Working with Placeholders

A placeholder is a visual representation of a piece of embeddable markup. Rather than exposing the actual markup to the translator, a placeholder is used to indicate the position of the markup within the segment. This ensures that translators cannot alter the content of the embeddable markup. Instead, translators are only allowed to position each placeholder in the target text in the correct location for the translation. WorldServer requires that all placeholders that are in the source text also appear in the target text.

To view the markup that is represented by the placeholders, click the Placeholder button for that segment. Note that if the placeholder is extremely long, it may show only the beginning and end portions of the markup, with an ellipsis in between.

Figure 1. Working with Placeholders

Placeholder Order

As you perform your translation, you may find that you need to reorder the placeholders in order to preserve the correct formatting. For example, say you have the source segment "Read the Users' Guide documentation first." This might be represented in the WorldServer Browser Workbench as "Read the {1}Users' Guide{2} {3}documentation{4} first." If you then translated this into Spanish, you might find that the order of the words in the sentence changes and you need to reorder the place holders as follows: "Lea {3}la documentación{4} de {1}la guía de los usuarios{2} primero." While you can change the order of the placeholders in the target segment, WorldServer has the following requirements:

You must have the same number of placeholders in the source and target segment; any variation from this will cause an error that will prevent you from saving your translations.
WorldServer does not allow you to change the contents of the placeholders. For example, if the source segment has  and  tags, you must use the same tags in the target.

Tip: If you enter content that looks like a placeholder (that is something like {4} ), you will need to escape the curly braces. For this example, you would type \{4\}.

Placeholder ID Numbering

In general, placeholders are numbered in sequence from the first segment in the asset to the last. If you use matches from Translation Memory that have tags that are not present in the source entry, you may see placeholder IDs that are out of sequence as you are working. The ID sequence generally resolves once a server roundtrip takes place (such as when you save an asset, or add a segment comment), if not before. The temporary inconsistency is not a cause for concern.

You are most likely to see numbering inconsistencies when you work with assets or translation memories (TMs) that are also used by SDL Studio 2011. The following cases illustrate placeholder ID numbering.

In Browser Workbench, if you open an asset which has 100% matches for segments, they are pre-populated from the translation memory (TM). If some tags (such as Studio quick tags) are only present in the target segment, they are assigned unique placeholder IDs. These IDs are larger than the largest placeholder ID for any source segments.
If you open the Translation memory matches dialog for such a pre-populated match, the quick tags for the underlying TM entry will again be resolved, and get new placeholder IDs which do not correspond with the ones assigned during pre-translation.
When you paste one of the matches from the Translation memory matches dialog into the asset, the placeholder numbering may appear to conflict with placeholders elsewhere in the document. Once a server roundtrip takes place, the placeholders in the pasted segment will be assigned new, document-level placeholder IDs, and the document will be consistent again. Note, however, that the placeholder IDs will be incremented each time you paste and save.