Using the Tridion TMS connector, adding comments to the text sent for translation

Question

I am using the Tridion TMS / WorldServer Connector to send translations to SDL. This is working fine.

However, I also want to send a comment along with the text, such as 'This is a heading and please keep it to 30 characters' or 'Use slang and make this sound cool'. This is not for translation.

Can I add a comments field value (normal Schema field in Tridion) to the XML generated for TMS / World Server and mark it as 'not for translation'?

Answer 1

I don't have first hand experience, but to my understanding (based on a demo and Q&A session) that you can do this by creating the .anl files which describes what xml fields to be translated and not translated.

You need to define a field with an attribute to specify whether it is translatable or not. When you define an element/attribute you need to specify as XLATE="NO" for not to translate.

I don't have a the TMS binaries, but I believe the install has some sample .anl files.

Hope this information helps.

Answer 2

As long as you do not use the aggregation functionality the Tridion Translation Manager will send the full component XML to TMS/World Server, including your non-translatable string.

If you use an older version of Tridion and/or TMS there will be an ANL file on TMS specifying which texts to translate. On newer systems (that are not configurd to run in backwards compatibility mode) the component XML will include ITS markup.

But unfortunately neither Tridion nor TMS (I do not know about World Server) currently support the Localization Note markup rules of ITS, so the translator will not see notes unless they actively go looking for them (which might seem like a reasonable thing to expect them to do... until you look at the number of words they are expected to turn around in a day).

It might be possible to insert a workflow step in TMS or World Server that use a naming convention of your field to extract your comment and attach it to the translatable string. But I do not know if this is even possible - that would be a question for the TMS or World Server experts.