The ability to work with comments in a managed localisation process is an important part of communication between translator, reviewer, project manager and the end client… and not necessarily in that order! Comments are used to clarify misunderstandings in the source text, questioning completed translations you’ve been told to ignore that just don’t look right, suggesting improved terminology, explaining why you translated something in a particular way, clarifying why you changed a translation in review, providing additional context from the client, adding notes to the target file for an in country review, they could even be comments that are just there to be translated, or ignored… the list of reasons could be pretty long and so could the comments. So it’s very important to be able to keep them linked to the context so it’s easy to deal with the referred text, and also to be able to get to the comments quickly when they might only relate to a couple of segments in three files that are part of a five hundred file project nested within a complex folder structure.
So this post is going to deal with two things… first of all the places where comments can be used in Studio out of the box and secondly a very neat OpenExchange plugin that I reckon many project managers, and translators, have wished for and didn’t know it was there already! Continue reading “Comments… chapter and verse!”