Tool

(View Disclaimer)

by Daniel McGowan and Jaime Mateos

Novell Localisation Workbench is a comprehensive tool to allow the safe translation and reuse of previous translations in Novell Software. This release includes an optional alignment tool to create leverageable sources from previous translated files.

NLWorkbench 2.6.3 - March, 2010:

New features in NLWorkbench 2.6.3 are:

• fixed issue with Win31 parser not recognizing .Net files correctly
• fixed FIL parser issues with codpage conversions

NLWorkbench 2.6.2 - July 30, 2009:

New features in NLWorkbench 2.6.2 are:

• Improvements in handling improperly formed controls inWin32/64 dialogs

NLWorkbench 2.6.1 - June 4, 2009:

New features in NLWorkbench 2.6.1 are:

• Wordcounts for strings marked as 'Need Review' can be broken down by leverage status
• Bugfix for command line errors when using directory names containing quotes

NLWorkbench 2.6 - April 2, 2009:

The main new features in NLWorkbench 2.6 are:

• Improved Fuzzy algorithm
  The fuzzy matching algorithm has been further improved. It provides around 20% more matches than previously.
• Enhanced filtering
  There are new filters for high and low fuzzies. Also dates can now be specified when using event filtering.
• New parsers
  This include parsers for Novell .fil, .inf, .mdb and .msg files, Apple .strings files, InstallShiled .txt files, and NSIS .nsh files.
• Run batch file
  The user can automatically run a batch file after target generation.
• Fuzzy comparison dialog
  Double clicking on a fuzzy match presents a dialog showing the differences between the original and the fuzzy string.
• Support for Win64 binaries
  The Windows parser supports Win64 as well as Win32 binaries.

NLWorkbench 2.5.2 - January 7, 2009:

New features in NLWorkbench 2.5.2:

• Bitmap handling
  NLWorkbench displays any bitmaps contained in a Win32 binary and allows the user to export them and import localised versions.
• Match upgrading
  In a leveraging pass, if a better match is found in a translation memory placed later in the list of TMs, the better match will be used instead. ICE matches are regarded as better than 100% matches, and these one are regarded as better than fuzzy matches.
• Online Help
  Comprehensive online help system covering topics of interest to both translators and l10n engineers.
• New parsers
  2 new parsers: Installhiled_txt. dll and NSIS_nsh.dll

NLWorkbench 2.3 - July 9, 2008:

This is a major release and addresses over 100 bugs and enhancement requests.

The main new features in NLWorkbench 2.3 are:

• Command line support:
  NLWorkbench provides a command line interface
• Improved Fuzzy Matching:
  The fuzzy matching algorithm is more successful at finding fuzzy matches. The fuzzy threshold has been made user configurable. It should be noted that this slows down considerably the leveraging times.
• NLWUtils.exe:
  This utility helps recover from an accidental loss of a Master set or a Sub set.
• Generate source files:
  NLWorkbench allows you to regenerate the source files that were inserted in the project from the .NLW.

New features in 2.2

Workspace
NLWorkbench generates a Workspace file (.WLN) that contains pointers to all language .NLWs. This Workspace file can be open and used to performed batch operations on all/some of the NLWs. The operations include Leverage, Update, Generate targets and Generate reports.

Auto - translate
At project creation strings are searched for duplicates. If duplicates are found the first string is left untranslated and any other occurrence is locked and marked as a 'Duplicate'. Once the first string is translated, the translation is propagated to the duplicates and their status is changed to 'Needs review'

Resources tab
This tab groups all resources across all source files and presents them according to resource type. This allows, for instance, to see the contents of all stringtables in one view.

Logging - History - Event tracking
NLWorkbench now records a number of events along with the date and user information. They can be displayed in the history tab. To display the history for any given string, right click and select History. At the moment events are recorded at the project and string levels.

Filter dialog
The new filter dialog allows for multi-selection and History based filtering. You can access it thru the Filter combo box.

Localisation status
New flag that allows the translators to quickly filter out pre-approved translations. This feature provides improved but similar functionality to the Vendor Changed flag present in the NLWorkbench 1.x series.

Context tab
The new Context tab in the Results window displays the strings immediately above and bellow the string that is being edited. The number of surrounding strings can be configured thru the Tools-Options-Editors dialog (defaults to 3). This functionality only applies when a filter is active; when No Filter is selected the Context tab remains empty. Use the menu View-Context to switch this tab on/off.

Concordance search
NLWorkbench allows to search the contents of designated .PTMs or NLWs for any given substring.

Win32 parser:
Parses standard Win32 dlls and also Groupwise FIL files. Dialog translation and resizing are available thru the dialog editor.

New QA checks

• detect strings with the same text for both source and translation
• detect invalid escape sequences (e.g. Backslash-space)
• detect unescaped double quotes

Aligner.exe
This utility allows to align original (English) and translated version of source files, and produces an NLW that can be used for leveraging.

Other

• New installer with Vista support
• The search dialog supports regular expressions
• New navigation shortcuts: Ctrl+U (Next Untranslated), Ctrl+W (Next Need Review), Ctrl+J (Next Approved)
• The behavior of the Enter key has been made user configurable. The Enter key can be set to bring you to the Next string (default; as in previous versions), Next Untranslated, Next Need Review or Next Approved.
• Two new context menu items to Expand or Collapse subitems in the "Files" and "Filter" trees. They fully expand/collapse the tree from the selected item.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.