Comments are useful in two ways: to keep notes for yourself as you translate, and to pass on queries and information about the translation to a reviewer or other person in the workflow. For example, a reviewer can open an SDLXLIFF sent by the translator and view the translator's comments. The reviewer can also respond to the translator's comments in the SDLXLIFF in the form of a comment thread. The main actions that you can perform with comments are as follows:
- To add a comment to an entire segment: Click in the segment and, from the Review tab or right-click menu, choose Add Comment (Ctrl + Shift + N). The Add Comment dialog box shown in the following screenshot appears. Type the comment and click OK.
The background color of the segment changes to indicate that a comment has been added (as in the sample file in Segment 7, shown in the following screenshot):
- To add a comment to a word or string of text inside a segment: Select the text and, from the Review tab or right-click menu, choose Add Comment (Ctrl + Shift + N). Type the comment and click OK. The background color of the selected text changes to indicate that a comment has been added (as in the sample file in Segment 16).
- To add a comment to an entire document: Click in any segment and, from the Review tab or right-click menu, choose Add Comment (Ctrl + Shift + N). Type your comment. Change the Scope option to Current File, and click OK. A comments symbol appears at the top of the segment status column (as in the sample document), as shown in the following icon:
- Comments tab: The Comments tab provides an efficient way to work with comments. The tab is located above the side-by-side editor in Translation mode default layout and below it in Review and Sign-off mode default layouts. Click the tab to view a list of comments in the SDLXLIFF. For each comment, the most recently added part of the comment thread is displayed in the list. To display the whole thread in the list, double-click the entry. The first two icons in the following screenshot are to edit or delete the comment selected in the list. The icon on the right is to delete all the comments in the SDLXLIFF.
- To edit a comment: Click in the commented text (or, in the case of a comment on the entire document, the icon at the top of the status column). From the Review tab or right-click menu, choose Edit Comment, then choose Edit to edit the existing content of the comment or Add to add another comment to the comment (as you would when replying in a thread of messages). Alternatively, select the comment in the Comments tab and then click the Edit Comment icon at the top of the Comments tab. In the sample file, the reviewer has added responses to the comments in Segments 7 and 16.
- To view a comment in the side-by-side editor: Place your mouse pointer over the text with the colored background in the target segment to display the comment in a tool tip, as shown in the following screenshot of the comment in Segment 16:
- To delete a comment: Click in the commented text and, from the Review tab or right-click menu, choose Edit Comment, and then Delete. Alternatively, use the icons in the Comments tab to delete one or all comments.
- Exporting comments to .docx files: In the case of
.docxfiles, comments in target segments are, by default, placed in the translated.docxfile when the translation is generated (such as via File | Save Target As). To change this behavior, the setting that affects it must be changed before the documents for translation are converted to SDLXLIFF format. If you are using the sample file, which is already in an SDLXLIFF format, you will not therefore be able to change this behavior. For an explanation of the reasons for this, see the Global profile settings versus active project settings section in Chapter 7, Working with Projects.To change this setting, before you open the document via Open Single Document or create a project that includes the document in the New Project wizard, choose File | Options and then File Types | Microsoft Word 2007-2013. Under Common, uncheck the option Retain Studio target comments in target file. This change will affect your global profile settings for all future work, unless you reset it later. The File Types preferences can also be set up to affect only the current project by changing them in the New Project wizard (in the Project Files screen) or during an Open Single Document operation (in the Open Document dialog box, by clicking the Advanced button).
- Extracting comments from .docx files: You can also decide whether to display comments added in
.docxfiles As translatable text or As Studio comments in the SDLXLIFF. These options are set under File Types | Microsoft Word 2007-2013 | Common, and must be configured before the source files are converted to SDLXLIFF format, as described in the previous paragraph.