Changing Segmentation in SDL Trados Studio 2011

For those occasions when Studio's standard segmentation won't do, the following steps will help you customize your file's segmentation to your liking.

 Let's say I have a source file that has tabs in it, like this simple Word file:

After adding my file to a project, and translating the first segment, it looks like this:

We can easily see that if the file were segmented differently, I would be able to leverage my translations much better, with each individual country name being on its own separate segment.

To achieve this, I go into Project Settings, then Translation Memory Settings:

In the window that opens, select Language Resources on the left, and then Segmentation Rules on the right, then click on Edit:

This brings up one more box. For this example, since I want Studio to create a new segment every time it finds a tab, I need to choose Add:

To create a segmentation rule based on tabs, I add a name (Tab), choose "Anything" in the "Before break" dropdown menu, "Tab" in the "Break characters" dropdown menu, and "Anything" in the "After break" dropdown menu:

 Click OK several times to close all the open dialog boxes.

Now I go back to my project, remove the Word file I was working on, add it again, prepare it, and this is what I see:

Much better!

From now on, whenever I use this TM, a new segment will be created  whenever there is a tab. If I want to remove this segmentation rule, I simply go back to the Segmentation Rules dialog box, select the rule I created and click on Remove.

This is a simple example using tabs, but Studio is powerful enough to provide a great range of possibilities by playing with the various options provided.