Now that your stakeholder comms are ready in English, how do you get your content translated so other non-English-speaking audiences can learn about your developments and progress made during the reporting year? Building on our article about making the report-translation process run as smoothly as possible, we’ll now take a look at Workiva.

Rather than dive straight into how to extract your copy to get it translated, we’ll start with a quick look at design considerations – because otherwise you could end up with a formatting nightmare owing to text expansion. We’ll then move on to how to extract, translate and reimport copy. Although we focus on Workiva, the process for other .xliff- and .docx-based platforms is similar.

What is Workiva?

Workiva is a secure, cloud-based software platform designed for connecting financial, sustainability (ESG), and GRC (governance, risk and compliance) data within a single, collaborative system. Aside from its heavy-duty data linking and regulatory reporting capabilities, it functions very much like a collaborative word processor (think Google Docs or Microsoft Word) but with enterprise-grade security and auditability features.

An increasing number of corporations and businesses use it for their reporting process, so we’ll look at how to use it effectively for multilingual reports.

The root cause of design issues: text expansion

Some languages are longer than English. Indeed, when translating content, some languages like German and French can be 20-30% longer than the English source. This ‘text expansion’, although a manageable annoyance, can be time-consuming to deal with depending on the complexity of your design as you could end up with widows and orphans (single lines of text at the top or bottom of a page) and section headers that have jumped to the very bottom of a page.

Top tips to lower the annoyance factor

Plan for 30%: When designing the original English version, leave extra white space in tables and at the bottom of pages.

Use Workiva’s style guides: Set up robust style guides before you translate. If text expansion makes the report too long, you can shrink the paragraph spacing or font size by 0.5 to 1pt in the translated file’s style guide rather than editing every page.

Make all charts and graphics editable: Use charts and graphics from external sources that can be edited.

Annoyance factors

The level of annoyance usually breaks down into four categories:

1. The document flow annoyance (Low)

If your report is a standard text-heavy document, text expansion is relatively easy to handle.

• The good: Workiva’s word processing engine behaves like a standard document: text simply flows to the next page.
• The bad: You will suddenly find widows and orphans (single lines of text at the top or bottom of a page) and section headers that have jumped to the very bottom of a page. You’ll spend an hour or two scrolling through the document to fix page breaks and adjust section properties.

2. The design & graphics annoyance (Medium-High)

Workiva isn’t InDesign, but people often use it to create high-design ESG or annual reports.

• Overlapping elements: If you have text boxes placed over images or specific floating layouts, text expansion can cause words to bleed out of their boxes or overlap with charts.
• The workaround: Many users create a language project within Workiva. This creates a translation preview which you then convert into a live document. This means the translated version is a disconnected copy of the layout, so any design tweaks you make in the French version won’t mess up your English original.

3. The table & formatting annoyance (High)

This is where the real work happens. Because Workiva is often used for data-heavy reports, you’ll likely have complex tables.

• Column squishing: If a column header was “Total Revenue” (13 characters) and becomes “Gesamtumsatzerlös” (17 characters), the column will either wrap—making the row twice as tall—or it will truncate.
• Manual resizing: You often have to manually resize columns or reduce font sizes in the translated version to ensure the table still fits on a single page width.
• Linking integrity: The good news is that your data links remain intact, so the numbers will be correct; you’re only fighting the visual layout.

4. Non-editable charts/images/graphics annoyance (Very High)

Some of your team might reuse charts, images or graphics which can’t be edited. As such, it’s best to avoid them and use editable content. Most translation agencies will work with you to identify images or graphics that can’t be edited using a word processor, translating them separately for reinsertion or overlaying text boxes with the translated text within.

• Top tip: If you do use non-editable elements that require translation, flag them to your translation partner so they know they’ll need to deal with them separately.

Now we’ve taken a quick look at design considerations, we’ll move on to look at the export formats Workiva supports and how to export your copy and import the translation.

Workiva export formats: .docx, .xliff

The good news is that it’s straightforward to extract text from Workiva for translation using either the .docx or .xliff file format. Let’s take a look at Word first, simply because most people are familiar with it. While convenient, the .docx format does introduce issues which we’ll explore.

Exporting to Word – for convenience

There are many benefits of exporting to Word, including:

• collaboration with external teams
• offline access
• backup purposes, or
• for specific review/editing needs where recipients don’t use Workiva. These teams can then review content, comment and use track changes in a familiar environment even if some formatting (like complex tables or object positioning) might shift slightly compared to a PDF export.

