12. Importing Microsoft Glossary Files

This is a legacy feature, that was developed in the past for the Glossary Importer plugin, the direct predecessor of the Data Exchange Utility for Passolo. Because the glossaries with the Microsoft UI translations can currently no longer be downloaded from Microsoft, this feature can be used only by users who still have local versions of the Microsoft UI translations.

In the past, Microsoft offered subscribers to Visual Studio Standard Subscriptions (formerly MSDN Subscriptions) the UI translations for almost all Microsoft applications in all available languages for download.

These ZIP files with the UI translations contained a CSV file for each individual Microsoft product. Individual CSV files can be converted into Passolo glossaries. The CSV files are bilingual and tab delimited. Entries could be double-quoted or contain double quotation marks. Other entries could contain XML entities. All recognized special characters and strings are converted into a plain text format that could be used in the pre-translation of Passolo. Untranslated entries where the source and translation are the same, entries with an empty source and entries with an empty translation as well as entries with a character length of more than 512 characters are deleted and not saved in the glossary file.

The converted glossary will be stored in the same directory as the CSV source file with the same name but the extension GLO. The glossary will automatically be added to the list of common Passolo glossaries.

On this Microsoft website you will find a link to the UI strings that opens a search window with the web version of Microsoft Power BI into a database with all UI strings. However, you can only search for individual strings there manually, which is not suitable for pre-translating your own product.