Import 2 column bilingual file into Déjà Vu

With the exception of a few formats, Déjà Vu only support monolingual files when importing into a project. This means that Déjà Vu will assume that all the text it can extract is in the same language, the source language, and will therefore present that text in the left-hand column of the translation grid.

If you have a file that has text in 2 languages, where the text in one language is a translation of the text in the other language, you will not be able to get Déjà Vu to differentiate between the two and place it in different columns (with the exception of the bilingual formats Déjà Vu supports).

There is a way to work around this, however, though it is a little more complex that importing a normal monolingual file. In this article, we will illustrate it with an example.

Suppose that you have an Excel spreadsheet which has 2 columns in it. One of those columns has text in English, and the other column has the same text translated to Spanish. You have been tasked with checking the translations in this spreadsheet, and you would like to be able to use your Déjà Vu TMs and TBs to be able to run Déjà Vu's QA checks on your spreadsheet.

To this, you need to have Déjà Vu place the English text in the source column of Déjà Vu's translation grid, and the Spanish text in the target column, which is something that Déjà Vu will not do on its own if you simply add the spreadsheet to the project and import it.

In this situation, you will do the following:

1. Create a new TM that you will use only for this.
2. Import the spreadsheet into the TM.
3. Make a copy of the spreadsheet, that you will use to do the next steps. The next steps will involve making changes to the spreadsheet, so you will want to keep a backup copy without these changes, hence this step.
4. Open the new spreadsheet you have as a result of step 3.
5. Delete the column that contains Spanish text, leaving only 1 column in one language, English.
6. Save this spreadsheet.
7. Import it into a Déjà Vu project.
8. You now have a project that has the English text in the left-hand column, and no text in the right-hand column. Half way there!
9. Attach the TM you used in steps 1 and 2 to the project. Make sure there are no other TMs attached to this project, at least until the whole procedure is finished.
10. Pre-translate the project.
11. Déjà Vu will now fill the right-hand column with translation taken from the attached TM, which are the same translations found in the original spreadsheet.
12. You have successfully placed the text from both languages in the project, each language in a different column in the editing grid.