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Although I will need to create the screen captures the usual way for the
current translation cycle (with the added functionality of SnagIt 6,
ofcourse), we may have found a way to automate this in the future:
Preparatory steps (will only need to be carried out one time)
1. As a first step, each dialog box and menu for a product is saved as a
bitmap image.
2. All texts on the menu or in the dialog box are erased in e.g. Adobe
Photoshop.
3. The image is imported into Adobe Illustrator.
4. An SVG image is created and with data-driven fields where the text
strings used to be.
During operation:
1. The SVG image pulls the different language strings from a database.
2. A script saves the image as a bitmap image in the image database and
assigns the ISO language code as a suffix, e.g. FI003689_ES.bmp for an
image instance in a Spanish manual.
3. When a new translation project is created in the documentation system,
a switch will switch all image instances in the source manual to end with
_ES (e.g. FI003689_DE.bmp for a German image will be switched to
FI003689_ES.bmp for a Spanish image).
4. The manual is sent to the translation company where it is run against
the XTranslate's TTX file to take advantage of pre-translated sentences
and paragraphs. Where there is no match, a translation will be carried
out.
There are, ofcourse, still some issues to address, e.g. how to deal with
very long text strings etc., but after some tweaking it would probably
work.
Best regards,
Mats Broberg
Technical Documentation Manager
FLIR Systems AB
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