Now we’ve been through some of Trados’ basic features, I thought we could have a look at some handy tips I’ve learnt over the years—often late in the day, after battling for months and even years with some sort of annoying set-up that “I’m sure they could simplify”, which does actually have a solution I just hadn’t had the time to look for. In my defence, Trados really does offer a lot of options… and I can be a little lazy! Yep, that’s my excuse. You’d never guess my dad is a lawyer, right?
1) Selecting your default languages so you don’t have to set them up for each new project
When I first started using Trados, whenever I added a document for translation, it would always suggest English as the default source language and German as the default target language. It would drive me crazy, as each time I had to manually select French as the source language (yes, I know, it only takes a few seconds and it’s not a big deal, but it’s the sort of thing that drives me up the wall).
In fact, all you need to do is go to the Welcome page, select File => Options => Editor => Languages and set which languages are displayed by default when you open a document, once and for all.
2) Choosing which columns to translate in an Excel file
You might have already used Trados to translate an Excel spreadsheet that contained columns not to be translated. If you’re like I was, you probably: Open the Excel file, copy the column for translation into another Excel document, save the new document, translate that document in Trados, save the target, then copy the translation back into the original spreadsheet. But you can actually ask Trados to ignore various columns in an Excel file right off the bat.
To do this, when you add your file to Trados and arrive at the settings step (I’ve tried doing this after importing the file and it didn’t work, so I recommend doing it right at the start), go to Advanced => File Types => Microsoft Excel => Content Processing (or Exclude in Trados 2017, if I remember correctly) => “Skip selected columns”, then select the columns you don’t want to translate (you can also select an option to only include cells with a selected colour if you prefer, whichever works for you).
3) Hide tags
Oh, tags, the famous Trados tags! In some texts, there are just WAY too many, or they’re too long, too in-your-face and just down right irritating. But did you know you can actually hide tags?
Simply go to the View tab and select the tag display option of your choice:
4) Changing the letter case
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve typed out an entire segment that was basically a perfect match except that in the first instance it was in lowercase and the second time it was in uppercase, or vice versa. This is the sort of thing that really eats away at your time. I’ve even reverted to copying text into Word to change the case using the shortcut SHIFT + F3 before pasting it back into Trados…. So much time wasted!
It turns out, however, Trados actually has a pretty good option for changing the case,hidden in the Advanced tab. Simply select the text you want to change (until you select text, the option will be greyed out), then make the change you would like (Toggle Case is handy if you’ve accidentally typed something out without realizing CapsLock is on. Title Case changes all the first letters in the word to capital letters, and the other two options speak for themselves).
The moral of the story? When something’s bugging you in Trados, it’s often worth taking the time to do a little digging, as there is normally a good solution ready and waiting. You just need to find it! Let me know what interesting features you’ve found in the comments below!
This is a translation of one of my French articles (“Trados: quelques fonctionnalités avancées“), kindly provided by the amazing Georgie Scott from Cf Language Solutions!
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