How do I translate using a "pivot" source language?

Question

Most of FICO's documentation is authored in English. However, we have a small group that authors in German. The German source text is then translated to English. We want to use the English translations as the source language (the "pivot" language) to translate into other languages. How can we accomplish this in the tools?

Raf Snijders · Accepted Answer

Hi Elizabeth, Looking at the Configuration you provided above it is allowed in your system to translate from either "DE" or "EN-US" to any other language. Hence in your case you have the unpredictability of which language will be used to translate towards for example "RU". If you want to restrict the translation process in such a way that "DE" can only be translated into "EN-US" and all other languages need to be generated from "EN-US" I would go for the following configuration in the element. With this configuration the "DE" authored content can only be translated into "EN-US" and once this "EN-US" variant is released, the other languages can be generated from that content. In the original configuration (where "DE" content could be translated into any language) the system had two options to generated the "RU" language variant and hence picked randomly one of the allowed starting points. I hope this helps, Raf

Raf Snijders · Answer

Dear Elizabeth, You can accomplish this by extending the Translation Management configuration with the language paths required for you setup. So if you introduce a language path which will allow you to create 'English' translations from the 'German' source language, this means that you can translate the 'German' content into 'English' As soon as the 'English' content is released the normal language path starting from 'English' will allow you to create the respective/required language variants. So in SDL TD 14 syntax this kind of configuration would like like: Example shows setup to support 'German' to 'English' and 'English' to 'French', 'Dutch', 'German' and 'Spanish' I hope this helps setting up the 'pivot' language. Kind Regards, Raf

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How do I translate using a "pivot" source language?

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