Auto-translation problem

I will be correcting the documentation about this soon.

unapproved terms that have been auto-translated are exported as GOOGLETRANSLATE() formulas and cells are shaded to indicate this

That used to be the behavior, but doing the parsing in the WebService to know where terms were approved or not, and then doing the same in the editor, was too slow. When having just a few terms, it was not noticeable, but as the number of terms grow, the webService was taking too long doing all the string operations.

That why a few versions ago this was changed, so that auto-translated terms no longer get marked as "need human translator to check it". That way the webService import/export become way faster.

If you want to mark terms as auto-translated, so that human translators could know what changed, you should add a mark to the "Description" field (that will show as a Note in the spreadsheet) or create a Disabled language and type the note there (that will show as an extra column in the Spreadsheet).

I really liked this feature, but the speed improvement was more important for all the customers I talked about this.

Hope that helps,
Frank

EDIT: Here are a few threads about the original issue:
inter-illusion.com/forum/i2-localization...-import?start=6#1323
inter-illusion.com/forum/i2-localization...e-to-i2auto-tag#1850

I assume that if parsing the data in the webservice is slow, that having separate columns to use as 'auto-translated' flags is also not really an option

Having the extra column will not be slow.
It was previously slow, because the webService had to get the information of all the cells, then compare each of them to see if they were using the GOOGLETRANSLATE function. And if so, extract the result and send that, but also attach a flag so that the editor knew that translation was auto-generated. Google Scripts is not very fast at doing all those string operations!

However, currently the webService just needs to get the value of all cells and send that to Unity. That's why having an extra column or passing information in the Description field will not slow down the import.

Hope that helps,
Frank