xliff and placeable substitution

Question

I need help to correctly modify a xliff unit. My workflow is the following:

1. My input file is a docx and the first step is to extract a xliff file from it. I use tikal for this purpose and I get an xliff file where I have many transunit like the following one (as you see tikal fills automatically the target with the same source text):

   xml <trans-unit id="tu3" xml:space="preserve"> <source xml:lang="it"><g id="1">Equazione di </g><x id="2"/><g id="3">Poisson</g><x id="4"/></source> <target xml:lang="en"><g id="1">Equazione di </g><x id="2"/><g id="3">Poisson</g><x id="4"/></target> </trans-unit>

2. Then I use the following code to extract all the strings that I want to translate:

   from translate.storage import lisa, xliff
   f=open(filename,"r")
   inputfile = str(f.read())
   XliffFile = xliff.xlifffile.parsestring(inputfile)
   for transunit in XliffFile.units:
       print transunit.source
   

   which extract the correct sentence to translate from the transunit source

   Equazione di Poisson
   

   I send the sentence to a machine translation server and I get back the translated sentence (Poisson Equation)

3. And now I'm in trouble... I didn't find a simple solution to change the target in transunit with the translated sentence. I tried

   In [50]: a.rich_target
   Out[50]: [<StringElem([<G(id="1" [u'Equazione di '])>, <X(id="2" [])>, <G(id="3" [u'Poisson'])>, <X(id="4" [])>])>]
   In [51]: a.target = "Poisson Equation"
   

   but I get:

   In [52]: a.target
   Out[52]: u'Poisson EquationEquazione di Poisson'
   In [53]: a.rich_target
   Out[53]: [<StringElem([<StringElem([u'Poisson Equation'])>, <G(id="1" [u'Equazione di '])>, <X(id="2" [])>, <G(id="3" [u'Poisson'])>, <X(id="4" [])>])>]
   

   and this is not what I want... any suggestion in how to get the correct target? Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming that you are using the Translate Toolkit: try using the settarget command. I am not sure how you will get the <g> or <x> tags in - perhaps by passing a multistring parameter.