Blog Archive

“General massive catastrophic system failure” in Trados Studio is neither general nor massive, nor catastrophic. On some occasions, Trados Studio shows a frightful message, “general massive catastrophic system failure.” This can happen in different versions of Trados Studio. The message is horrible: you may think planet Nibiru will crash into the Earth soon, and it is the right time to panic. Ironically, […]

Mozilla Thunderbird is not able to use Microsoft Word spelling engine, but checking spelling still is possible. Many of us use Mozilla Thunderbird for emails. It is an ancient but powerful free email client. Spelling errors in emails you send look ugly. So you should know how to check spelling in Thunderbird.  First, you need to prepare your Thunderbird so it can […]

Relax! When translators are going crazy with the amount of work and tight deadlines, they want to relax. One of the mainstream CATs (memoQ, of course) has a special tool for this. Even two tools! The first one: put on your headset and go to memoQ > Options > Go Zen: You will obviously know Zen. The second thing (if […]

You can check spelling check is in Excel via the standard Microsoft Office engine. Unfortunately, it is impossible to check spelling in Excel like we do this in Word, where misspelled words are underlined with red (if you know the way, please tell us). Excel was initially designed mostly for numbers, and hence, spelling is not its strong point. Nevertheless, […]

Sometimes copying in Excel can be done in one command. In Excel, you sometimes need to copy the contents of the upper cell to the cell where the cursor is. This operation consists of four simple steps:  But when you need to do it many times, the operation becomes quite tedious. The solution is very easy: use the shortcut CTRL+D. The contents of […]

The most convenient way to convert Wordfast TM to TMX format involves Xbench. A Wordfast TM file has .txt extension. It is a usual .txt file delimited with tabs specially. There are several ways to convert it to TMX format that allows TM exchange between other CAT tools. The easiest and quickest way involves Xbench (either free or […]

Word easily converts a table into text. The main “problem” with this operation is not to perform the converting itself, but to find when the necessary button is 🙂 1. Select the table you want to convert into text or place the text cursor into any of its cells. On the ribbon, the Layout menu appears. […]

You can convert the text from Passolo to another, more convenient format. Passolo files (they have .tbulic extension) are not convenient for some operations: it is not easy to add the translations they contain to the existing Trados translation memory, to perform QA in Xbench, etc. Free Passolo Translator’s Edition does not allow that at all; Professional version can do that, but the export […]

Xliff Editor can be configured to underline mistakes like Word. Recent posts in this blog described how to enable check spelling with Microsoft Word spelling engine in the following programs: Now we shall talk about Xliff Editor. This CAT is a part of the Translation Workspace system, and it works with usual “offline” files by connecting to online resources (translation memory, termbases, etc.). […]

Your browser can check spelling in the way Word does. We have already set the spelling check in Word, memoQ, Wordfast, Trados Studio, and Passolo. All of these programs are standalone software for PCs. But many CAT tools are so-called SaaS—”Software as a Service”. They are not software, but rather services providing online access to servers. There are many of them; the […]