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Unable to see emoji in the source
Thread poster: Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
Italy
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French to Italian
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Apr 27, 2020

Hi,
I'm not sure if this topic has already been discussed. My issue is that I've received a couple of .xliff files for a mobile phone app that are supposed to have many emoji in them. I only see some emojis in the source, like the X or tick emojis, but I don't see any of the typical yellow emojis. I know I'm missing a lot of them because the client told me, and I find a lot of double spaces instead.
I'm using Trados Studio 2019, and I've tried a couple of online tools as well but I c
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Hi,
I'm not sure if this topic has already been discussed. My issue is that I've received a couple of .xliff files for a mobile phone app that are supposed to have many emoji in them. I only see some emojis in the source, like the X or tick emojis, but I don't see any of the typical yellow emojis. I know I'm missing a lot of them because the client told me, and I find a lot of double spaces instead.
I'm using Trados Studio 2019, and I've tried a couple of online tools as well but I can't see any of the yellow emoji online either.
Any idea how to fix this? Can i do anything about it or it's just an issue of the .xliff file?
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Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
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@Elena Apr 27, 2020

Elena Feriani wrote:
I'm using Trados Studio 2019, and I've tried a couple of online tools as well but I can't see any of the yellow emoji online either.


There are a number of ways to display emoji inside text, but the most common method these days is using specific Unicode characters. This means that emoji will only show up if you are using a font that have glyphs for those characters. If your font does not have glyphs for those characters, then it depends on the program you're using what will happen... whether the character will be shown as a space, an X, a question mark, or some other character.

A good program (but Trados is NOT a good program in this sense) will "fall back" to another font that does have the character, if the current font doesn't have it. At the very least, one can expect a program (even a bad one) to display the unrecognised character in some useful way, e.g. a question mark or a little box. But Trados doesn't do that.

[Edited at 2020-04-27 09:43 GMT]


 
Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
Italy
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French to Italian
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TOPIC STARTER
Thank you Apr 27, 2020

Thank you, Sam.
Nice Peach emoji collection!
By yellow emojis I meant the yellow smiley faces. I'm able to see some emojis like the green tick sign but not others. The client says it's not a big deal, and that they will add them manually. So I'll leave it for today. But I'll definitely try later to look into the font situation
Thanks a lot,

Elena


 
Samuel Murray
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This appears to be a bug in Trados Apr 27, 2020

Elena Feriani wrote:
I've received a couple of .xliff files for a mobile phone app that are supposed to have many emoji in them. I only see some emojis in the source. ... I find a lot of double spaces instead. I'm using Trados Studio 2019.


I just tested this, and discovered to my dismay that emoji in source files are LOST by Trados. My test file was a UTF16-LE file with some text and emoji in it, but when I convert it to SDLXLIFF format in Trados, some of the emoji characters are replaced with spaces in the SDLXLIFF file! I double-checked by opening the SDLXLIFF file in a program that allows me to see exactly what Unicode character code each character has, and these emoji were truly replaced with ordinary spaces! Then I used copy-source-to-target for all segments, and generated the target files, but the emoji are gone. They are gone. Trados lost them.

emoji in trados2

In what format were the files sent to you? Were they sent as XLIFF files or as SDLXLIFF files? I'm trying to find out if you had received files from the client that are already stripped of emoji.



[Edited at 2020-04-27 09:50 GMT]


 
Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
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Thank you for testing this for me. Apr 27, 2020

The files were sent as xliff, and I was told to use the cat tool of my choice.

 
Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
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the xliff were fine Apr 27, 2020

I tried on memsource and it works
edit: Erased screenshot for confidentiality concerns

[Edited at 2020-04-27 10:20 GMT]


 
Samuel Murray
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@Elena Apr 27, 2020

Elena Feriani wrote:
The files were sent as XLIFF, and I was told to use the cat tool of my choice.


Well, there's the answer, unfortunately. It would appear that Trados loses these characters. So if you use Trados for these files, you will not be able to generate the translated files correctly because (so my limited testing shows) the SDLXLIFF files no longer have the emoji in them.

There may be a trick to employ in Trados, when creating the SDLXLIFF files, to ensure that Trados retains the characters, but I don't know what that is.

I tried my test files in WFP5 (which converts them to WFP5 XLIFF files), and the emoji are retained. I then opened my WFP5 XLIFF files in Trados, and Trados loses the emoji.

I tried to convert the emoji to entities when editing the XLIFF files in a text editor, in the hope that Trados would retain the entities e.g. I changed 😃 to 😃 ... but Trados still replaces it with a space.

The only solution that I can see at this moment, would be that some scripter should write a script that takes the XLIFF file and replaces all emoji characters with their numbers, surrounded by e.g. curly brackets (e.g. change 😃 to {{1F603}}) or as something that will cause it to become a tag in Trados. Then you'd open that new XLIFF file in Trados, translate it, and generate a target file, and then run another script on that final file to convert the placeholders back into emoji.

==

Added: I asked this question on the official Trados forums, and I was told that this is a known problem with Trados.


