No "Translation" folder in program directory

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Dwimble
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Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2006 7:14 pm

No "Translation" folder in program directory

Unread post by Dwimble »

The Help+Manual 9 help file references the SDL Trados Configuration.ini and SDL Trados 2009 HelpAndManual.sdlfiletype files, located in the "\Templates\Translation folder in the Help+Manual program directory." However, that "Translation" folder doesn't exist, even though the readme.txt file in the Templates folder also mentions that the Translation folder should be there. Are those old files now obsolete and removed from H+M but the change not noted in the help file?

I'm preparing to send our latest round of changes to various translators (several use Help and Manual and several use Trados or other translation software), and since I upgraded to HM9 recently, I thought I'd check to see if those files may have been changed or updated, since it has been an extremely long time since I've looked at them. Are they no longer needed? I have old copies of them from a previous version, but don't what to include them if they aren't necessary.
Michael A. Mason
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MDaemon Technologies, Ltd.
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Tim Green
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Re: No "Translation" folder in program directory

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Michael,

Thanks for noticing this. I'm going to check the change with our developers, but I'm pretty sure it is because the config files were outdated, and nowadays the current versions can be generated by the translation tool, such as Trados, from the XSD schema file included with every Help+Manual project.

Generally, translators will be using a newer version of Trados and if they are not already configured to work with Help+Manual they need to create a new .sdlfiletype configuration file from the XSD file included in every HM project folder. XSD stands for "XML Schema Data' and it defines the entire Help+Manual' XML format, or "schema". It describes which tags are allowed by the XML schema, how they relate to each other and what they can contain. Most XML editors, including Trados, can validate an XML file against the schema. If the XML that the program writes validates against the XSD file, this guarantees that H&M will be able read it after translation.

Trados has a list of all the file types that Trados knows how to process, including HTML, XHTML, Word, DITA, and several other XML schemas. Trados can add XML schemas it does not yet know by analyzing the XSD file for that schema.To (re-)create an .sdlfiletype configuration file for the current version of Trados the translator needs to get Trados to analyze the file "helpproject.xsd" that is included in the project folder of every Help+Manual HMXP project. Trados will then rebuild the .sdlfiletype or create a new one. This configuration file will then be used for processing Help & Manual projects.

In addition to using XSD to process XML and be able to write valid XML for the schema, programs like Trados also have configurable display filters to display the data in the XML tags in a way that the human translators can more easily work with. These filters can be configured with XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) defined in an XSL file, which defines how the tags in the schema should be displayed on the screen.

An XSL file is also included in the project folder for browser display of the topics and Trados can use this for displaying the data the translator is working on. Web browsers can also read this file: If you open a topic XML file with a web browser and the browser supports XSLT (the XSL file is referenced in the topic), then the browser can display an approximate representation of the topic, both the original and the translation. 
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Dwimble
Posts: 38
Joined: Tue Apr 25, 2006 7:14 pm

Re: No "Translation" folder in program directory

Unread post by Dwimble »

Wow! Thanks for the incredibly thorough response. It's much appreciated.
Michael A. Mason
Senior Technical Writer
MDaemon Technologies, Ltd.
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Tim Green
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Re: No "Translation" folder in program directory

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Michael,

You're welcome. To confirm: Those files were removed intentionally, as I described. The help will be updated to reflect this. Thanks for noticing it!
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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