The multilingual Excel filt... revolution!

It has become a habit at Kilgray that every now and then we sneak in some massive functionality into an interim build. 6.2 is no exception here either, as build 6.2.15 introduces some very interesting functionality.

As we have made our foray into the computer games market, it became pretty clear that in reality, agile multilingual localization happens in multilingual files stored in a structural format, which is usually either Microsoft Excel or multilingual XML. I believe we can see the benefits now - there is no issue with versioning, no problem with different languages being at different review levels, and this is what the developers want: a single file that they can use to feed the most up-to-date, linguistically reviewed translations into the code.
However, the translation industry has a different idea: there is not a single translator or reviewer that can process 5 to 50 languages, and these files need to be chopped up into individual bilingual files. At the same time also translation experts acknowledge that cognate languages can assist the work of translators and reviewers - a person doing for example English to Swedish localization can easily get inspiration from the English to Danish translations.

At Kilgray we like to be pioneers, but we can only provide good solutions for problems that we can generalise. It took us a year or two to succumb to the idea that multilingual filters can exist.

It was also possible earlier to prepare multilingual Excel files for translation, but this required a lot of pre- and post-processing steps, and getting the translations into a translation memory took many steps, even so that there was no manual alignment needed - structural alignment did the job with a 100% precision. Over the years we have seen a lot of such translatable files, and have also consulted customers on what these files can be like. I'd like to thank here for all the input we got from our customers including Plinga, SEGA, Keywords International, Alpha CRC, the Syntes Language Group, and one major games publisher that we cannot mention here. The challenge here is that there are no standards in multilingual Excel files - everybody comes up with their own version. However, there are patterns that just seem logical, and those are the patterns that we need to support.

So the new multilingual Excel filter "just" simplifies the way you work with these files - to a very large extent. What required manual pre- and post-processing is now plug and play. It is actually not a single filter, but in reality we added two multilingual filters: one for Excel, one for comma-separated values. What's special about the new filter?

1. You just create one single configuration for the file, and memoQ imports all languages at once.
2. You can use a cascading filter, i.e. HTML in Excel or other patterns in Excel are not a problem.
3. If for a target language there is a translation, that comes in as a translation. As a result building a translation memory from all your existing translations is very simple, takes two clicks per language. Those cells where there is no translation don't disturb this process.
4. You get a preview, but not a normal Excel preview but something much nicer. The preview actually shows all languages, and works well with enormous files - the largest file we tested contained a million words.
5. The filter processes files where you have information aligned in columns. You can select what column holds the source text, what column holds the translation, for each source text you can have a resource ID (e.g. where in the application does this text come from), and for each translation you can have comments imported.
6. We have seen some files where translations with certain background colours need to be imported or excluded. The filter enables this.
7. You can always export bilingual files from the multilingual project, and send it out to linguists for translation, or assign individual languages in online projects. Linguists will see the translations for the other languages in the preview, but can only edit theirs.
8. You can consolidate the individual bilingual files that you received back into one multilingual Excel file within memoQ.

Isn't this too good to be true? Well, try it out yourself. It is part of memoQ now. You can click Import with options, and select the delimited text filter option from the list of available configurations. And if you have a memoQ server with content connectors or a GamesLoc package, you can automate the translation of such files from beginning to end (or rather, all the time, as this process usually never ends).

This is a new concept in memoQ and I think in most of the mainstream translation tools. While most tools support the concept of multilingual projects, we have not seen tools to support the concept of multilingual documents.
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Enjoy!