With the release of Doc-To-Help 2011 v1 (January 2011) comes a big helping hand to those who struggle with managing the translation process: integration with SharePoint Translation Management Libraries. When content from a Doc-To-Help project is uploaded to at Translation Management Library, SharePoint’s translation workflow will kick off and Doc-To-Help will create a project copy for each langue you are writing. You end up with an easy way to track translations, provide content to translators who do not use Doc-To-Help, and an organized way of producing localized targets.

How It Works

Using SharePoint and Doc-To-Help together to manage the translation process involves the following concepts:

  • Source language: The language you start with, typically your primary language.
  • Target language: The language(s) you are translating to.
  • SharePoint Translation Library: Special library in SharePoint that manages the translation workflow. See “SharePoint’s Translation Management Features” to learn more.
  • Help Target: A Doc-To-Help output, its settings, and theme. Help Targets can be printed manuals, desktop Help, or web-based Help. Learn more about Help Targets in the “Creating Help Targets” topic in Doc-To-Help’s documentation.
  • Document: Any file containing content. It could be a Word document, XML file, or HTML file.

When using SharePoint to manage the translation process, you start with a Doc-To-Help project in your source language and then upload the content from that project to a SharePoint Translation Management Library.

In the example above, a project is written in English and uploaded to a SharePoint Translation Library.

SharePoint will then make a copy of each file for each target language you wish to translate to (target languages are specified in SharePoint). SharePoint will also create translation tasks for translators.


In the example above, Spanish and French are specified as target languages.

Once the copies are made, Doc-To-Help will automatically create a new project for each target language and automatically download the appropriate documents.


In the example above, there is a Doc-To-Help project for each language and each project has the appropriate documents.

As translators work through the process, all documents are kept in synch with the central SharePoint library and the Translation status is reported in Doc-To-Help’s interface. Also, outputs can be generated at any time.


You end up with a central SharePoint library that manages all languages and a separate Doc-To-Help project for each language.

That’s it! Well, almost. There is some setup involved. The SharePoint Translation Library needs to be set up and each project will need localized Help targets. Don’t worry, I have information for all that and provide links throughout this article.

First, let’s look at the recommended steps.

Best Practices for Setting Up and Managing the Workflow

Here is an overview of the process you should use when starting with a project in your source language. It is assumed that you have a source Doc-To-Help project, can access and write to a SharePoint site with the Translation Management features enabled, and do not yet have localized Help Targets.


What you should have:

  • Source Doc-To-Help project.
  • SharePoint site to which you have access to create and write to Translation Management Libraries.

The steps:

  1. Create a Translation Management Library. It is here that you will specify translators and target languages (Read “SharePoint’s Translation Management Features” to learn more).
  2. Open the source Doc-To-Help project and upload the content to the SharePoint Translation Management Library. Start the process by clicking the Translate button in the SharePoint Document Group on the Home ribbon tab.

    From that point, you will follow a wizard to upload the documents. SharePoint will then create copies of the Documents for each source language.

    SharePoint will also start the translation workflow by creating tasks for translators and send them notifications.

  3. Once SharePoint has created copies of the source documents, Doc-To-Help will automatically create a new project for each target language. Each will have the source project title plus the target language.

    At this point, you have a central SharePoint library containing content in all languages and Doc-To-Help projects for each language.

  4. When you open a target language project, its corresponding documents will synchronize. The appropriate content will stay synchronized with each project and you can check its translation status through Doc-To-Help’s interface.

  5. Now that the initial setup is complete, the translation work begins. By now, emails have been sent to the translators (as specified in SharePoint). Translation can be performed by opening documents from within Doc-To-Help or by opening them from SharePoint. In either case, changes will always stay synchronized between Doc-To-Help and SharePoint.
  6. When translations are complete, you are ready to generate output. But before you do, you need to have localized your Help Targets. If you have already localized Help Targets in a different project, you can import them (see “Reusing Doc-To-Help Targets” to learn more about importing existing Help Targets). If you have not already localized Help Targets, you can do so by opening the Help Target properties and entering the new strings in the fields provides (see “Setting Up Targets for Languages Other than English” to learn more about localizing targets).

Closing Remarks

This is a “best-of-breed” solution to producing localized translations. Doc-To-Help focuses on helping you create professional-quality documentation deliverables while SharePoint is an industry standard management and collaboration tool (one that you probably already have installed on your network). This also eliminates the need for translators to learn how to use Doc-To-Help. In fact, they don’t even have to know Doc-To-Help exists.