Short answer: it's not possible to do translations with the game editor.


Do you really mean 'english.xls' or 'English.xml' ?
An 'english.xls' is completely unknown to me.

If it is 'English.xml' though ...:

Most of the pointers you see in the English.xml are the 'handles' used in root templates, in the 'translated string keys', directly in the .exe, in the dialog files and maybe somewhere else I currently don't think of.

I haven't looked at everything but I know that one never gets to see those handles anywhere in the game editor, you can only see them when you unpack the .lsb or .lsf files to .lsf, the XML text format. You need an external tool for that, Norbyte's EE Pak Extractor.

An example from the unpacked 'Stat.lsb' --> 'Stat.lsf', which is one of the translated string key files that contains the string keys for most items:

Code
<node id="TranslatedStringKey">
    <attribute id="Content" value="Iron Belt" type="28" handle="h3db97d7cgcf2ag4418g8ca3ga6048ad69c42" />
    <attribute id="ExtraData" value="" type="23" />
    <attribute id="Speaker" value="" type="22" />
    <attribute id="Stub" value="True" type="19" />
    <attribute id="UUID" value="ARM_Chain_Belt_A" type="22" />
</node>


The relevant part is the 'handle="..."' attribute that determines which handle to look for in English.xml to get the final text to display. Only if this handle is not found in English.xml, the text 'Iron Belt' will be displayed for the item, otherwise, the text from English.xml - which might be exactly the same - will be used.
For most things, both texts will be the same, but the one from English.xml will always take precedence.
So you can change the Stat.lsb in the game editor as many times as you want, the text will still not change unless English.xml is changed.

The discouraging part now is:
You cannot look up the handle anywhere in the game editor, neither for root templates nor for translated string keys, nor ...

All you can do if you want to know which text belongs to what is to search all unpacked .lsb files and all the dialog XMLs for that handle. There are additional .lsb files in the regions for all the pre-placed objects and NPCs and all of them might also have the 'handle=' attribute which is only visible in the unpacked version of the .lsb file.

This is work you will not want to do I'm sure.

It is easier to blindly translate English.xml for the most part and only look up very few border cases, for which you might already have an idea where to find it.


Larian for sure has some tools to do handle and string assignment automatically and they must have some database which connect handles to objects to translations but I have never see any of this published.
This alone would not help you either unless those tools also provided some direct links to examine the 'context' you are looking for.