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Introduction
Length limits can be set either during project creation or for existing projects. The segment length monitoring feature counts the number of characters in a segment.
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When you are creating a new project, and have specified the key project details and options, scroll to the Settings section. Select Monitor target length and decide what length limit to set.
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If you want the translation to be no more than 20% longer than the source, enter number 20 in Source plus X %.
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If you want the translation to be no more than 20 characters longer than the source, enter number 20 in Source plus X characters.
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You can also change your length limit settings for an existing project in the Project Editor. Go to Projects → Project List, and click the project in which you want to change the length limit settings.
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Scroll down on the General info tab of the Project Editor. To enable length limits, select Monitor target length, and then adjust the required length settings.
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Result
When the project is in translation, XTM Cloud will display segment errors when the entered translation in XTM Workbench is too short or too long.
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Character count in XTM Workbench
After you select the Show character counter option in XTM Workbench settings (Settings → General → XTM Workbench window → Show character counter), you might see what you could consider an "incorrect" character count in the bottom panel:
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The actual value might be misleading. The number that is displayed at the bottom once a particular segment is active does not represent the total character count for the segment itself but shows the total length of the segments that can be merged with one another (note that there is an intermittent line between segments of this kind). In other words, the character count number is the total character count for the paragraph that a particular segment is part of. This is expected behavior.
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The value on the left indicates the number of characters in the source paragraph and the value on the right indicates the number of characters in the target. |
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Character limit in XTM Workbench vs. in Source File
Your source files very often may contain an imposed character restriction with regard to the size of particular paragraphs MS Word files, or the size of text in cells in Excel files. This restriction is also transferred into XTM Workbench; however, you may sometimes see inconsistency between character count displayed in your source file and character count displayed in XTM Workbench. Usually, this difference is a couple of characters, more or less.
The reason that the character limit that is displayed in XTM Workbench differs from the character limit in the source file is because XTM Cloud has to account for the characters it uses to replace the spaces in between the sentences, line breaks and any special characters that are included in placeholders.
XTM Cloud will always use a relevant number of characters to insert whitespace characters between segments in the paragraph. For example, if your paragraph consists of 3 sentences, which means 3 XTM Workbench segments, and you set the minimal target paragraph length to 30 characters, the actual character limit for Linguist is 28 characters, as per the below calculation.
That being said, the formula for calculating final character count allowable in XTM Workbench will look as below:
Minimum target paragraph length - (Number of segments in the paragraph - 1)
30 - (3-1) = 28
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Good to know!
For XLIFF 1.2 files, XTM Cloud can process advanced options like defining translatable text, comments, segment IDs, segment length, custom attributes and HTML processing.