Translation file formats

The Manufacturer Tool can export the product data content in 3 different formats in order to have it translated.

• ETA (CSV)
• XLIFF (XML)
• ETS3-compatible ETA (CSV)

ETA (CSV)

This is the traditional translation format used by older versions of Manufacturer Tool. It is a CSV format with the following conventions:

• The first row contains a header for the columns.
• The first 5 columns have a fixed meaning:
  • Column 1: Contains a line number
  • Column 2: Contains a unique ID identifying the element to be translated
  • Column 3: Contains the element type
  • Column 4: Contains the name of the attribute to be translated
  • Column 5: Contains the maximum length of the text
  • Column 6: Contains the text to be translated in the source language.
  • Column 7 and the rest of the columns contain the translations for the requested languages. There is one column per language. The column header is of the form 'langid – langname', where 'langid' is the IETF language code.

The character encoding of the exported '.ETA file' is UTF-8 and it can be easily edited in Notepad, Excel or in a modern translation tool. However, please ensure that if you modify the file using Excel, that it still has the same structure (Tab delimited) when saving it. You can download an example '.ETA' file for Greek language of a test product from the link below.

You shall only modify the content that is in the 'target language column(s)'. Otherwise, if you try to import the file, the translations may not be imported!

XLIFF (XML)

Modern translation tools are capable of reading and writing XML-based files formats, and XLIFF is also a standard format for translations. XLIFF files are restricted to one source and one target language per file.

For details on XLIFF, see here. 

You can download an example '.XLIFF' file for Greek language of a test product from the link below.

ETS3-compatible ETA (CSV)

The ETS3-compatible ETA format, contains a different header row than the standard '.ETA' format:

• The caption of column 2 is 'Path' instead of 'ID'
• The caption of column 3 is 'TableName' instead of 'Type'
• The caption of column 4 is 'TableColumn' instead of 'Attribute'
• The caption of column 5 is 'ColumnLength' instead of 'MaxLength'
• The captions of the language columns start with the Windows LCID in decimal representation instead of the IETF language code.