Localization Academy

How To Run Pseudo-translation In Phrase TMS

Is Phrase your favorite TMS? In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use pseudo translation in Phrase TMS with our instructor Carlos.


Carlos García Gómez 

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the third and last tutorial for phrase TMS. Today, you’re going to learn how to run a pseudo translation and how you can export the target files. So let’s get started. Alright, so in this tutorial, we’re going to work with the same project that we worked in the previous tutorials, where we prepare the JSON file and the TXT file, what we’re going to do, again, is to run a single translation. And in case you’re not familiar with the concept of pseudo translation, you will know what it’s doing in a few minutes. So let’s just select both jobs. Okay, with this checkbox, we can select both jobs. And here for pre translate, we can specify see the Translate were empty.

What is the translation is going to do is that it’s going to change or modify the characters that we have in the string for translation with the dollar symbol. Or if you want to use any other characters, you could use the transliterate function and just do for example, the A with the a cute the B with the beta, in order for you to change this character, with this one, the beat with the beta, etc. Okay, I find it actually more useful and more helpful to just replace any character, any letter really, because it’s not going to replace the period, the exclamation marks the numbers, so it’s going to replace letters with the dollar symbol. And you will see this later on why it’s so useful. Here we have some options. Now we have the option to mix with source text. And I’m going to disable it. Because for example, if we have a string, which says hello, what this is going to do is that is going to use the hates, then the dollar symbol, then the E, then the dollar symbol, then the L dollar symbol again, and I just want dollar symbols to be used. So I disabled this option.

You can also add to target segment start and to target segment and some things. For example, we could even add an underscore at the beginning or at the end of each segment or translation unit. Alright, we’re not going to do this, again, we’re simply going to replace the original text with the dollar symbols. The translate rate is what we what I showed you before, you can just use a comma separated list, when you are mapping the source with the target, which means they find this letter and replace it with this other letter. The segment key has length, this is just some numeric values that are prepended, you know, to the string. And we’re not going to do this. In fact, I have never used this option and have never seen a project where this translation is done this way.

Alright, so just bowler symbols or something with a dictionary, which is changing some letters into some other letters specific to that language. And finally, this is some important sometimes it says the target segment length. If we say 100%, this means that we’re going to have the same number of dollar symbols as we have in the in the source. So for example, if Hello has five letters, we’re going to change this hello into $5 symbols. If the original string has, I don’t know 100 characters or 100 letters, then the target or the zoo translation is going to have the same length, you could use just for example 130. Imagine that you would like to see how the German translation which is usually longer occupies the space in your file or in your DTP file or whatever. In that case, then it might be useful because you are adding a 30% more of characters than what you have in the source. Okay, but for this case, let’s just use 100%, which is the same length you can use to translate. So let’s run a single translation. And since we have selected both jobs, it’s going to run a single translation on both. Now we would like to open both files to see how it looks like in the editor. So again, instead of just open each file one by one, we can enable this option and select both jobs and click on any of them.

You will see that here we have a joint file is like a virtual file. And we’re going to have first the JSON file as you can see here, messages dot JSON in job number one. And as you can see, all of the text has been changed into $1 symbol. And this is pretty useful because when you export the file later on, you’re going to see what has been included for translation right. So for example, here, you will see that the notifications enrollment title, this has been kept as part of source, the student in here this is a placeholder and it has been kept as per the source to because it’s a placeholder, which is here, number one, and the tag number one is kept in the in the translation. However, everything that you can see with dollar symbol, that means it has been included for translation, anything that you can’t see with dollar symbols, for example, the context, it means that it has been excluded from translation, which is good, because it’s the context. In this case, I’m here for the enrollment code on the enrollment modification, which is the type it has also been excluded. So that’s pretty good. And then if you scroll down, you’re going to see the strings dot txt, if you click in here, we are going to change the preview for from the JSON file into the txt, this is job number two, you will see what has been included for translation. So anything that is found in polar symbols, it means that that’s the text that is saved will translate it Alright, any other texts, for example, the the keys, here, or the identifiers, or the developer comments, six, five, etc, that has been excluded from translation, which is okay.

And the same happens for the HTML tags and the other patterns like the student level, okay, which is good again, however, sometimes, you are not going to see these in the editor if you’re working with many files. So let’s just close this tab. And let’s see how we can export the files. This is completely valid when you try to export the seller translated files, or when you try to export the final files in the corresponding language, or right so you can select both of them, click on Download, and then completed file. Final file is grayed out because we haven’t yet approved all of the translations, etc. So with completed file, it will export the latest version of these files. So we select complete completed file. Now it has been exported, we can go to the downloads.

And let’s just copy this here. Alright, so we have the source files, messages dot JSON and strings dot txt. This is what I meant in the first tutorial if you didn’t miss it. So when we create the project, we can specify what’s the file name for the target files. So we keep the same name messages, underscore, and then just the language code for the target language that we are using, which is ESP s. Now let’s just open all of the files with notepad plus plus, here we have the source file. Here we have the corresponding to the translation, as you can see, only the text that is supposed to be translated like this or like this, it has been similar translated, and this is a good way for you to check that the filter that you have used is correct, it’s doing a good job, you can scroll down and see everything in here. And the same for the strings dot txt. As you can see, this is just the same way of visualizing the files as we did before with the preview. But here, you will be able to see all of the files. Or for example, if you have, I don’t know 50 files in your project are not going to go one by one, you will basically use a tool like video and compare it in order to compare all of the files in four different folders or whatever.

Alright, so this is pretty useful. And the translation again, shows what has been included for translation, which is okay, and the comments have been excluded and the same for the identifiers. So that’s all for this video.

We’re always creating new localization content

Make sure you don’t miss anything. Join 5150 other professionals on our mailing list and be the first to get our upcoming newsletter. 

If you enjoyed that, you’ll love these…