Translation Project - Best Approach or Helpful Hints

[Former Member]

Hi All,

We have begun a project to translate correspondence/forms into different languages.

We are hoping that someone who has experienced similar requirements could share their experience with us or give helpful hints for approaching this task.

Source language is English.

Target languages are: Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.

These languages have been activated (system profile zcsa/installed_languages), but only English/German are imported.

This first requirement is a custom form (based on order confirmation) and requires the following objects to be translated:

• Standard Texts (SO10) - 10 medium length long texts (maybe 300-500 lines of text)

• Sapscript Form (SE71) - 1 form

• Materials (MM02) - c.a. 4000 materials

• Quality Certificates (QC02) - c.a. 2 or 3 certificate forms

• Classification/Characteristic values (CT04) - c.a. 100-200 short texts

Later requirements will be for similar correspondence/forms (e.g. Invoices) with equivalent requirements.

We currently only support English language logins to our SAP system and for the forseeable future we have no requirements to support login in other languages. Therefore we don't necessarily need to import these languages. The foreign language requirement is for correspondence only. We have a 3rd party company who is already engaged with us doing the translation work and they will be handling the SAP translations for us as well. However, they will not be logging into our SAP system. We must import/export the texts to be translated.

Questions:

1) Is there a way to easily setup the translation workbench LXE_MASTER(SLWA) to cover only these objects?

2) Is there a way to export and reimport these objects on completion?

One could say this project is limited in scope . . .

3) Is the translation workbench overkill for such a project?

4) Are there hard requirements to import the other languages for such a project?

Thank you for any help,

Eddie

[Former Member]

Thanks Angela for your response.

The objects we need to translate fall into 5 categories:

1) Program Texts (text symbols)

2) Standard Texts (long texts, with a custom format)

3) Quality Certificates (long texts)

3) Material Sales Texts (long texts)

4) Characteristics (short text descriptions and long texts)

We have developed a way for exporting and importing the specific texts required for our project in XLIFF format for external translation. Since our translation team works with a 3rd party vendor, export and import was a hard requirement. Maintaining the translations directly in the SAP Translation Workbench was not a viable option. Thanks for the confirmation that the translations from the workbench are not exportable/importable.

Using Tcode SMLT and I18N I have been able to do the one-off translations needed (Quality Certificates Long Texts).

Thanks,

Eddie

[Former Member]

Sorry somehow I wasn't ready with my answer.

Questions:

1) Is there a way to easily setup the translation workbench LXE_MASTER(SLWA) to cover only these objects?

It's possible to configure the translation workbench for translating different objects by choosing the needed object types.

I don't know the object for the objects you would like to translate.

2) Is there a way to export and reimport these objects on completion?

No, there is no way.

3) Is the translation workbench overkill for such a project?

No, especially when you have more to translate in future.

4) Are there hard requirements to import the other languages for such a project?

You have to define the language in smlt (DON'T define the supplementation language)

but you don't need to import the language.

Regards,

Angela

[Former Member]

Hello Eddie,

I'll try to answer your questions.

1) Is there a way to easily setup the translation workbench LXE_MASTER(SLWA) to cover only these objects?

It's possible to configure the translation workbench for translating different objects over the object types. I don't know the object

types for the objects you would like to translate

2) Is there a way to export and reimport these objects on completion?

One could say this project is limited in scope . . .

3) Is the translation workbench overkill for such a project?

4) Are there hard requirements to import the other languages for such a project?