Description

multifariousLaTeX File Type for Trados Studio – user guide

1. Description

LaTeX is how a great deal of academic and technical writing is actually authored: papers, theses, journal submissions, books, standards.  The file that arrives is a .tex document – plain text, but plain text in which prose and machinery share the same stream.  A sentence, an equation, a code listing, a cross-reference and a macro the author invented last Tuesday all sit side by side.

That is what makes it awkward to translate.  Hand the whole file to a translator and they must pick sentences out of markup by eye and hope they put it back correctly.  Extract too eagerly and equations, listings and file names arrive as things to translate.  Either way somebody spends the afternoon repairing a document rather than translating it.

multifariousLaTeX File Type reads a .tex file the way TeX itself reads it – mode by mode – so that what reaches you is prose, and what does not reach you is untouched.  You translate in Trados Studio with your translation memory, your termbase and your QA, and see the typeset page as you go.

The Studio editor with a LaTeX document open – source paragraphs on the left, target segments on the right (untranslated), and the compiled document rendered in the Preview pane.

2. What it reads, and what it delivers

Input	How it is handled	What you get back
.tex, .ltx, .latex	Read as a character stream, mode by mode	The same file, with only your translated text substituted

The fidelity promise, in plain words: the target is your source file with the translated sentences swapped in, and nothing else changed.  It is not the document parsed and written out again.  That distinction is the whole design, and it is what protects the things a rewrite would quietly normalise – the encoding, the byte-order mark, the mix of CRLF and LF line endings, the blank lines that LaTeX reads as paragraph breaks, the indentation inside environments, the whitespace after a command name.

A file you open and save without translating anything comes back byte for byte identical.  That is checked against every file in the test corpus on every change to the code.

3. Installation

1. In Trados Studio, open Add-Ins > AppStore and search for multifariousLaTeX File Type for Trados Studio. Or download the .sdlplugin from the AppStore website and double-click it.

2. Install, then restart Trados Studio – plugins are read at startup.

3. Confirm it is there: File > Options > File Types. You should see LaTeX in the list, with two pages beneath it, LaTeX content and LaTeX preview.

System requirements: Trados Studio 2026 on Windows 10 or later.

The preview needs LaTeX installed. Translating does not.  For the compiled preview of section 6, install TeX Live or MiKTeX – both are free, and both include everything else the preview uses.  Without one, the preview pane says so and names them; everything else still works, and a .tex file will open, segment, translate and deliver on a machine with no TeX on it at all.

4. What gets translated – and what does not

This is the section worth reading before your first project, because the surprises are all here.

Translated

• Paragraphs of prose.

• Headings – and their short forms, the optional argument used for the contents page and running heads.  Leaving that in English ships a translated document with an English table of contents.

• \title, \author, \date.

• Captions on figures and tables.

• Each \item in a list, and the term in a description list (\item[Groyne]).

• Table cells, with & and \\ kept as tags.

• Footnote text, kept inline in the sentence carrying its marker rather than split off.

• The label of a link: \href{https://example.org}{the site} gives you the site and locks the address.

• The braced text of commands nobody has ruled – which in practice means the ones a package or the author defined. This is a setting; see section 7.

Not translated

• Maths. $...$, \(...\), \[...\], equation, align, gather and the rest, each locked whole as a single tag – including maths inside a heading, as in \section{The $n$-th case}.

• Verbatim. verbatim, lstlisting, minted, alltt and \verb with whatever delimiter the author chose, reproduced exactly with no conversion and no reflowing.

• The preamble.  Package options and macro definitions are machinery, and translating them would change what the document does. \title, \author and \date are the exceptions, by their own rules.

• Machinery inside prose: \label, \ref, \cite, \includegraphics, \input.  A cross-reference key is not a word.

• Anything the document class generates.  This is the one that surprises people, and it is covered next.

The words that are not in your file

A translated document still prints “Figure 1:”, “Contents” and “References” in English.  Those words are not in the .tex file at all – the document class supplies them when the document is compiled, so nothing can extract them and nothing can translate them.

