Translating Ongoing Text Changes Using SAP Translation Hub and i18n Translation Manager for SAP S/4HANA

Published on 13 Jan 2025

So you’ve completed the initial translation of your SAP texts into a new language… But new texts are constantly being added through development and Customizing, and any texts you don’t translate will lead to gaps. If you would like to handle translations in-house, our i18n Translation Manager offers a great solution thanks to its new, scalable, deep integration with SAP Translation Hub.

Taking Translation In-House

First of all, if you have made it through translation an initial translation project, such as translating your SAP S/4HANA implementation into Italian, you can pat yourself on the back. Congratulations! That’s no mean feat. Maybe you’ve contracted out the linguistic work to professional Italian translators and invested in high-quality translations, or you have opted for a fully automatic solution, such as pre-translating all your SAP texts with a tool like SAP Translation Hub, and made plans to review these automatically inserted translations in a second step. Or maybe you’ve already been using i18n Translation Manager for SAP S/4HANA for your initial translation project!

In any case, that’s a big achievement. But now that you’ve come this far, you would like internal teams to take over and handle ongoing translations on their own. The idea is that from now on, only smaller amounts of texts will be translated, and you’ve decided that your key users in, say, Italy can handle translation of these incremental changes. Your Italian colleagues have agreed to help. That leaves the question, which tool will they use to enter their translations? And how will you manage the delta translation process?

i18n Translation Manager and SAP Translation Hub workflow

i18n Translation Manager and SAP Translation Hub combine for an end-to-end translation workflow.

Translation Should Be Done in the Browser

One thing will realize quickly is that doing SAP translations the traditional way using transaction SE63 will probably not be a good option. The amount of training alone that you will need before translation activities can start can be prohibitive. But most of all, you have just implemented a new Fiori-based user interface, so going back to a translation editor that runs in good old SAP GUI just feels wrong. What you want is a modern, cloud-based translation environment that runs in a browser. And that’s what SAP Translation Hub offers.

SAP Translation Hub’s translation editor is a lightweight tool that lacks some of the features that professional Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools such as XTM Cloud offer, such as a translation memory system (TMS). But an all-out professional translation tool with all the bells and whistles may not be what you need. SAP Translation Hub’s strength is that it’s simple, easy to use and a great fit for internal colleagues that have no desire to become professional translators. And it comes with two other great advantages – it’s a first-party solution from SAP, and it’s relatively affordable.

End-to-End Translation Workflows

One thing that SAP Translation Hub does not offer is a fully integrated end-to-end translation workflow – and that’s where our i18n Translation Manager comes in. i18n Translation Manager runs in the SAP backend, on SAP GUI, and was built on SAP S/4HANA to enable end-to-end translation processes. With our latest release, we have now added SAP Translation Hub as a translation environment. This addition is specifically for organizations wanting to do SAP translations in-house. This gives you the best of both worlds – the end-to-end translation workflow for Fiori apps, Z developments, entries in Customizing tables, forms and so on that i18n Translation Manager has always offered, combined with the easy to use, first-party, browser-based translation editor that is SAP Translation Hub.

Selecting SAP Translation Hub as a translation environment

Selecting SAP Translation Hub as a translation environment in i18n Translation Manager. Note that you cannot upload translated texts.

So how does this work? In i18n Translation Manager, you create a new project by entering any number of Fiori apps (Git URLs or BSP applications), transport requests, or specific objects, and selection a source language and a target language. For example, You could be translating from English (enUS) into Italian (itIT). For the resulting project, you select SAP Translation Hub as the translation environment. You can then refine the scope of the project by excluding any objects that should not be translated, using i18n Translation Manager’s Visual Scoping feature. And finally, you check out the project, which means that any new or changed texts contained in the project will become available for translation on SAP Translation Hub. Technically speaking, the texts are pushed to SAP Translation Hub’s API using the SAP system’s REST stack, and a project is created on SAP Translation Hub. Any texts that are already translated – such as those translated as part of the initial translation project, or in previous delta translation rounds – are not being uploaded.

Tracking the Translation State

How does i18n Translation Manager know which texts count as translated, you ask? i18n Translation Translation Manager for SAP S/4HANA was built from the start to support end-to-end translation and track the translation state. Any target text ever translated through i18n Translation Manager gets assigned the Translated status, a status that it only loses when its source text is changed by a developer, for example. This ensures that only newly added texts will be translated. It also ensures that texts that have been translated before, but for which the developer has changed the original text, do not count as translated anymore.

SAP Translation Hub's browser-based editor

SAP Translation Hub’s browser-based editor, showing texts from i18n.properties files (I18N), Customizing tables (TABL), and Backend texts.

Once the texts have been uploaded, SAP Translation Hub does its thing and pre-translates all uploaded texts, using both the so-called MLTR, a huge database of translations created internally at SAP based on the translation of SAP’s own user interfaces, and SAP’s machine translation functionality (AI translation, if you will). You can then ask your colleagues who speak the language in question – say, your key users in Italy – to review the translations, adapt them where needed, and approve the completed translations. And best of all, they can do this in the browser, using SAP Translation Hub’s easy-to-use user interface.

Transport Management and Git Integration

Once all texts have been approved, the next step is to check in the translations to i18n Translation Manager, which means downloading them from the API. Both check-out and check-in support batch processing, which means there is no technical limit to the amount of texts you can translate at a time. And once check-in is complete, the various deployment options that i18n Translation Manager offers come into play. You can commit any Fiori frontend translation (i18n_xx.properties files) to their respective Git repositories, or you can write them to the versions off the apps already deployed to the SAP system. You can also make use of the integration into SAP’s transport system, both for backend translations and the Fiori apps themselves. This way, you ensure that all translation changes are moved using transport requests managed by your change management solution, such as SAP Solution Manager or ServiceNow.

Read more on i18n Translation Manager