Alternating between plain text and WYSIWYG in SDL Trados Studio

Depending on the content we're working with and our own preferences, we may want to see only plain text or fully-formatted text in Studio's editor view. Thankfully, switching between the two is easy. Consider the example below, where we have a Word file with some formatting.

Which Studio view would be more comfortable while working on the file: the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) view on the left or the plain text view on the right? Whichever we prefer, we can get there in a matter of seconds.

To choose how the text will be displayed in the Editor, we go to File - Options - Editor - Formatting display style. These are the default settings:

The default is to "Show formatting but hide recognized formatting tags", so we get this (Adapt Font Sizes is disabled in this example to show variations in text size):

I personally don't like having all the tags hidden, as I find that it's easy to accidentally skip or     delete a tag. So, to add the formatting tags to the above view, we can either change to "Show all formatting and tags" in File - Options - Editor - Formatting display style, as shown here...

...or we can simply click the "Toggle formatting tag display" button in the View tab - Options group. This button is only active when "Show formatting but hide recognized formatting tags" or "Show all formatting and tags" have been chosen in the Editor options.

If we find the colored text hard to read or would rather have plain text for whatever reason, then we have a third option: "Show all tags but do not show formatting".

Here's what we get with this setting: plain text with formatting tags.

Increasing Font Size

So far so good, color contrast is no longer a problem in this last view, but the text is still too small to work comfortably (at least for me!). To adjust the text, we can use the "Adapt Font Sizes" button in the View tab and then increase or decrease text size to a comfortable level.

A Word about Tag View Options

Choosing our tag view options is also a matter of personal preference. In addition to the "No Tag Text" options shown above, we have three more, that we can easily switch among from the View tab, Options group.

Partial Tag Text

This is a view I use very rarely, as I find that most of the time it doesn't give me enough information to be as useful as the other views.


Full Tag Text

This view gives us the most information, but it can also lead to a cluttered segment, so I use it sparingly, and will often activate it only for specific checks rather than keeping it on all the time.

Tag Id

This is my preferred tag view. It allows me to quickly check that the tag pairs are correctly placed in the translation. To learn more about tags, don't miss Paul Filkin's article  Simple guide to working with Tags in Studio.

Once we become familiar with these options, we can quickly switch views while we work, to suit our needs and preferences.

Studio 2015: AutoSuggest Gets Even Better

Studio 2015 comes with significant updates to the AutoSuggest feature, which will be a welcome productivity enhancement for users.

Translation Memory and Automated Translation Suggestions in Studio 2015

In addition to Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries and AutoText, Studio 2015 includes a new AutoSuggest provider: Translation Memory and Automated Translation.*

* For Automated Translation suggestions to be provided, an automated translation provider, such as Google Translate, must be added to the list of Translation Memories.

Depending on the settings we choose, we can get suggestions that are 100% matches, fuzzy matches and concordance matches that come from our very own TMs.

To access the new settings, we will find a new node under Options - AutoSuggest, where we can set our preferences.

Above, I have chosen a value of 1 under "Minimum number of characters typed before displaying suggestions" to get the most matches. A setting of 1 under "Minimum suggestion length in words" will result in many more matches than a setting of 3, for example, as it's a less restrictive criterion.

The best settings for these thresholds will depend on personal preferences and the extent of our resources. With a well-populated termbase and TM, for example, low thresholds in these settings (1 character typed, 1-word suggestions) may result in many duplicates in our suggestion list, as, for example, one-word terms that already exist in the termbase and in the AutoSuggest dictionary will also be offered as Translation Memory autosuggestions, as shown in the (extreme) example below. As a disclaimer, please note that the AutoText entry would only appear after the first four letters have been typed, so, in fact, after typing the first letter, only the first three suggestions would be offered.

With this new AutoSuggest provider, even a user who has no termbases, no AutoSuggest dictionaries and no Auto Text entries will benefit from AutoSuggest, as suggestions are offered from existing and newly added translation units, and are updated on-the-fly, as translation units are confirmed.

For the examples below, I have disabled Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries and AutoText from the list of AutoSuggest providers to simulate a scenario where the only resource available to the user is the TM.

For segment 1 there are fuzzy matches in the TM, so AutoSuggest offers a fuzzy match in the list of suggestions when I type the letter "v".

Since segment 5 has no exact or fuzzy matches in the TM, AutoSuggest offers concordance matches* and automated translation suggestions as soon as I type the first letter for the segment.

*The setting that determines this behavior can be found under Options - Editor - Concordance Search Window. If this option is not checked, auto concordance is disabled and therefore AutoSuggest will not offer any concordance suggestions.

AutoSuggest in Action

The 'magic' of AutoSuggest is best appreciated in action, so below you'll find a video showing how it works.

