Bridging the divide… merging segments

001Ever since Trados came about one of the most requested features for translators has been merging across hard returns, or paragraph breaks.  Certainly for handling the translation it makes a lot of sense to be able to merge fragments of a sentence that should clearly be in one, but despite this it’s never been possible.  Why is this?  You can be sure this question has come up every year and whilst everyone agrees it would be great to have this capability, Trados has not supported it through the product.  The reason for the reluctance is that when you merge a paragraph unit (the name given to translation units separated by a paragraph break) you probably need to be able to decide how this change to the structure of the file should be handled in the target document.  Sometimes this might be simple, other times it might not be, and the framework that Trados products use is not designed in a way that supports the ability to alter the look and feel of the target file across every filetype the product can open.  Even the release of the Studio suite of products still uses the same basic idea of being able to handle the bilingual files directly rather than importing them into a black box and whilst this does offer many advantages, this problem of merging over paragraph units remains… until now.

Continue reading “Bridging the divide… merging segments”

More power to the elbow… upLIFT

001“More power to the elbow”… this is all about getting more from the resources you have already got, and in this case I’m talking about your Translation Memories.  In particular I’m talking about enabling them for upLIFT.  upLIFT, in case you have not heard about this yet despite all the marketing activity and forum discussions since August this year, is a technology that is being used in SDL Trados Studio 2017 to enable some pretty neat things.  I’m not going to devote this article to what upLIFT is all about as Emma Goldsmith has written a really useful article today that does a far better job than I could have done.  You can find Emma’s article here, called “SDL Trados studio 2017 : fragment recall and repair“.  But a quick summary to get us started is that upLIFT enables things like this:

  • fragment matching
    • whole Translation Units
    • partial Translation Units
  • fuzzy match repair
    • from fragment matching
    • from your termbase
    • from Machine Translation

Continue reading “More power to the elbow… upLIFT”

Target Wordcounts…

001CAT tools typically calculate wordcounts based on the source material.  The reason of course is because this way you can give your clients an idea of the cost before you start the work… which of course seems a sensible approach as you need to base your estimate on something.  You can estimate the target wordcount by applying an expansion factor to the source words, and this is a principle we see with pseudotranslate in Studio where you can set the expansion per language to give you some idea of the costs for DTP requirements in the finished document before you even start translating.  But what you can’t do, at least what you have never been able to do in all the Trados versions right up to the current SDL Trados Studio, is generate a target wordcount for those customers who pay you for work after the translation is complete and are happy to base this on the words you have actually translated. Continue reading “Target Wordcounts…”