Here’s how to export to .docx format

Click File > Save As > DOCX (.docx)

Then select which elements you want to export:

Issues when exporting to Word

Your Word document might differ from your Workiva document in a number of ways.

• Page breaks

Tables might break at different spots or the line breaking may not match.

• Fonts

Exported fonts in Workiva may not be present in Word.

• Inline tables

Workiva and DOCX inline tables behave differently. Workiva anchors tables adjacent to the text, so the table will move as the text moves.

• Charts

Any backing data from Workiva won’t be included. Exports of Workiva documents with charts will export a SVG image instead.

• SVG support

Word 2019 and newer supports SVG images while past versions don’t.

• Shape modifiers

Workiva’s export to Word doesn’t support the shape modifiers for all shapes.

• Wrapping objects

Wrapping may cause page breaks that won’t appear in the same place as in the original document.

• Object placement

Objects that are anchored to a paragraph may get pushed to another page or to the bottom of a page.
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Since your report will have already been reviewed and be ready for publication, exporting to Word is not a great option for the initial translation. This is where XLIFF comes in.

Exporting to XLIFF – for better results

XLIFF (or the XML localization interchange file format to give it its full title) is the best format to use for translation. That’s because it’s an industry-standard designed for exchanging localisation data, making it easy to extract text from Workiva reports and other platforms without breaking the structure and ensuring translators can work efficiently while preserving numeric linking, layout and formatting as well as metadata.

Dedicated feature for language projects

Workiva offers a dedicated feature to manage language projects.

Once your report is ready for translation, you simply create your language project. Here’s how:

Open the External tab in the Language Translation panel.

Click the plus icon.

Add in your project’s details such as the project name, target language and formats. You can also choose to exclude tables and section names from translation or include XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language – an open, royalty-free standard for digitally tagging and exchanging business/financial data, making it machine-readable and comparable, like barcodes for financial facts.

Once you’re done, click Create.

Prepare for translation

You can now prepare your entire report or specific sections to be translated as an XLIFF file for your translation agency.

• Open the External tab in the Language Translation
• Select the Prepare for translation icon (the downward-pointing arrow)

• Select a language project in the dropdown.
• Choose any sections that you want to export.

In Prepare for translation, you can select to export document-level content. It’s best to export this at least once in your process to make sure you’ve covered everything.

For Requires translation?, a row will be marked as Yes if there’s been text content changes, text formatting changes or a chart’s been added. Some examples of what will be marked as No are: design and layout changes, and adding a table without text.

• Once you’re done, click
• On export, a XLIFF file will be downloaded to your computer for you to send off for translation.

 

Your translation team will then translate your text as per your brief, using preferred terminology and taking into account your style and tone of voice (see our briefing template for guidance).

Once the translation is ready, all you need to do then is import it back into Workiva.

Importing the translation

• Open the External tab in the Language Translation
• Select the Import icon (the upward pointing arrow).

Choose a file to import.

Click Import

 

You’ll see the most recent translation in a language project or you can click View previous translations to see previous translation previews. Workiva lets you send text for translation section by section. It means that each time you import a translation, Workiva generates a preview showing the cumulative translations for a specific language project.

Once all the translations have been imported, you can convert your report to a live document.

Make sure to check your formatting and layout after translation, because things might’ve changed due to language variances.

The new live document will not receive translation updates. You’ll need to manually update.
To manually update, you can copy and paste newly translated sections into your new live document and remove your out of date section. Alternatively, you may manually copy and paste text content between your updated translation preview and new live document if you only need to update a portion of your section.

As mentioned, it’s always best to finalise each step as copying and pasting from translation previews will not bring over numeric links. To bring in numeric links, create a new live document and duplicate that content over.

Practical ways to help your translation team

·        Use external translation services only after the primary language content is finalised (design and copy).

·        Avoid duplicating tables in spreadsheets to simplify the process.

·        Provide your translation team with as much background information as possible – along with terminology/style/tone-of-voice preferences.

·        Tell your translation team to provide you with an XLIFF version 1.2 for easier importing into Workiva.

·        If you’re translating to an APAC language, keep in mind that you’ll need to adjust your fonts. To learn more, read Multinational Companies Expanding to APAC.

·        The format of new dates added will change. You may edit the default value format styles for dates. To learn more on value format styles, read Use style guides for documents.
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