 Productivity Tip
Configuration files for SDL Trados are included with Help+Manual Pro. This makes editing and translating your projects in Trados much easier. See here for details.
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Many professional translators and translation agencies use "translation memory" tools like SD Trados (this is the market leader) to translate Help+Manual projects.
The ICanLocalize web-based translation service used to feature translation memory and Help+Manual project support. However, as of July 2018 both of these are being discontinued in ICL because they are replacing their old translation memory editor with a new one.
Translation memory tools are generally too complex and expensive to purchase and learn yourself unless your company has its own translation department. However, the benefits of using them are so great that you should really consider working with translators who use them, particularly if you have extensive documentation that gets updated regularly.
If you can, using translation memory is definitely the most efficient way to manage the translation and localization of your Help+Manual projects.
You can explicitly protect text against translation and editing changes. To do this select the text in the editor and then select the "padlock" tool in The text will then be displayed shaded in the Help+Manual editor and it will be tagged with the attribute translate="false" in the XML topic file.
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Translation memory tools have an integrated dynamic database for your projects that automatically "remembers" all text that has been translated. When you deliver updated version of your project the software first reads it through and automatically translates all the sentences that have already been translated. Then the human translator only needs to process the new and changed material.
In addition to this they generally also feature additional tools to make translation more efficient, like a terminology database that gives the translator direct access to the correct translated terms for all your special terminology.
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•Never translate anything twice – all unchanged material gets translated automatically
•Terminology consistency – your customers don't get confused by varying terms for the same things
•Easy updating – no need to track changes, you just send the new version for translation
•Compatibility with Help+Manual projects – the tools work on them directly |
Generally, any tool capable of handling XML files should be able to process Help+Manual's topic and TOC files, although some will do it better than others.  SDL Trados (the market leader), Western Standard Fluency and Across are all directly compatible with Help+Manual.
Help+Manual comes with configuration files for SDL Trados (the market leader) and Across to make them work better on Help+Manual projects. You can find them in the \Templates\Translation folder in the Help+Manual program directory.
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If you are working with a translator who is using one of these tools you need to send them the entire folder containing your project in the uncompressed XML/HMXP format. You can only save projects in this format with the Professional or Floating license version.
The translators need to have the entire project folder, which should also contain all your graphics files folders. You will receive back a translated version that you can open directly in Help+Manual to do any final layout work and publish the project to the formats you want to use (CHM, HTML etc).
Click on the individual steps below to display more detailed instructions.
1.Make sure your graphics are included in your project folder
Graphics files:
The translator will be able to understand the project better if you include the graphics files. The easiest way to enable this is to make sure that all the graphics are included in the project folder as well. You can move them there easily, and generally they should always be kept there. See Managing your graphics for instructions.
Graphics containing text:
If you create your graphics using the Impict editor included with Help+Manual you can have it store the text they contain in linked XML files that can be translated by translation memory programs. See Translating texts in images for more details.
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2.Set up the language settings for the target language in the translation version
3.Check whether you need to include any snippet files for the translator
If your files contain linked snippets from external sources you may need to include copies of these embedded files for the translator.
If you include the files with the translation package you should put them in a separate folder inside the project folder you are going to send to the translator and add an entry to pointing to the folder containing the snippet files so that Help+Manual will find them.
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4.Pack everything in a zip file for the translator
Finally, pack up the entire prepared folder and all its contents in a zip or other appropriate archive format and send it to the translators for processing.
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Since all your topics are stored as individual XML files you can also send copies of individual files out for translation as well. However, this is not generally recommended. It is usually better to provide the entire project so that the translator has the entire context. Also, when you split out individual topics it is much too easy to lose track of what has been edited and what hasn't.
In addition to copying individual topic files from your project folder you can also export topic files with the File > Save Topic to File function in
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When you use translation memory tools the procedure for translating an updated project is exactly the same as for the original project. You just send the translators the entire updated project folder, using the procedure described above. The translation memory database will automatically translate all the known sentences, leaving only the new and changed material for the human translators to process.
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