to translate a project but the information I found is not enough. Who has more experience with translations?

[Peter Grainge]

Welcome to the forum.

Not me but maybe this will help.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/robohelp/articles/localized_projects.html

[Ingever]

Thank you, Peter. Once we've upgraded to RoboHelp 8, this information will be a great help.

[Peter Grainge]

Whilst the article is based on RH8, my understanding was that a lot of it was still applicable to RH7. The author will be online later.

[Ingever]

OK, I'll ask the author then if it's necessary to upgrade to RoboHelp 8.

[Guest]

Hey folks,

Most of the article is actually applicable to RH7. Since writing the article, I have found that in RH7, your topics can have the same file names as long as they are in different folders. So if you have your original files in an "en" folder and then import your translated files into an "fr" folder, you can have all your files within the same RH project.

The main thing that RH8 provides is the ability to assign languages at the topic and paragraph levels. In RH7, you can have only one language for the entire project, so for all topics that aren't in that language, you have the red squiggly lines underneath the text. RH7 provides conditional build tags and multiple TOCs, indexes, and glossaries as described for RH8 in the article. So I think other than not being able to assign multiple languages within the project, you'd be able to accomplish everything in the article using RH7.

Just remember to change the project language in File > Project Settings before generating any layouts so that the correct .lng file is applied to your output.

Hope this helps!

--Ben

[Ingever]

Thank you very much for your information, Ben. I'll try this first then before upgrading to RoboHelp 8. Hopefully this will go fine now.

[Guest]

Our projects are translated into over 20 languages with Trados and I never had a problem with that in RH7. Just have the htm, hhc and hhk files translated as required, make a copy of the original project in another folder and just replace the original files with the ones you receive from the translator and rename the project as you wish (File > rename project). Of course, the original htm files should have the same name as the ones that have been translated if you just want to replace the original ones as I suggest.

If references to the style sheet ccs in the translated files has not been changed, layout should be the same. Trados separates tags from actual content, so no changes to layout should have been made.

Also, don't forget to change the language settings in the project (File > Project settings > Language)