MadCap Flare™  is a powerful application for writing and managing user documentation for help systems and printed documentation. Many of our prospective and current  clients have switched to this technology and we are often asked  – “What should I consider before launching a translation project with Flare?”.

Should I purchase Lingo™?
Lingo is the translation management application created by MadCap to simplify the whole process. The tool does a great job of managing and bundling all of the resources needed for the translation of your Flare project. This is a great tool.  It has saved us loads of time in preparing and completing projects. We have been handling Flare projects for a long time and before Lingo – managing Flare projects was very difficult.  However, this doesn’t mean you have to buy it. The buying decision depends on how much control you would like to have over the project preparation. If you would like your language service provider to do all of the prep then no need to buy Lingo. If instead you would like to understand how many words are in your projects or how many new words are in your updates to projects then you should purchase Lingo.

Cover ownership of the Translation Memory
If you decide not to manage the setup of the Lingo Project be sure and request an export of the translation memory as one of your project deliverables. The file will be a TMX format file that is easily imported into Lingo or other translation management programs like Across or Trados. This will give you the flexibility to manage the projects in the future or to switch to a different language service provider for future projects. The translation firm should not charge you for this export.

Use of snippets and conditional text
The use of snippets is one of the strengths of Flare. Snippets are basically complete ideas or chunks of content that are treated as a variable. This is very useful for text that might apply to multiple documents. That way you can update a snippet and that content will be automatically updated in all of  your other projects! This is a real time saver for standard text like cautions and warnings.  It is a good practice to only use complete ideas in your snippets or conditional text.  Far to often we see something like:

“{variable} is forbidden for use outside of the United States.”

The problem with this sentence is that the linguist will have no idea what options will be used for the variable. This is problematic in translation. It is far better to conditionalize the entire sentence and just have the whole sentence replaced depending on which condition is active.  Since snippets are typically larger blocks of text this isn’t as much of an issue but just remember to use complete chunks of content in your snippets as well.

Clean up your Flare Project
Be sure and clean up your Flare project before sending it out for translation. Sometimes clients will have superfluous content in their Flare project. In other words, if you use conditional text and snippets to come up with a final document you probably have more content in your Flare project then required for translation. If you don’ t intend to have the whole Flare project translated don’t send the whole Flare project out. If your LSP uses Lingo all chunks of content will get picked up when the project is built. It is a good practice to limit the content in your Flare project to only the material that is required for translation.

Use the latest version of Flare and Lingo
There are typically nice improvements from version to version of the programs. It is really best to purchase the maintenance plan and take advantage of upgrades to the tools. A great example is a huge improvement in Flare 7 relative to the import of text from other applications like RoboHelp.

Good luck with your project!