This documentation provides practical examples of how to use
the Project Automation API, which allows programmatic access to
the project automation functionality of SDL Trados Studio 2017.
Apart from various code snippets that demonstrate common use cases you
will also find a fully-documented command-line sample application that
showcases how to automate project creation and batch task
functionality.
What you can do with this SDK
The Project Automation API is concerned with the automation of common
project management tasks such as file analysis, pre-translation, generation of finalized
target documents, etc. Based on this API you could potentially build
fully-fledged, customized workflow systems.
Below you find examples of applications for the API:
- Developing a Comand-line application that traverses a folder / sub-folder structure
to analyze or pre-translate the translatable documents contained therein.
- Develop an application that creates custom analysis reports for
importing into an accounting system.
- Develop an application for fully automating the project creation process, e.g.
create multiple projects according to a template with one mouse-click.
- Schedule automated project package creation and assigning manual tasks
to a number of users. The application can then upload the packages to an
FTP server or forward them via e-mail.
- An application that is timed to automatically loop through a folder
into which translators/editors
have delivered their return packages. The application then imports the return
packages, thereby updating the corresponding projects, generates an updated
project statistics report, which is then forwarded to the responsible
project manager.
- An application that loops through a number of translated bilingual
(SDL XLIFF) documents and that batch-updates the corresponding master translation
memories on a regular basis.
- An application for testing whether a set of native documents can be
converted to a translatable (SDL XLIFF) format prior to creating a project.
The application loops through a folder structure, identifies any translatable
documents and converts them SDL XLIFF. Upon failure, a report is generated
that states the file and (if applicable) the reason why the conversion failed
(e.g. a Microsoft Word document has the track changes functionality switched on)
- An application that loops through multiple projects and generates the
finalized target files, which are then automatically forwarded to the end customer via
e-mail or uploaded to an FTP share. In case of any failure to generate the target
documents, an automated mail can be send to the project manager.
Note that the Project Automation API might sometimes have to be used in conjunction with
the Translation Memory API to cover specific use-cases, e.g. when certain information
such as the number of translation units, the TM languages, etc. needs to be read from a TM.
This SDK contains an example of how to retrieve the languages of a specified TM using
the Translation Memory API and then create a project based on the TM language direction.
See Also Comments