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Hi,
I'm looking for some advice here. We have a number of projects we may need translated to another language. The person doing the translating has no experience editing html, so he needs to work in Word. I tried importing the .htm files to Word, but it doesn't accept them.
Does anyone have suggestions as to the simplest way to export/import the files so he can edit them in Word? Generate a printed document? Copy/paste the text into the individual files?
Does anyone have experience doing this?
Thanks!
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Hi Marion.
I hope you won't mind me suggesting a different workflow. If your translator wants the output in Word, that is fine so long as you want to spend a lot of time working out how to get their translated output back into RoboHelp and sorting out any issues this workflow creates.
A better approach would be to find a translator that can use the RoboHelp source files and translate these. This requires them to be familiar with using the product but it will save you a lot of time and money.
There is also a good article on localising projects written by Ben Minson. It is a bit old now but the principles remain the same:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet-archive/robohelp/articles/localized_projec ts.html
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Good article - thanks!
Unfortunately, time is of the essence, so I don't really have time to find another translator. The guy we have is willing to learn to work in .html, but we'd have to get him some software and show him how to use it, and the risk of mistakes is too high.
I'll test the export/import method today.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Have you planned how you will get him to translate the topic titles (rather than topic headings), the index, table of contents and suchlike?
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
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Yes, thanks, Peter. We do most of our projects in Word, then import them
into RH, so I'm pretty savvy at that part. As I've said in my response to
Colum, though, I think I now have a better solution.
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Be careful with Kompozer. I haven't looked for a while now but last time I did it added loads of blank lines in the code view. It didn't seem to affect what displayed but it was horrible working in the code.
I wasn't working on RoboHelp content and I would test thoroughly before you go too far. Kompozer could do things with the code that Rh does not like and cannot resolve.
Given Rh's Design Editor is not dissimilar to Word and the translater will only be changing text, that's the way I would go with plenty of backups.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
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Thanks for the warning, Peter. I did test yesterday, and there seemed to be
no problem.
For the translater to edit the files in Design Editor, we'd have to install
RoboHelp, right? There's no stand-alone version?
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That is right Marion. The translater could download the RH10 trial provided you are also using RH10, but you are using RH9 if I'm not mistaken. That would have given them 28 days to complete the work.
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If you will not be using your copy at the same time, you could install it on a second machine. It's legal but only if not in simultaneous use.
See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips
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It sounds like the risks of a mistake are quite high as it is. It is your choice, but you need to consider what a RoboHelp project is made up of. As Peter suggests it is a lot more than what you see in a topic. Think stop lists, ignore lists, synonyms as well as the TOC, Index, etc. Getting the output of those into Word and back into RoboHelp sounds like a big risk. Should you decide to go down this road, check out Peter's site for a link on importing Word docs:
http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/importing/about_importing_linking.htm
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Thanks - yes, we import Word documents to RH all the time, so I'm OK with
that part.
However, I think I've found a solution. Kompozer seems to do a great job of
WYSIWYG editing of html files - he would be able to translate the files
directly with minimum effort.
Your point about the indexes, etc., is well taken - thanks. I've built in
some time for editing on my end afterwards, so we should be covered.
Thanks for all the feedback!