Collaboration with other software

[Julien_Marchand]

I would need to collaborate with another company for translation and they do not use RoboHelp for their documentation needs.

Apart from getting them to buy the software... 😉 Is there any easy way to send them the text I've written, get them to translate it and then re-import it easily in RoboHelp?

Thanks

[Guest]

Julien,

How easy it is depends quite a bit on the translation company's process and what file types they'll deal with. For example, our in-house translation group has software (WorldServer) that pulls strings out of Word documents, HTML files, PowerPoint presentations, and others. But they have to have a filter for each type, and new file types require new filters. If the company you're dealing with takes HTML files and gives you HTML files back, you're most of the way there.

I give our translation group my HTML topics; they translate and send them back. Then I drop them back into my project using Windows Explorer and tell it to replace the old ones. But that works because I have a copy of a project for each language. So far, it was worked pretty well--maybe a glitch or two, but nothing major.

When it comes to files like the TOC, glossary, and index, your best bet is to have them look at those files first to see if they can work with them. If not, you may have to copy the text you want translated into a more friendly format for them. Then you'd have to copy/paste the text back into the RH files once they're done.

Hope this helps,

Ben

[Julien_Marchand]

Thanks for that... How do you deal with Conditional build tags and user variables, then?

If I send them an HTML file properly tagged and with variables, all those will likely be stripped out when they send that back to me.

[Guest]

Again, depends on the software. In my case, conditional build tags have largely been preserved, but every once in awhile there was one that got shifted. Our group's program displays tags in brackets: {1}text{2}. So their software is supposed to preserve anything in an HTML tag, conditional tags included. If tags are embedded in text, whether the tags end up in proper order after translation depends on how careful the translators are. I found that in a few cases, our translators made mistakes.

Haven't dealt with variables in my projects, so I don't know much about them and couldn't give you an answer as to whether they would be handled like conditional tags.