Translators are Jazz™ model objects that are stored in the Rational Team Concert™ for System z® repository. Translators describe an operation that will be performed on a file during a build. A set of translators can be associated with a language definition. During a build, the set of translators associated with a language definition is reiterated and executed for each file associated with the language definition. A language definition contains one or more translators. You can create or modify translators either from the Translators node in the Rational Team Concert for System z Team Artifacts navigator, or by selecting .
Each translator represents an operation that must be performed on buildable files that are associated with a language definition. For example, a CICS® COBOL source file might be associated with a language definition that contains two translators: one for the CICS preprocessor and one for the COBOL compiler.
In the Translator editor, which you use to create or modify a translator, there is a Data set definition field where you must indicate the data set definition that points to a given translator module. For example, a COBOL compiler translator would specify the data set definition that is marked as existing and has the same data set and member names as the COBOL compiler module.
There is a DD Allocations table within the Translator editor. Each entry in the DD Allocations table has a flag that indicates whether or not the build should keep the DD name for a future translator. If you set the flag to Yes, the data set allocation is preserved for use by subsequent steps in the build script. If you mark a data set as Temporary in a data set definition, but as Keep in the DD Allocations table, that data set is deallocated at the end of the build script execution. Data sets that you mark as Temporary are deallocated at the end of the translator step.
Finally, the Translator editor also displays a list of concatenations, including the concatenation name, or the DD name that will be allocated to the concatenation. For example, the SYSLIB concatenation would be specified here. Next to the DD name is a comma-delimited list of data set definitions that should be concatenated together.