Trados: Basic features

Let’s go through the basic features Trados offers so you can get the most out of the program. In addition to the features found in most IT tools (save, save as, etc.), Trados also has its own special features it would be worth going over quickly.

1) Project settings

Project Settings are accessible from various locations, including the top toolbar, under Home and File, and the Translation Results section in the Editor tab.

This is also where you can create, add and delete translation memories and termbases, and change their settings.

To add a translation memory, go to Project Settings => Language Pairs => Translation Memories => Use => “File-based translation memory” and select your translation memory. If you don’t have one yet, click Create and create a new TM.

Check the Update box if you want your translation memory to remember the segments you are about to translate and confirm (NB. If you don’t check this box, you will only have access to your TM in Read mode and your new entries won’t be added to it).

The Penalty box can be used to apply a penalty to the segments in your memory. In other words, if you add a penalty of “1”, for example, and your translation memory has a 100% match, it will be given one penalty point and appear as a 99% match. This can be handy if you want to double-check matches from previous projects before using them. A 100% match from Text A, for example, might not be suited to Text B, because the context or register are different.

2) Batch tasks

In the Editor, Projects and File tabs, you can run various “Batch Tasks”. In this article, I will only mention the two I use the most: Analyze Files and Pre-translate Files.

• Analyze files: Trados will calculate the number of repetitions in your file or files. This is a practical way to estimate how much time a translation will take if it’s a project for a direct client (agencies normally send the word count with the project, so in theory you don’t need to re-run the analysis).
• Pre-translate files: Trados will pre-translate your files and enter the matches from your translation memory. I would normally run this task before beginning my translation and apply a minimum match rate of 90. If you use the DeepL plugin or another built-in MT tool, you can also check the option “Apply automated translation” if no match is found. If you do this, segments will automatically be populated by your machine translation tool and you will only need to proofread them rather than having to copy and paste the translation into each segment.

3) Confirming segments

Remember that your translation memory only saves “confirmed” translations. If you simply enter your translation and move onto the next segment without confirming it, it won’t be saved in the TM, even if you save the document. The same applies if you change a confirmed segment. The new translation will only be saved in the translation memory IF you confirm the segment again.

=> To confirm a segment, hit CTRL + Enter (this takes you to the next unconfirmed segment) or CTRL + ALT + Enter (this takes you to the next segment, even if it has been confirmed). If the icon shown in the middle column is a single pencil without a tick mark, the segment has NOT been confirmed.

4) Verify and Quality Assurance

Once you have finished your translation, remember to run the quality assurance tool. To do this, go to the Review tab from Editor view and click on Verify. Before running the quality assurance process, check the settings by clicking on Project Verification settings:

This page will open, where you can change what you want to be verified:

You can, for example ask to be notified if the target segment ends with a different punctuation mark to the source segment, or if there are inconsistencies in your translation (say you have two 100% segments, and you changed one but not the other, you will have two identical source sentences with two different translations), or if there are differences between the numbers/times in the source and target, etc. You decide what matters to you.

Once you’ve finished updating your settings, click OK, click Verify to run the verification process, then go to the Messages tab on the Editor page to see the errors shown and make any changes necessary.

In the next article, we’ll look at how to translate a standard file in Trados!

This is a translation of one of my French articles (“Trados: les fonctionnalités de base“), kindly provided by the amazing Georgie Scott from Cf Language Solutions!