Translating drawings

[sparklerach]

Hi All,

 

We use Betterwmf to make wmfs of our drawing that are then inserted into our Word Product Manuals. Lately we have had the need to have these manuals tranlsated to different languages by 3rd party translators. The problem is that they can't obviously click the text in the drawings, as they are just flat images.

 

Does anyone have any experience with translations. Do you send the AutoCAD files and then re-insert them all later or how do you manage it?

 

Thanks very much:)

[Tyke]

Hi sparklerach,

 

I have translated lots of AutoCAD drawings from German into English and I have a macro that grabs the text, allows you to translate it and then reinserts it back into the drawing. But the translator would need to have a full version of AutoCAD for this to work. Alternatively you need to extract the text and its handle from the whole drawing and send this to your translators with the requirement that none of the handles are touched, saving the handles and text in two columns of an Excel sheet and locking the handle column would work fine. The translators could then read the text into their translation software and make use of their translation memories and glossaries. When you get the translated text back you need to insert it into the drawing and visually check the there are no overlapping texts.

 

If you need any help with this, get back to me.

 

Ben

[sparklerach]

Thanks for the reply. I like the sound of the macro. I since found an AutoCAD app called COINS Translate and it worked ok. After install, just type the command Coinstranslate and then select all the text, then pick the language you want and it does it. Seemed to work ok, I'll do some more testing. I'll also contact the translator and ask if they have AUtoCAD at all too.

[Tyke]

Machine translation (Microsoft Translator Service, Google Translate, & Co.) is fine for getting a rough translation of general text, but for a professional translation of technical texts it is useless and should not be relied on. Coins Translate uses the Microsoft Translator Service. The quality of a translated text can only be judged by a native speaker so be careful you don't give yourself a bad reputation by using MT. It's much better to send your translators a file with the text to be translated.

[Tyke]

If anybody is interested here is a VBA macro that will extract all of the text objects in a drawing and export them to an Excel spreadsheet that can be edited/translated at will. Afterwards the same macro can read the Excel file and re-insert the text back into the drawing.

Translation Text - Excel.zip