Adding Variables to a Studio TM to Increase Leverage

By adding variables to a SDL Trados Studio TM, we can customize our TM to recognize and automatically replace words, alphanumeric combinations and numbers that would otherwise need to be replaced manually.

In the example below, the only difference between these pairs of segments is X20™ and X40™.

Once the X20™ segments have been translated, a regular TM finds no matches or only fuzzy matches for the X40™ segments:

But by adding X20™ and X40™ to the TM Variables, these items will be recognized as non-translatable elements, and will therefore be replaced automatically.

To achieve this, we go into Project Settings > Language Pairs > All Language Pairs > Translation Memory and Automated Translation, select our main TM, and click on Settings:

Then go to Language Resources and select Variable List from the list on the right-hand side, then click Edit:

Add both X20™ and X40™ to the list and click OK:

Close all the open dialog boxes and go back to the file, where we now get this:

Note: For this to work, each of the segments that had been previously confirmed in this example had to be confirmed again, so that the segment variables could be processed with the newly modified TM and the variables could be recognized and automatically replaced. From here on, any new segments entered into the TM that have either X20™ or X40™ will be automatically processed with the new variables.

Any number of variables can be added to a TM. This also works for things like product names and numbers with hyphens, such as 1375-2, 1379-5, for example, that Studio would not normally recognize as numbers.

Variables can be added or deleted from a TM at any time.

A new OpenExchange app for Studio 2014 called Variables Manager now makes it easy to add long lists of variables quickly to a TM through a simple copy-paste operation.

Adding a Soft Return Segmentation Rule to SDL Trados Studio 2014

In a previous post, I discussed how to add a Tab segmentation rule to Studio.

That is pretty straightforward, as the Tab is one of the segmentation options offered in the list of Break characters.

But what if we want to add a new segmentation rule for soft returns? No such option in the dropdown menu, so we need to use a Regex expression. The steps are detailed below.

In order to get to the Segmentation Rules window, we first need to do the following:

Go into Project Settings, All Language Pairs, 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 soft return, I need to choose Add:

To create a segmentation rule for soft returns, add a name in the description field, choose "Anything" in the "Before break" dropdown menu and "Anything" in the "After break" dropdown menu. Since a soft return is not one of the options in the "Break characters" menu, we need to go to the Advanced View by clicking the button to the right of the Description.

 After clicking on Advanced View, we see this:

This is where we add the Regex expression for a soft return, which should look exactly like this (feel free to copy from below and paste into Studio):

.[\n]+

Disclaimer: My knowledge of Regex is extremely limited; I got this expression from one of Paul Filkin's posts in a forum and simply typed it in. Thank you, Paul!

After this, click OK several times to close all the open dialog boxes, and that's it, from now on, in files processed with this TM, a new segment will be created whenever Studio encounters a soft return.