Operating in an environment of ever-increasing international competition, companies deploy censhare to rapidly adapt communication and information for different countries, languages and target groups. With censhare 4.8 they can easily interface to external translation systems using the XLIFF exchange format.

Management of all variants in one system

Many companies are active on foreign or even international markets. Technical magazines have foreign language editions or are directly produced in multilingual form. With censhare, companies create this multilingual content - whether for print, online, mobile or E-books - in one single system. They control and monitor production not only for the original language, but also for all the translated versions. As the workflows build upon digital asset management they all work with the same information. This ensures that the marketing literature is available when the product goes on sale, not only in the original language, but for all regions and languages.

With censhare, a company can also ensure that all literature or versions of a magazine conform with corporate design or visual character. However, it is also possible to deviate from this for individual markets in order to accommodate local conditions. Or the central office of a company could specify a layout with particular areas which the individual branches can modify with Web-to-Print.

In order to translate the text for particular languages, companies often use service providers. These may then involve additional freelance translators. In many cases, special translation solutions are used for this. censhare is equipped for interworking with these systems. It exports the text in XLIFF format (XML-Localization-Interchange-File-Format). censhare 4.8 uses version 1.2. XLIFF has established itself as a standard format for translation solutions, for example with Across or Trados.

This software package imports the XLIFF text. Then the translation process begins for technical terms, the actual text and their correction. At the end, the translation system re-exports the completed text in XLIFF. After import into censhare, it is available for further production.

Customer Benefits

• Different translation workflows: Sequential or parallel generation of the translation
• Linking of translations and localizations with the original text by means of variants
• Notification or automatic update on later alterations to the original layout, text or other content
• Application of the translation solution already used in the company or the service provider
• Export of text in XLIFF for further processing with a translation solution
• Import of the XLIFF data after completion of translation
• Use of the Segmentation-Rules-eXchange (SRX) standard to define the segmentation rules for translation elements

Application Case

• Creation and coordination of international sales literature
• Creation of marketing literature in different languages with the design adapted for the regional variation
• Production of multilingual magazines
• Production of literature for different languages in a multi-stage process, such as from German via English to Tagalog (the Philippines)

Translation process on the basis of XLIFF

The creation of language variants of assets ensures that no alterations get lost in any regional or language version. Variants may be created at any time in the production process, in order to take into account the workflow for the translation of the text. If the translation or localization takes place only after the completion of the magazine in the original language, the variants will only then be created. But these may also be created when the translation is ready to begin, although the layout is not yet ready.

In both cases, the Adobe InCopy text to be translated is exported in XLIFF format. In censhare 4.8, the segmentation of the Adobe ICML format or another XML dialect may be controlled. Segments are the basis for the further translation process: This proceeds segment by segment. These normally correspond to a sentence in the text to be translated.

Translation Memory Systems (TMS) use segments as the basis for checking whether something has already been translated. Depending on the degree of similarity, the translation may be inserted automatically or manual checking may be required. The segmentation rules specify how the segments are composed. censhare uses the Standard Segmentation Rules eXchange format for this. When the translated text comes back, censhare stores it in the appropriate variant of the original text.

Control of segmentation for export

Before a user can start the export of a text item to XLIFF, a tag mapping must be defined with the admin client for the appropriate XML dialect. An example of this is Adobe's ICML. With ICML, censhare knows how to handle the element names which appear there, such as “Content” or “ParagraphStyle-Range”. This may be converted into one or a pair of XLIFF inline tags. In this way, the text markup present in ICML remains available in XLIFF and provides the translator with additional information.

With regard to each element name it can be specified whether its appearance marks the start of a new segment. For example, this might make sense with the element name "br" (Break), which causes a line break in Adobe ICML. Here, it is important that the segments represent sensible translation units like a sentence. Division of a sentence into multiple segments on the basis of character styles is not generally helpful for translation. Translation memory systems may then be unable to find any matching translation segments in their database.

Export/import for XLIFF is defined in a censhare module, alongside mapping. censhare uses the "strict" variant for version 1.2 of XLIFF, which only allows attributes and elements which are also defined in XLIFF 1.2.