This is definitely one of my favorite features in Studio 2015!

The New Bilingual Excel File Type in Studio 2015

With the new Bilingual Excel file type in Studio 2015, we can extract text from a specific column for translation and have Studio insert the translated text into a different column in the target file. No more cutting and pasting!

Note: File type and filter are sometimes used interchangeably, so Bilingual Excel file type and Bilingual Excel filter refer to the same thing in this post.

What It Does

Here's a typical use scenario.

The regular Excel file type produces the following Studio file, with all the content extracted for translation.

The resulting target file of the above would be an exact copy of the source file, but with all the text replaced by the translations.

With the new Bilingual Excel file type, however, only the text I need will be extracted for translation.

And the resulting target file will have the translations inserted in Column F, while the rest of the text remains intact, as shown below.

How to Use It

First things first: For any projects created with a pre-2015 version of Studio, the Bilingual Excel file type will need to be added manually by clicking on the "Additional installed File Types exist" link, and checking the new file type checkbox, as shown here.

Are the files in the correct order?

A key thing to keep in mind to make this work is that Studio will process your Excel file with whatever filter it finds first, so if the Bilingual Excel file type comes before the regular Excel file type in the list, the Bilingual Excel file type will be used to process your file, but if it comes after the regular Excel file type, then the regular Excel filter will be used. So, to make sure Studio uses the Bilingual Excel filter, you can either make sure it comes before the regular Excel filter in the list or you can disable the regular Excel file type.

Go to File - Options - File Types

Important note: There are two places where you can make this change.

1. If you make it by going to Options - File Types (as shown in the screenshots above), this change will affect future projects and single-document flows, but not existing projects.

2. If you make it by going to Project Settings - File Types, the change will only affect your active project.

This gives you the ability to enable the Bilingual Excel file type only for a specific project without changing how Studio handles Excel files in general.

Once the file type is enabled, it's time to look at the settings. For my example above, I set the source column to E and the translation column to F and chose to confirm any existing translations that may already be in column F.

After clicking OK, you would process your file as usual. Keep in mind that any changes made to Project Settings or Options will be applied to files that are processed after the changes, not to existing files, so if you've made this change after a file had been added to a project and prepared, you would need to remove the file, add it and prepare it again for the new settings to go into effect.


Limitations
Note: This section has been edited to clarify how cell and text-level formatting are handled.
A limitation of this first version of the Bilingual Excel filter is that text-level formatting (e.g. bold, italics, font, color applied to individual words or phrases) is not recognized. Cell formatting, however, can be preserved by unchecking the "Preserve Target Style" checkbox in the file type settings, as shown below. Note that in this example, column C has been marked as containing comments.

This is the source file to be used in this example. Rows 2 and 5 in Column A have cell formatting applied to them. For the rest of the cells, formatting was applied at text level.

Here's the above file, processed with the bilingual file type and with the settings shown earlier. Note that there are no formatting tags in the source column.

Now let's have a look at the resulting target file.

So, as we can see, formatting that applies to the entire cell is transferred over to the target column, but since we have no tags to help us indicate the formatting of individual words or word groups, text-level formatting cannot be preserved.

Let's compare now how the same text looks when processed through the regular Excel filter.

Here we get full control over text formatting tags, so it's easy to duplicate source formatting.

Another limitation of the bilingual file type is that there are no embedded content settings for this file type. For most regular jobs, however, this may not even be an issue.

In conclusion, choosing the right Excel file type to use will depend on the specific use case at hand. While heavily-formatted files may still call for the regular Excel filter, there will be other files with little or no formatting that will be perfect for the new Bilingual Excel filter. 

How to easily spot unintentional spaces in Studio segments

Studio's QA Checker offers a section under Punctuation to check for unintentional spaces before punctuation marks, a very useful feature to spot those extra spaces that might be difficult to see, especially in the vicinity of tags.

I find that a simple enhancement that makes this feature more useful for me is adding a closing parenthesis and a comma to the selection of marks, which already includes a colon, an exclamation point, a question mark and a semicolon.

To apply this change to all projects created in the future and to future documents processed with the single document translation workflow, go to File - Options - Verification - QA Checker 3.0  - Punctuation and add the necessary punctuation marks as shown below:

Please note that making this change at the global level will not affect any existing projects or open documents.

To apply the change to current projects in your system created before the change or to packages received from a client, go to Project Settings - Verification - QA Checker 3.0  - Punctuation and do the same.

Once this has been set, Studio will show a warning* when unintentional spaces are found in a target segment, as shown here:

*Provided that the QA Checker 3.0 checkbox (under Verification) and the Check for intentional spaces before: checkbox (under Punctuation) are checked.

And that's it, a simple customization that can make Studio a little more helpful!

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.