Passolo projects

This section explains the structure of translation projects as well as their administration with Passolo.

A SDL Passolo project consists of one or more source files and a certain number of languages.

Source files are executable program files (*.EXE) and/or libraries (*.DLL), as well as any other files containing source strings to be translated in one of the formats supported by Passolo. For more information about the file formats that can be handled with Passolo, please refer to Add-Ins for Passolo. If, for example, two programs are to be translated into three different languages, this creates six new applications. The six files generated by Passolo are described as target files.

The Passolo project window displays all the components of a project, i.e. the source and target files. Each of the fields displayed in the project window corresponds to a string list. In the case of a source file, this is the source list, which comprises all the string resources of the original file in a single column. A translation list is assigned to the target file. This is basically a copy of the source list, but it contains an additional column for the translated strings. The actual localization process in Passolo consists of editing this second column in the translation list. Glossaries and a dialog editor are available to support the user in this process. For further information about working with string lists, please refer to Creating String Lists.

Once all string have been translated, the target file is generated. Passolo creates a copy of the source file in which all the string resources - and dialog resources, as the case may be - have been changed to reflect the translation. The following diagram, in which an English resource code is translated into German and Spanish, illustrates the translation process:

Depending on the file format, Passolo also offers the option of writing all of the translated resources back to the source file so that this contains all of the language versions in a single file:

The translation lists can also be exported for editing outside of the project, thus allowing translation work to be contracted out without having to copy the entire project. In this case, the translator simply edits the file to be translated. For further information, please refer to Export and Import Interfaces.