[Edited at 2020-04-27 12:40 GMT]


 
Elena Feriani
Elena Feriani
Italy
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Thank you! Apr 27, 2020

Samuel Murray wrote:

The only solution that I can see at this moment, would be that some scripter should write a script that takes the XLIFF file and replaces all emoji characters with their numbers, surrounded by e.g. curly brackets (e.g. change 😃 to {{1F603}}) or as something that will cause it to become a tag in Trados. Then you'd open that new XLIFF file in Trados, translate it, and generate a target file, and then run another script on that final file to convert the placeholders back into emoji.

==

Added: I asked this question on the official Trados forums, and I was told that this is a known problem with Trados.


Thank you for your help, you lost me at "some scripter" and thank you for asking the question in the official forums, now we know it's a known problem. I (almost) regret upgrading to Studio 2019!

[Edited at 2020-04-27 14:20 GMT]


 
Roy Oestensen
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Yes, try a different CAT tool if possible Apr 27, 2020

Elena Feriani wrote:
I tried on memsource and it works

In such instances I try memoQ, but memsource would also be a good choice.


Elena Feriani
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
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@Roy Apr 27, 2020

Roy Oestensen wrote:
In such instances I try MemoQ, but Memsource would also be a good choice.


Yup. But FWIW, Paul F from the official Trados forum says that MemoQ has the same problem.


 
Stepan Konev
Stepan Konev  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 07:46
English to Russian
Emoji in memoQ Apr 27, 2020

In memoQ editor, emojis are presented as tagged squares, but you can see them in the preview pane.


*By the way, I received a notification today from the SDL notification
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In memoQ editor, emojis are presented as tagged squares, but you can see them in the preview pane.


*By the way, I received a notification today from the SDL notification system. It said Paul suggested this improvement for future releases, so the issue is flagged now.

[Edited at 2020-04-27 16:18 GMT]
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Elena Feriani
 
Roy Oestensen
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Samuel Apr 27, 2020

Samuel Murray wrote:

Roy Oestensen wrote:
In such instances I try MemoQ, but Memsource would also be a good choice.


Yup. But FWIW, Paul F from the official Trados forum says that MemoQ has the same problem.


I think you misunderstood - I only meant it as a general advice: If one CAT tool can't handle a problem, it would be a good advice trying some other, in case it would be able to do so. I did not have this specific situation in mind.

Roy


 
Samuel Murray
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@Stepan, please use my test files Apr 27, 2020

Stepan Konev wrote:
In memoQ editor, emojis are presented as tagged squares...


Please also try it using my test files:
http://www.leuce.com/tempfile/emojitrados.zip

Roy Oestensen wrote:
I only meant it as a general advice...


That is what I understood, but I thought I'd mention what Paul said about MemoQ, for future reference only.

[Edited at 2020-04-27 20:50 GMT]


 
Stepan Konev
Stepan Konev  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 07:46
English to Russian
Test result Apr 27, 2020

Samuel Murray wrote:
Please also try it using my test files:
http://www.leuce.com/tempfile/emojitrados.zip

For the xliff file, preview is obviously not available.
UTF 8 and UTF 16 give the same result: most emojis are ok, but some are not.

List of emojis that are not available on preview:
🥺 Pleading Face
🥰 Smiling Face with Hearts
🤍 White Heart
🥺 A New King: Pleading Face
🤯 Twemoji 12.1.16 Emoji Changelog
🦠 Spread of the Coronavirus Emoji
Weirdly, when I copy the relevant placeholder (white square) for each above-listed emoji directly from the mQ editor, it is correctly pasted here as you can see.

[Edited at 2020-04-27 22:31 GMT]


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
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@Stepan Apr 28, 2020

Stepan Konev wrote:
For the xliff file, preview is obviously not available.


Yes, but one should be able to see in the MemoQ XLIFF file (by e.g. opening it in a text editor) if the emoji were retained or lost.

UTF 8 and UTF 16 give the same result: most emojis are ok, but some are not.


From your full description I gather that although MemoQ was unable to display the emoji correctly, it did not "lose" them. MemoQ retained all of the emoji in the test files. The problem with Trados is that not only are the emoji not displayed in the editor, but the emoji are truly gone (they get removed and replaced with actual spaces in the SDLXLIFF file).

Weirdly, when I copy the relevant placeholder (white square) for each above-listed emoji directly from the MemoQ editor, it is correctly pasted here as you can see.


Actually, that is not weird. That is what is supposed to happen.

It means that the probable reason why you have white squares in MemoQ is simply because MemoQ's chosen font does not have these glyphs, and so they are displayed as white squares, but the characters themselves remain intact.

When the final translated file is created, the correct emoji should be visible in the final format, as long as the translator copied each target segment's white square from its corresponding source segment. See, this is the danger with displaying only white squares: some ignorant translator might think that all white squares are the same, and then copy a single white square and paste it over and over into all target segments. Well, if you do that, then obviously you're copying the same emoji to all target segments, and not the particular emoji from the particular source segment. Or, the translator might think that it is just an ordinary white square, and therefore type/insert real white squares into the target text, which means that the final translated file will contain... white squares, not emoji.


[Edited at 2020-04-28 08:08 GMT]


Stepan Konev
 
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