xliff.ai teacher kit · Lesson plan

Bilingual files in practice: a 90-minute lab session

Level: First weeks of a translation technology module
Language pair: English → German (the kit's files)
Room: One computer per student, a current Chrome or Edge
Second session: Excel, for exercise 6

Aims: by the end, students can

open a bilingual file, translate and confirm it, and return it with only the translations changed;
keep inline tags and placeholders where the source has them;
run the quality checks, fix what they find, and say which errors the checks cannot find.

Before the session

On one lab computer, open xliff.ai, drop 01-garden-visitor-guide.xlf on the page, translate one segment and export it.
Put the student-files folder where students can reach it: a shared drive or your learning platform.
Print quick-start.html, one per student.

The session

Time	What happens	Handed in
0–10	What an SDLXLIFF or MQXLIFF is, and why it must come back with only the translations changed. Hand out the quick-start.	—
10–30	Exercise 1, First translation. Open, translate, Ctrl+Enter, export.	01, exported
30–50	Exercise 2, Tags and placeholders. Ctrl+, to insert a tag; read what the tag checks say.	02, exported
50–75	Exercise 3, Find the errors. Load the termbase, work through QA, then read for meaning. Discuss: which errors did QA miss, and why could it not see them?	03, exported, and its QA report
75–90	Hand in. On shared computers, clear the site's data. Set exercises 4–6.	—

Second session, or homework (60 minutes)

Exercise 4, Translation memory · Exercise 5, Terminology · Exercise 6, Review in Excel. For a pair version of 6, students export a review workbook of each other's exercise 1, review it in Excel, and import the partner's decisions.

Marking

Each answer key lists what to look for. To set a student's file beside the reference, open both in Compare two files at xliff.ai/xliff-compare/, the student's export on Before and the file from teacher-only/reference on After: tracked changes and the edit distance of each segment, as an HTML or Excel report.

Free to use, copy and adapt under CC BY 4.0: xliff.ai teacher kit, Terratra OÜ. The texts were written for this kit, and the places, products and businesses in them are invented. Trados and memoQ are trademarks of their respective owners. xliff.ai is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to them.