Handling the translation of conditional text in MadCap Flare with MadCap Lingo poses some challenges if not handled properly at project setup. Here are three strategies to use in your translation workflow. Recently we posted some tips for properly translating Flare projects. One of the tips discussed cleaning up conditional text in your project. The point I was trying to make is that if you send your project to a translation vendor they would typically quote on translating the entire project. If instead you want certain conditions excluded you should cover this with the vendor or simply eliminate the condition in the Flare project you submit for translation.

Here are three ways that I would address conditional text in your quotation request:

1. Apply colors to the topics in your project. For example, Blue for topics to be translated and Red for topics to be excluded (as suggested by MadCap support). This strategy would work well if your conditional text exists at the topic level.  If you can exclude or include entire topics in the structure of your content this strategy would work perfectly. The translation vendor could simply exclude the “Red” topics from the translation bundle. This strategy will not work if your conditional text exists within topics.

2. Manually exclude/hide conditional text the client specifies to be excluded from project. If there is not a large amount of text to be excluded, the translation provider can use their Translation Management system to search on specific tags or text and “hide” or “lock” the text to be excluded. Depending on which TMS you are using this may be very cumbersome or very easy. If you can isolate the tags in question you should be able to include or exclude tags through the project properties or document settings templates. Once you accomplish this task the excluded text will not be counted in the word count so the text will have no bearing on the cost or time required for the project.

3. Use Flare to build a version of the project where only the appropriate text is included. Either the translation provider or the client could build a Flare project that only includes the content to be translated.  This would probably be the easiest solution. I don’t see any major drawbacks with this strategy. The final Flare project would look just like the project in scenario 1. The conditional text would be excluded from the project entirely.

From our perspective scenarios 1 and 3 would be the easiest to manage. Scenario 2 is very doable. It would just take more time to properly prepare the project. The odd thing about the final Flare project in Scenario 2 is that file set would include text in the target language and the source language. My only concern is that if the owner of the project forgets about this and a future release uses the condition we excluded, you could have a target with translated and untranslated text.