Welcome to a new tooltip about Transit NXT. This one is specially addressed to project managers, who are the ones likely to be confronted with the issue explained here. Let's say you have a new project, to translate some documents from American English into Spanish, but the available dictionaries contain term pairs in British English and Spanish only (or in the main). That should not be a problem, you might think, and indeed it should not be in practice but as long as you know what to do.

If you did not know that you needed to do something, you might end up wondering "Why can't the translator see the terminology in the dictionary window?" Different language variants, like US English and UK/GB English, are considered as different languages by Transit NXT for many purposes. For example, if you add a language pair in a given language combination as reference material to a project in a different language combination, no matches will come up even if the source languages are variants of the same language (e.g. US vs UK). Earlier we saw how to come around that with a little trick outside Transit NXT. This time, regarding terminology, it is a bit different. Transit NXT does consider language variants as variants (but still not as the same language, or language variant). If you need to send a project to your external translator you need to pay attention to this. Let's get down to a particular example. Imagine the source language is US English...

... but most of your terminology is in UK English (ENG), not US English (ENU).

In that case you would need to do something. When packing your project to send the PPF to the translator, you need to explicitly include language variants. For that, click on TermStar options:

In the dialog that appears, you need to check options Pack all *-language variants for either the source or the target languages, or both.

If you do that, the vendor will receive a PPF that includes all terms in English regardless of their language variant (either ENG, ENU or any other). If you do not, there will be a majority of (UK) English terms that would be left behind, and the vendor will receive the dictionaries that you packed but will not see the terms in the dictionary window. If someone (either you or your translator) realizes this, you will have a chance to re-pack and re-send the project again. However, it might be the case that nobody realizes it, and the translator will do their job spending more time and effort than really necessary and using terminology that has not been validated, which you, as the final QA checker, will have to correct or ask to correct. So it is worth bearing in mind that you need to watch out for variants. And that's all for now. Thanks for reading, and please do not hesitate to send your comments or questions or to ask for specific tooltips that address your specific doubts. Special thanks to Karen Ellis for reviewing this post.