Define translation units

Ondrej Chrastina, Jiri Lojda

5 minutes

0% complete

Choose your translation strategy so that your translation units contain the right content for the translation management system.

Choose your translation strategy

Define your translation units. Do you need to send a single content item for translation or several of them at once? This depends on the way you structure your content. For example, information about products might live in individual content items, whereas web pages might be built from multiple content items.

When you trigger the translation process, what content should be sent for translation? This can differ based on content types or other criteria.

A. Translation unit as a single content item

In some cases, you might want your translation unit to consist of a single content item. This would be the content item that triggered the translation process.

➕ Advantages	➖ Disadvantages
Easy to implement.	Content from a single identifiable piece of content will not be collocated in the TMS. This can lead to a worse experience for human translators or possibly worse results for machine translators. If you want to translate the unit whole, you will need to trigger the process for all content items that are part of one identifiable piece of content.

B. Translation unit as all items in an identifiable piece of content

If you structure your content from multiple content items, you need to trigger the process for the root item. That is the root of your identifiable piece of content like a web page. Then traverse the children of the root content item.

➕ Advantages	➖ Disadvantages
The whole identifiable piece of content is translated together. Easier for machines and especially human translators to see the context in which the content is used and create a better translation.	Harder to implement compared to a single-item approach.

Ensure your content is sent for translation just once Keep in mind that you should protect all items that are part of the same identifiable piece of content. However, this change might trigger your webhook listener again for all the child items. To prevent that, either set up your webhook to only trigger for the root content type, such as Page.

Consider protecting content during the translation process

Protecting specific content item variants during the translation process might be beneficial to avoid errors.You can protect a variant by creating a workflow step such as Translation in progress where no user can make any changes apart from the integration itself. Then you need to move the variant to the workflow step. Once the translation is done, the process moves the variant to the next workflow step so that users can work with it again.

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