The remedy belongs in the document, not in the translation: loading babel or polyglossia with the target language redefines the whole set at once.

\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}

This file type will not add that line.  Writing packages into a document we did not author, and cannot compile-test on your behalf, is not something a translation tool should do.  If the client wants those words translated, that one line in the preamble is the answer, and it is theirs to add – or yours to ask for.

Be aware that babel covers the standard set – around twenty names.  A document using biblatex has several hundred more strings of its own (“and”, “et al.”, “edition”, “visited on”), which babel does not touch.  The reliable way to know what your delivered document looks like is to look at it: the preview compiles the real thing.

5. Your first project

1. Create a project as you would for any file, adding the .tex document.

2. Open it in the editor.  The document structure column on the right of each segment tells you what you are looking at: Paragraph, Section, Caption (figure), Item, Title.

3. Translate. Everything that is not prose is a tag.

4. Save the bilingual file (Ctrl+S), then Save Target As.

Reading the segments

Tags carry the document’s own markup. A \textbf{ and its closing } are the two halves of a tag pair, and the text between them is yours to translate.  Turn on full tag text in Studio (View > Tag Display Mode) if you want to see exactly what each one holds.

Formatting looks like formatting.  \textbf{...} shows as bold, \textit{...} and \emph{...} as italic, \underline{...} as underlined. \texttt, \textsf and \textsc stay as plain tag pairs – they select a font family or small capitals, and Studio has no way to show that honestly, so it does not pretend.

Characters look like characters.  The file may say caf\'e, \% or ``quoted'', but you see café, % and "quoted".  Type in your own language rather than in TeX.  On save it is all converted back, and anything you typed that LaTeX treats as special is escaped for you.

You cannot break the compile by typing.  A brace or a per-cent sign typed into a segment reaches the file as \{ or \% and typesets as itself.  The one thing to avoid is deleting tags, because those are the document’s markup rather than your text.

A non-breaking space is a character.  You can type one, and you may need more of them than the source has – French wants one before every colon, semicolon, question mark and exclamation mark.

Adding formatting

Select a word in a target segment and press Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I or Ctrl+U.  The toolbar buttons do the same.  The command and its braces are inserted around your selection, and the result is ordinary LaTeX:

Coastal \textbf{erosion} affects \textit{thousands} of \underline{kilometres of shoreline}.

This works in a document that contains no formatting at all, which is the point – these tags do not have to exist in the source for you to use them.

6. The compiled preview

The preview shows the real document: your translation, compiled by LaTeX, page by page.

Setting it up

The preview needs a LaTeX distribution on the machine. Install TeX Live or MiKTeX – both include everything else the preview uses.

Then open File > Options > File Types > LaTeX > LaTeX preview and press Check my setup. Before anything is installed it tells you so plainly, and what each missing piece is for:

The setup check on a machine with nothing installed, reporting that the preview cannot work because no LaTeX engine was found, with pdflatex, pdftocairo and dvisvgm each marked not found and each carrying its own advice.

After installing, the same button confirms what it found and where:

The same setup check after installing TeX Live, reporting that the preview should work, with pdflatex and pdftocairo found in the TeX Live bin folder and dvisvgm marked limited.

“dvisvgm – limited” is not a problem.  dvisvgm cannot read a PDF without Ghostscript or mutool, and TeX Live installs neither.   The preview uses pdftocairo instead, which TeX Live does provide.  The report says so rather than leaving you to wonder.

Using it

Open the Preview pane and choose Compiled document in the View list.

• Target compiles your translation – the document your client will receive.

• Source compiles the document as it was delivered, for comparison.

• Refresh re-compiles.  It is on demand rather than automatic because a compile takes a few seconds.

What it does when things are missing

A document often arrives without the files it references.  The preview carries on:

• A missing figure becomes an empty draft box on the page.  That is the preview working, not failing.

• A missing \input file becomes a visible [missing file: ...] marker, so you can see what is absent and where. Drop the real file in beside the document and refresh, and the marker gives way to the real content.

