InDesign expert

Question

Hi mr. expert,
I am looking for at very specific feature /(script).  I know a company has allready made it (here in Denmark) but it is very expensive and mayby there is something similar out there.
What I want is the following:
We have a lot of basic texts and it is quite difficult to keep track of them. 
The text are basic texts and we use the same text in all our brochures, catalogues, flyers etc. SO if we have a small text edit (change a word) I have to open all my Indesign files (app. 20-25) and change the little specific word. (it is getting very difficult to remember where to edit)
Solution: a EXCEL/WORD or other document where we collect ALL our text - a master document and we ONLY have to made the corrections in here and it automatically transfer the correction to the indesign documents which uses the same text where there are corrections. It menas that the master document has to be linked up to indesign.
The danish company has done that, but is there a script out there, which can manage my request?

Answer 1

Well, translation memory apps can be expensive, like SDL/Trados, although there are some free/open source ones like OmegaT that will work with InDesign. Either one is overkill unless you spend a measurable amount of your time on translations of documents. However, if you're spending any signficant time on handling translated documents, then the hours spent on setting this workflow up will pay for themselves absurdly quickly. (SDL/Trados costs so much that I wouldn't suggest it to you unless your job was more than 60% localization, or if there were more people like you updating translated documents in your organization. You may want to talk to them anyways, if I'm underestimating your translation workload.)
But, here's the way it works: Let's say that you have an English master document in ID. Just hypothetically, let's also assume that your translation provider is capable of delivering translations in some way that lets a single English sentence be matched to its translation. (There's lots of file formats and options here, which I will detail for you if you're interested. Also, if all you have is Word/Excel files of these translations, it's not hard to align them into a bilingual format that can be used here.)
Then, your superior tells you that there's a changed graphic on the English document. You then open up the English doc, note the new graphic, and export an INX file. These files were originally meant for backsaving to previous versions of ID, I think, but they're useful if you need another app to parse an InDesign file.
Then, you run that INX file through your translation memory app. It automatically finds matching sentences and pastes 'em in. If something isn't a perfect match - say, they changed a word or moved some punctuation, or if a sentence has been signifcantly revised - your TM app will point it out, and inform you of how much it's changed (a percentage usually based on a new character count).
So, you only have to make graphics updates to one file, and all the rest of the text for the translations flows straight in. Often, some adjustment of the size of text boxes is necessary, but if you set up your ID files well, a twenty-language update can be completed in forty minutes. (That's obviously a best-case scenario.) Does this make any more sense now?
My advice against using layers to manage translations is simply because a) people who do this usually rely on manual recordkeeping to manage their translated documents, which is okay for small projects but usually falls apart completely when you try to scale it up. If your organization plans on 0% growth in international markets, sticking with manual management of translated documents will work great for you. However, let's just say that all of a sudden your translation needs skyrocket (big EU contract?), and you need to move your old-fashioned I-keep-track-of-everything-in-spreadsheets workflow to a contemporary translation workflow with structured authoring, legally-mandated controlled language, et cetera. In that situation, trying to tease apart five-language files into one-language files is tedious but doable, if and only if you've exhibited perfect information hygiene.
As I work on big localization projects on a regular basis, I often inherit other people's manually-managed documents, and part of my reputation is built upon being able to figure out how to revamp a workflow like this. Basically, I do detective work to reconstruct other people's philosophies of how duct tape and Perl hold the world together. In the last decade, I've only seen one layers-and-spreadsheets workflow that wasn't pure hell to untangle.
However, the method you describe is actually okay; if it works the way you say it does, and you document your actions, and you disappeared without a trace, then when I was brought in to clean it up, your workflow might be the second such non-hellish workflow in my professional career.  If your translation needs are minimal, and it's only a small part of what you need to do with ID, then I see no reason to try to talk you into spending a lot of money and time on a workflow revamp with translation memory tools. However, that's what you are asking for, really - a translation memory tool written in Javascript, sitting on top of a multilingual InDesign document. Doing this is currently barely within my scripting abilities, but since I know that I'd be needlessly duplicating a custom solution for which there are already a few mature commercial applications and some general industry standards, I'd be reluctant to agree to such a development project without a ludicrous hourly rate and a disclaimer signed by all parties "We understand that the custom workflow we're asking you to develop is a step back fifteen years in time, and will furthermore be difficult to integrate with commonly accepted standards should we ever elect to drag our workflow, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century."
Or, if you wanted to do it the cheap way, do you know that you could just check the box upon placing a Word or Excel file that treats it as a link, and lets you update it like any graphic link? After writing all of the above novel, I just realized that there is in fact a way for you to get what you want, without changing your workflow at all.