AutoSuggest gets even better with Studio 2011 SP2

AutoSuggest has always been one of my favorite Studio features, but what I didn't like was the fact that it was case sensitive. Suggestions from termbases, translation memories and AutoText entries were only offered if the translator started typing the entry in the same case it was stored in.  My workaround for this was storing frequently-used items in a variation of case combinations. As an example, for the phrase "for example", my termbase included the following Spanish translations:

POR EJEMPLO
por ejemplo
Por ejemplo

This meant more work, of course, and could only be done with Multiterm termbases and AutoText entries, and not with suggestions coming from AutoSuggest dictionaries (which are automatically created by Studio from TMs and not user-editable).

With the release of Studio 2011 SP2 a few days ago, this is no longer an issue. There is now an option to enable/disable the case-sensitive feature of AutoSuggest. Here's how to do it.

Note: If you haven't downloaded SP2 yet, make sure you do, as this feature is not found in previous releases.

Go to Tools - Options - AutoSuggest, you will see this screen:

The checkbox is checked by default, so if you liked the original AutoSuggest behavior, just leave it checked.

Uncheck the Case sensitive checkbox if you want AutoSuggest to override the case of your entries. With "Case sensitive" unchecked, suggestions are adapted to the first letter you type, whether uppercase or lowercase, as shown here:

I think other Studio users will agree that this is certainly one of those little things that make a big difference.

Setting Up Trados TMs to Allow Multiple Translations

Why would a translator benefit from setting up a TM to allow multiple translations? Consider the following scenario.

You're translating a large document into Spanish which includes dozens of repetitions of the following question:

How many are there?

There are two possible translations here, dictated by gender:

¿Cuántas hay? and ¿Cuántos hay?

Having a TM that doesn't allow multiple translations would mean either stopping each time the segment comes up and manually making the change, or fixing the resulting document after the translation has been completed, both tedious and unnecessary actions. If you use a Translate to Fuzzy command or pre-translate your document, a single translation would mean that the errors introduced need to be fixed later, increasing editing time.

A better solution is setting up your TM to allow multiple translations, so that one source segment has two (or more) translations. Then it's just a matter of choosing the one you want to use.

The steps to do this are detailed below.