• A document that will not compile at all gives you a page explaining why, with the lines from the LaTeX log that identify the problem – not the whole log.

• A document that compiled but complained shows the pages with a note above them.  A missing font glyph is reported here, which matters: without it, a page can come out looking finished with words silently missing from it.

Its limits

The preview is view-only in this version.  There is no click-to-navigate between a segment and its place on the page, and no highlight of the active segment.  The side-by-side tab is inactive.

7. The settings, in depth

File > Options > File Types > LaTeX. Two pages, because they answer unrelated questions: LaTeX content is about what you are shown, LaTeX preview is about what the machine needs to compile it.

Settings are stored per file type configuration and are copied into a project when its files are converted.  Decide them before creating the project – changing them afterwards does not reach a file that already exists.

LaTeX Content settings page showing the various options.  Each set of setting has it’s own built in help explaining what they are for.

Special characters

Show accents, escapes, dashes and quotes as characters – on by default.

You see café rather than caf\'e, % rather than \%, an en dash rather than --, and curly quotes rather than `` and ''. Turn it off to work with the source spellings.

Either way, a segment you return exactly as it was shown is not written back at all, so a document keeps whichever spelling its author chose. G\"{o}del stays G\"{o}del and does not quietly become Gödel.

Comments

Two independent checkboxes, and neither is ticked by default.

A LaTeX comment is always a tag, so it can never be lost or edited by accident.  What the settings add is what else happens to it:

• Extract for translation offers the words of the comment as editable text, keeping the % and the line break as tags so a line cannot be uncommented by accident.  Choose this when the comments are content.

• Add as Studio comments puts the words where Studio shows comments – anchored to the comment’s own tag where it sits inside a segment, on the segment where it sits immediately above one, and on the file where it belongs to neither. Choose this when the comments are instructions from the author.

The two exclude each other: words being translated should not also be a note about themselves.

Commands with no rule

What happens to a command the file type has no entry for – which in practice means the ones a package or the author defined.

• Translate the braced argument (default): the command becomes a tag and the text in its braces is yours.  Right for prose macros such as \highlight{its main competitor}.

• Lock the command and its arguments: nothing belonging to it is offered.  Right for documents whose macros take file names, keys and measurements.

Before \begin{document} an unknown command is locked either way.  A preamble is machinery, and offering package options and macro definitions for translation would help nobody.

Protected environments

Two lists, one per line: Verbatim and Mathematics.  Everything between \begin and \end of these is protected exactly and never offered.

Add the equivalents your own packages define.  Three things worth knowing:

• The name is the one after \begin.  A document that defines its own with \newenvironment{rawdata} still means rawdata, not newenvironment.

• No backslash, no \begin or \end – just the name, as in lstlisting.

• Starred forms are separate environments. LaTeX treats verbatim and verbatim* as two different things and so does this file type.  Adding mylisting does not cover mylisting*.  That is why the shipped lists spell both out.

Preview engine

pdflatex (default), xelatex or lualatex.

pdfLaTeX suits most documents and is the fastest.  Choose XeLaTeX for a document that uses system fonts or a non-Latin script, which pdfLaTeX cannot typeset.  The engine names are program names and are not translated.

TeX programs folder

Leave empty unless the preview cannot find LaTeX by itself.  A folder named here is searched before anywhere else, which is what to use when two distributions are installed and only one of them is wanted.  Example: C:\texlive\2024\bin\windows.

If you name a folder that contributes nothing, the setup check says so rather than quietly falling back.

Maximum pages

20 by default, between 1 and 200.  Every page is built into the preview itself, so a long document takes longer to show and uses more memory.  The preview says when it has stopped early.

8. Saving the target

1. Save the bilingual file first (Ctrl+S). Studio generates the target from the last-saved state, so an editor tab showing an asterisk means edits that will not reach your target.

2. File > Save Target As, and choose where the .tex goes.

3. The delivered file is your source document with the translated spans substituted – same encoding, same line endings, same everything else.

9. Verifying what you deliver

The preview is the verification. The Target tab compiles exactly what saving would produce, so a document that renders correctly there is a document your client can build.

