"How to" or "best practices" for working with varieties/variations

Question

Hello, 
 we are new to SDL Passolo and we didn't work with varieties/ variations in the past. 
 Now we must start using variations in our projects. 
 Therefore we are searching for a "how to" or "best practices" on how to start with. 
 We already know, how to add variations to a project. 
 But as far as we know right now, there are two possibilities for working with variations : 
 1.) Add a variation to the project and "transfer" all translations from the main language to the variation . And then translate all strings, which are variation specific. 
 2.) Creat a satelite assembly which contains only the strings that don't match the strings in the main language and translate these strings. 
 Our main questions are: 
 According to 1.): How do we get all the translations from the main language into the variations ? And if there are all strings included: How does the translator know, which of all these strings shall be translated into a specific variation ? 
 And according to 2.): How to we get only the strings into the variation , which shall be translated? 
 I hope, you'll understand what I mean. 
 If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. 
 Thank you very much in advance. 
 Kind regards and stay safe. 
 Nils

Achim Herrmann · Answer

Assuming that my first answer is describing your problem, I will answer your questions as follows: 
 1: There is no in inbuilt feature in SDL Passolo that allows to copy translations from one translations list to another translation list in a different language. I once created a macro based solution for that. 
 2: This is neither a technical nor a linguistic problem. Only an appropriate product specialist who speaks the target language can decide which entries should be changed in relation to product names, terminology and certain phrases.

Achim Herrmann · Answer

The answer is quite simple, most of the clients don&rsquo;t have to localize products that have variations. So such a feature was requested very rarely and for the clients that really need it I developed a customized solution. Another solution approach that can be used is the Leverage feature. 
 Although SDL is localizing its Windows desktop based products like SDL MultiTerm or SDL Trados Studio using SDL Passolo, none of these products have variations. So I can&rsquo;t give a generic advice on how to work with variations. Clients have different business need and processes, so all advices are quite specific. 
 There are clients that create a copy of the SDL Passolo project file, then delete the unnecessary target languages before starting to vary the translations in the language that the OEM client requested. That makes sense if your OEM client want to do the translation changes themselves and because many of the OEM products also differs in code. Using Leverage or Pre-Translation updates of the OEM product can be taken over from the original product LPU. 
 It might be possible to create a variation of the translations by inserting another language into the project. (Original: EN->DE, FR || Enhanced: EN->DE, FR, fr-FR for OEM). Depending on the development environment and the localization concepts used this also might have an impact on the way how target file are created and will require that all source modules are the same.

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"How to" or "best practices" for working with varieties/variations