Introduction

XTM Cloud offers quite vast flexibility with regard to building up XTM workflow definitions, as well as transition between particular workflow steps. This article presents ins and outs of how transition marks work in XTM workflow, especially in the context of working on a particular workflow step by multiple linguists.

Transition marks

What are they?

Transition marks, or blocking mechanisms, are tools which allow you to impose rules on when specific workflow steps are available to work on by assigned linguists in the XTM Cloud UI.

They are set up in the XTM Workflow editor:

When are they used? – splitting a job into bundles

Transition marks gain their actual significance and effect mainly when XTM jobs are split into multiple smaller bundles. Their primary purpose is to enable different linguists to work on a single workflow step simultaneously.

IMPORTANT!

A common misconception about splitting an XTM job into bundles is that it enables linguists to work on the exact same segments in XTM Workbench, in the same workflow step, by multiple linguists. It works quite the opposite. In this case, linguists have a different scope of segments assigned to them in XTM Workbench, within a single workflow step. Other segments which are not assigned to a specific linguist are locked for them in XTM Workbench.

Types of transition marks

There are three available types of transition marks for inserting in between workflow steps in XTM Cloud:

	Comma → Bundles in the neighboring workflow steps can be processed at the same time, which means that the first workflow step does not necessarily have to be finished first:
	Arrow → A specific bundle in the next workflow next step cannot be started until the previous workflow step for the said bundle is finished first.
	Hashtag → Any bundle in the next workflow step cannot be started until all the bundles from the previous step are finished first.