If you would rather check outside Studio, open the delivered .tex in any LaTeX editor – TeXworks ships with TeX Live – and compile it.  It should behave exactly as the source did.

Two things worth a look before delivery:

• The pages compiled at all, with no note above them reporting problems.

• Nothing is missing from the page.  If the document uses a non-Latin script, check the words are actually there – a font without the glyphs drops them, and the preview reports it above the pages.

10. Workflow recipes

Piloting a new client’s documents. Run one representative file through first and look at the segments before quoting.  LaTeX documents vary enormously in how much of their content is prose: a maths-heavy paper may be mostly locked, a book chapter almost entirely translatable.

A document set that uses custom environments.  Open one file, look for content that should have been protected, and add those environment names to the Verbatim list before creating the real project.

Translation memory.  A LaTeX paragraph is one segment and Studio segments it into sentences as usual, so a TM built from other formats applies normally.  Table rows are currently a single unit per row rather than per cell, which is worth knowing when you look at leverage on tabular material.

Working without any LaTeX knowledge.  You need none. Treat every tag as something to keep, translate the words, and use the preview to see the result.  If the preview compiles and reads correctly, the file is sound.

11. Troubleshooting

The preview says no LaTeX installation was found. Install TeX Live or MiKTeX and restart Studio.  Use Check my setup to confirm. If your distribution is somewhere unusual, name its bin folder in the settings.

Check my setup says dvisvgm is limited.  Expected and harmless – see section 6.

Empty boxes where figures should be. The document was delivered without its images.  Nothing is wrong with your file.

“Figure 1:” is still in English.  Those words come from the document class, not the file.  See section 4.

I changed a setting and nothing happened.  A bilingual file carries its own copy of the settings from when it was created.  Change the setting and create the project again.

Something I expected to be protected was offered for translation.  Add the environment name to the Verbatim or Mathematics list, or switch the unknown-command setting to lock. Failing both, simply return the segment unchanged – an unchanged segment is not written back at all.

My translated document will not compile. Check you have not deleted tags.  Every tag carries a piece of the document’s own markup, and a \textbf{ without its } is a broken document.  Studio’s tag verification will find them.

12. Limitations, honestly stated – and an invitation

Version 1.0.0. What this does not do, plainly:

• Maths is locked whole. You cannot translate a word inside an equation, even where it is a word – \text{where} inside a formula stays put. Exposing text inside maths is a candidate for a later version.

• Words generated by the document class cannot be reached.  “Figure”, “Contents”, “References” and their kin.  Section 4 explains why and what to do.

• The preview is view-only.  No click-to-navigate, no active-segment highlight, no side-by-side.

• Table rows are one unit, not one per cell.  Better for keeping a row readable, worse for translation memory leverage on tabular data.

• \texttt, \textsf and \textsc show as plain tags, without a visual style, because Studio has no honest way to express a font family or small capitals.

• Files that reprogram TeX’s own lexer – \makeatletter regions and catcode changes – are locked rather than interpreted. Correct, and conservative.

• No .bib support.  Bibliography files are a separate format and are not handled.

• The translations of this plugin’s own interface are into nine languages and have been checked against Studio’s own terminology, but only English, German, Japanese, Russian, Italian and Spanish have been looked at in the running application.

LaTeX in the wild is more varied than any corpus.  Yours will use packages this has never seen, and conventions nobody anticipated.  If something behaves oddly, please say so – a document that segments strangely, an environment that should be protected out of the box, a command whose argument should or should not be offered.  A sample file is worth a hundred words of description, and every report makes the plugin better for everyone translating this format.

multifariousLaTeX File Type for Trados Studio. Copyright 2026 multifarious. All rights reserved.

Nothing is bundled with the plugin and nothing is installed by it.  The preview is compiled by whichever LaTeX distribution is already on the machine – TeX Live or MiKTeX – and the compiled pages are rendered by pdftocairo or dvisvgm, which ship with those distributions.  The translation path uses no third-party library at all: fidelity comes from substituting translated text into the original byte stream.