Can you "translate" from one language to the same language?

Question

Summary Can you "translate" from one language to the same language? Content Greetings! Here is what I am attempting to do: We have some "legalese" (terms & conditions in one document, something else in another) that sometimes gets updated and changed. For one of these documents we have translations (via .xlf files) into 12 languages. Currently whenever we have to update the "legalese" in the main language (U.S. English) on our main .rtf template (or in an .rtf subtemplate), we have to update all 12 .xlf files so that the text matches the newly updated en-US text so that the translation text gets displayed/printed. Not terribly bad for the one document, but we keep adding different documents, each with multiple translations, and the number of languages could grow. So over time this will get unwieldy. What I want to do is create a main .rtf where the "legalese" text reads something like, 'This is a placeholder for the Terms text.' Then, have an .xlf file that "translates" from 'en-US' to 'en-US' - just like all the others currently translate (from 'en-US' to 'fr-FR', for example). In that "U.S. English to U.S. English 'translation'", the would be 'This is a placeholder for the Terms text.' and the would be the U.S. English terms & conditions. That way, whenever the "legalese" gets updated in English but doesn't have to be updated in other languages, I only have to modify the one "English-to-English" .xlf file . I won't then have to update the of 12 .xlf files. Problem is, I've tried it and can't get it to work either when using the Template Builder for Word or in our test environment. Has anyone done this or something similar and gotten it to work? Thanks, -Moonpie

Brajesh Shukla-95078 · Answer

We had similar requirement in Oracle EBS so we used lookup(its kind of mapping  where you can define one value and there respective translated value) to achieve the same.

Based on language we are checking the lookup and picking the respective translated value in rtf. So its similar to defining translation in xlf file rather we used lookup to define translation.

So we have only one rtf and one lookup with multiple lookup values for each rtf tag. In future if some new field is getting added then we just need to make one entry in lookup with the respective translation.

Hope you have similar lookup functionality in Siebel as well.

Disposable581 Oracle · Answer

Brajesh, Thank you for the details of what you implemented. Upon reading it, I do not see how we can do anything similar in Siebel. However, in thinking through what you wrote (this is sort of "stream of consciousness" here, because I started typing this immediately after thinking this), my first thought was "Maybe we could put the U.S. English Terms & Conditions in a field and translate the other languages." But that won't work, because we don't have multiple languages set up in Siebel itself, so we can't translate the field values. (And there are other overhead and other considerations and liabilities.) But my next thought was just just simply do this: "Hard code" the U.S. English Terms & Conditions in the .rtf file, but make it's selection conditional: only choose this text if the locale is 'en-US'; otherwise, choose the "This is a placeholder..." text. Then the .xlf files can use "This is a placeholder..." as the and their proper translation as the . I believe this will work. I will try it later today, and hopefully post back this week with results. But if anyone can make my original desired functionality work, that would be a much more elegant design and easier to read in the template. Thanks, -Moonpie

Brajesh Shukla-95078 · Answer

In which platform you are running the report?