Thread: How to deal with Trados INI files with Linux tools

Hi there

A few comments on how I went about a task that promised to be highly boring.

The problem: about 20 xml files, around 50 lines long each. Just a couple of tags, say "code" and "data". The "code" tag could be set as non-translatable straight away from the Tag editor.

The thing is that among the "data" fields, there are also a few items which should not be translated. A way of distinguishing between them was by looking at an attribute which had lots of different values. I realised that if these numbers were within a particular range (say between 100 and 700) then the item was translatable, otherwise it wasn't .

The way of getting this job done with Trados itself is, for each number outside the range, duplicate the element "data" adding a condition on the attribute, and again and again ... say 50 times (with this specification it could have been up to 400 times!! Luckily not all numbers outside the range were used).

I'll leave this simmering and see if someone comes up with a way of doing it more efficiently.

Cheers.
P.

Hi there

When we look inside an INI file, there are some sections between square brackets with different settings. The relevant one for what we are trying to do is [Tags]. After modifying this INI via Trados, duplicating the "data" element with a conditional, we get the following:

Code:

[Tags]
Tag1=data:External,Other Attributes:att
Tag2=data[@att="015"]:External,Group,Other Attributes:att
Tag3=control:External,Group,Other Attributes:att
DefaultTagStyle=External
Tag4=--end--

Each line begins with "TagX" with X consecutive numbers. The last one is always "TagN=--end--", where N is the highest number. Experimenting a bit with the Tag Editor it looks as if the tags and conditional attributes are saved with no rhyme nor reason. And the "DefaultTagStyle" line is somewhere in the middle of them, also nowhere in particular. Maybe there is some kind of optimisation going on, but I couldn't figure out any pattern.

Anyway, notice that the tags are marked as "External" (that is, they delimit segments), and the non-translatable ones say "Group" after "External". And the syntax for a tag with a conditional is

Code:

tagname[@attribute="attributevalue"]

So the only thing left to achieve a nice INI file is to get the list of attributes as in my previous post and create the corresponding lines:

TagX=data[@att="YYY"]:External,Group,Other Attributes:att

... with the X going up one by one, and the YYY going through the attributes we want to mark as non-translatable. Next time I'll post a script that does this.

Cheers.
P.

Hi there

Finally, here is the script I've used to generate the lines to be added to the INI file:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
n=5
for x in $(grep -ho 'att="[^123456][0-9][0-9]"' *.xml|sort -u|grep -o "[0-9]*")
do
    echo "Tag$n=data[@att="$x"]:External,Group,Other Attributes:att"
    n=$(( n+1 ))
done

We start the counter at 5, but this would depend on how many tags you've got already defined in that INI. There is no much to explain here. To the list of attributes we've got earlier, we use "grep -o" again to extract just the numbers. After pasting the list generated by this script into the INI file, right before the tag marking the end of the list of tags, we need to remember to change the number in this last tag to the proper one. And we are done!

Cheers.
P.