Segment Lifecycle

What is a Segment

A segment is a piece of text extracted from a linguistic file. It is sometimes called a “String”.

Segment Statuses

In WebTranslateIt, segments have statuses. The status is displayed in the Translation Interface with an indicator to its right. There are 6 different statuses.

Right border Segment Status
Plain Green Proofread
The segment was translated and reviewed
Dotted Orange Not Proofread (or Unproofread)
The segment was translated but not proofread (not reviewed)
Dotted Red Not Translated (or Untranslated)
No translation was saved for this segment.
Double Yellow To Verify
3 possible reasons for this status:
1. The segment was translated but its source text was changed after that.
2. An automated system like Machine Translation, Auto-Translate or a Batch Operation translated the segment and flagged it as To Verify.
3. A manager manually flagged the segment as To Verify.
Solid Grey Hidden
The segment was flagged as hidden by a manager
Dotted Grey Obsolete
2 possible reasons for this status:
1. The segment was not found in the master language file during the last synchronization and was put into the trashcan
2. A manager manually flagged the segment as hidden.

Segment Lifecycle

Let’s consider the example of a project translated from English to Japanese. The master language file uploaded contains 3 segments: A, B and C. Some translations translations have been made in the Translation Interface.

A Japanese file is uploaded. It contains the segments B, C and D. What happens to the segments on WebTranslateIt?

Since the source language is English uploading a Japanese file to the system won’t do anything to segments A and D. It will edit the Japanese translations of segments B and C if there are any differences.

This is because English is set up to control what gets added and what gets obsoleted from a project. Why? Because most of the time, translated files coming from from other sources that WebTranslateIt are completely out of sync with the master language file and have some segments too many, and some missing segments too.

An English file containing the segments B, C and D is uploaded. What happens to the segments on WebTranslateIt?

Segment A and its translations will be flagged as obsolete and will be removed from all its target language files. Segments B and C will stay the same and segment D will be created and added to all its target languages files.

An English file is uploaded again, this time containing the segments A, B and C.

The system will flag A as active and will add it back in all target languages files, B and C won’t be touched and D will be flagged as obsolete and removed from all target language files.


Next Up: Batch Operations. Batch Operations lets you run a script to change parameters on several segments at once… »