Automatically exclude strings - Multilingual App Toolkit

Question

When using the Multilingual App Toolkit, our resx and xlf files contain lots of junk that we don't want translating (like a control's size and location).

Is there anyway to automatically exclude all the extra information?

If not, is the only way to manually go through the XLIFF file using the Multilingual Editor and change translatable to False?

The problem is even worse when the resource file contains images...

Answer 1

A few days after asking here, I tried asking the same question at the official support page for Multilingual App Toolkit, but I didn't get a reply there either.

So, as a workaround to the problem I've written a python script to set all of the properties other than .Text in the XLIFF files so that they are marked as translate="No". The Multilingual Editor doesn't have an option to set "Translatable" as a bulk operation, and doing this manually would take forever.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from lxml import etree
import os


NEW_LINE = '\r\n'


def set_translatable(filepath):
    """
    Each string in the XLF file is set to translatable False unless
    it is the `.Text` attribute that we actually want translated.

    """
    doc = etree.parse(filepath)

    for d in doc.iter():
        if 'trans-unit' in d.tag:
            translate = False
            for k, v in d.items():
                if k == 'id':
                    if v.endswith('.Text'):
                        translate = True
            translate = 'yes' if translate else 'no'
            d.set('translate', translate)
    with open(filepath, 'w') as out_file:
        doc.write(out_file)


def main():
    cwd = os.getcwd()

    for subdir, dirs, files in os.walk(cwd):
        for file in files:
            if filepath.endswith('.xlf'):
                set_translatable(filepath)          


if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

In Visual Studio, I also had to manually open every form and set the Localizable property to True so that the .Text values are saved in the corresponding .resx where the Multilingual App Toolkit can process them.

Answer 2

In my case I wanted to ignore on a per-file basis, so this was helpful for me: https://multilingualapptoolkit.uservoice.com/forums/231158-general/suggestions/13627704-add-ignore-exclude-filter-for-resx-files

I basically added

<SuppressAutomaticLocalization>true</SuppressAutomaticLocalization>

in the EmbeddedResource tag in the .csproj file, resulting in:

<ItemGroup>
  <EmbeddedResource Update="Properties\Authorization\Components_Actions.resx">
    <Generator>ResXFileCodeGenerator</Generator>
    <LastGenOutput>Components_Actions.Designer.cs</LastGenOutput>
    <SuppressAutomaticLocalization>true</SuppressAutomaticLocalization>
  </EmbeddedResource>
...

More Info: If the .resx File is not listed in your .csproj file, make sure to set the AccessModifier in the .resx file editor. If no selection is made, the file does not appear in the .csproj