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Transifex helps you manage translations of your apps, website, documents, and more.
After you sign up for a Transifex account, you'll be asked to create an organization. This organization will be the home for all the projects you'll translate with Transifex, along with the people involved in the process. As the person who created the organization, you'll be designated as one of its Administrators.
Note Only one organization per user is allowed. If you would like to create a new organization with the same username, please contact us. |
Each Transifex organization is organized around projects and resources. Before we dive into how you can create a project or add content for translation, let's walk through what resources and projects are.
Resources are content you're translating along with their corresponding translations. Let's say you're translating a file named file.po (the source file) from English into French and German. When you upload file.po to Transifex, Transifex will automatically create two new files for you – file_fr.po and file_de.po. These new translation files will hold your French and German translations, respectively. Together, the three files form a single resource in Transifex.
Once you understand what resources are, it's easy to understand Projects. Projects are simply a collection of resources. You can create as many projects as you need, and there's no limit to how many resources can be in a project.
Organizing projects and resources
Projects can be organized in any way you like. Think about the projects as directories and resources as files. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
It's best to group related content into a single project. For example, one project for your iOS app, and another for your website. Each project has certain settings and configuration options (e.g. translation team, translation memory, workflow settings).
Each project is translated into one or more languages (target languages). If you have content that needs to be translated to separate sets of languages, create separate projects for them. If you really want to have content in the same project which needs to be translated into different languages, you will need to tell your translators directly to remember not to translate those files into some of the project's languages.
Each project is also assigned to a team of translators and reviewers. If you have two resources that you wish to be translated by two different teams, put them into separate projects.
If you are using files, then one file is associated with one resource. In certain cases, you might have thousands of phrases in your database which can be grouped in different ways into resources. Here, it's really up to you: you can have one big resource or multiple smaller ones:
One big resource will make it easier for translators to go over the phrases.
Multiple smaller ones allow you to further group your phrases in some logical way and to have multiple same phrases which need to be translated in different ways, etc.
Here's an example structure that can help illustrate some of these ideas.
Project: Documentation
Resource: FAQ
Resource: About
Resource: Introduction
Project: Android app
Resource: UI labels specific to customer X
Resource: Translations of city names showing in the app
Resource: UI phrases
Project: User-generated content
Resource: Customized menu label
Resource: User Comments
Resource: Product Reviews
In the above example, you could also argue that the resource type "UI labels specific to customer X" might be better grouped on a separate project, so that they're all together. It's really up to you. If you have just 1-2 customers, leave it under the project. If you have 100 customers, put it under a separate project. If the number of labels per customer is just a couple, instead of having 100 resources of 2 phrases, you might want to have just one resource with 200 phrases and use tags to distinguish each customer.
Source and target file formats
Resources are files you're translating along with their corresponding translations. Let's say you're translating a file named file.po (the source file) from English into French and German (translation files). When you upload file.po to Transifex, Transifex will automatically create two new files for you – file_fr.po and file_de.po. These new translation files will hold your French and German translations, respectively.
CONVERTING FILE FORMATS
Please note that Transifex does not change or convert the source file format, but instead keeps the same file format and structure of the file: ex. if you upload a .po file in English, you’ll get the .po file in French and German.
The only case when it is possible to get another file format is .xliff (This feature is available on the Premium plan and up). This option is for using .xliff as an intermediary file format for translating outside of Transifex, in another CAT tool. XLIFF file is an XML-based format created to standardize the way localizable data are passed between tools during a localization process and is a common format for CAT tool exchange.
In this case, the workflow is:
Upload your source file in your desired file format, e.g. .po
Download the file for translation as xliff
Translate XLIFF outside of Transifex
Upload XLIFF file back to Transifex (using the option “Upload XLIFF file")
The translation is now back in Transifex, so you can download the translated file in the original .po file format.