Tips

Like any other serious CAT tool, Trados Studio helps you to simplify your work by allowing you to search in the concordance—i.e., in the translation memory attached to a Trados Studio project you work on. A special shortcut for this feature exists: F3 key. (By the way, it is the same in the ancient Trados 2007.) So, you need to select a word or several words you want to find in the TM(s) and press F3. In the Concordance Search Window, you see the results of searching.

But there is an inconvenience: when you select a fragment in your target text and press F3, the search is automatically performed in the target part of the TM, while, in most cases, you need to search in the source part. And you have to switch the search line to the Source manually.

But there is a shortcut for searching in the source too: CTRL+F3! (It was missing in Trados 2007: you could search in the source ONLY there.)

One of the amazing errors in Trados Studio sometimes occurs when you try to save translation—i.e. after you press the CTRL + S key combination. It looks like this:

To a non-specialist, this message yields little information. To be more precise, it is meaningless—one just doesn’t have a clue. Moreover, Trados Studio doesn’t allow saving files, and it seems to you that the results of your work are lost.

Hold your horses and don’t import the Trados Studio package again! If you do this, the results of your work will be lost indeed.

According to our experience, this error only occurs when several package files have been opened simultaneously with the Include subfolders flag set:

The way out is to open files one by one, not “in bulk.” In this case, Trados Studio saves the changes “properly.”

Thus, if you face this error, the algorithm of saving the performed translation is as follows:

• Close the files without changing them (actually, you don’t have another option at this stage).
• Remove the Include subfolders flag.
• Open the documents one by one, fill the target with your translation from the translation memory by replacing the existing translation, if there is one, with it using the CTRL + T key combination. (You have been confirming segments through CTRL + ENTER while translating, haven’t you? We hope you have; otherwise, this method won’t work.)
• Save the documents the usual way—by pressing CTRL + S. 

Sometimes the font in Trados Studio documents appears to be too small and inconvenient to work with. Like this:

The font in Trados Studio can be increased. Unfortunately, it must be done in a non-trivial way.

Press File > Options > on the left panel choose Font Adaptation. On the right panel four number fields will appear standing for minimum and maximum font size of text sections in source and target languages. Increase these numbers. They may be different for different languages (a language choice field is located in this very dialog window below). For obvious reasons, the maximum number must be bigger than the minimum one.

We recommend to set 12 for minimum font size and 14 for maximum font size:

After pressing OK button, you’ll have the font size changed:

Save your vision!

While working in Trados Studio (and with texts in general), one has to perform numerous copy and paste operations through pressing CTRL+C and CTRL+V key combinations (you don’t copy texts with the help of your mouse, do you?). Translators are constantly looking up terms in dictionaries, reading specialized articles in the Internet etc.

However, an attempt of doing so sometimes results in Trados Studio displaying a message as follows:

In other words, for some reason Trados Studio refuses to copy a text fragment to clipboard.

Usually, this error is caused by another program (for example, Punto Switcher or a clipboard manager) “fighting” with  Trados Studio for the right to be the first to run the copy command.

The easiest method to get rid of this error is to copy the fragment again, taking your time :) Mostly, it is enough.

If you want to get rid of it completely, you’ll have to remove or disable the competitor program.

We keep on studying Trados Studio bugs features.

Trados Studio allows to open many SDLXLIFF files at once. To do this, you have to check Include subfolders in the Files mode at the left:

Then at the right, in the file list, select several files having the SHIFT key pressed or select all files in the package at once by the CTRL+A command, right-click, and choose Open For Translation (or Open For Review—depends on what you are going to do) in the drop down menu:

In this, all segments of all the opened files will appear as a single longread as if it were a single gargantuan document.

However, if one presses the CTRL+H key combination to open the Find and Replace window for massive correction, Trados Studio occasionally gets exasperated and gives out this message—yielding little information, as usual:

What it is that Studio is mad about remains unclear. It has been noticed that this message appears following the attempt to open an autocorrect dialog box.

The solution is easy: you should take advantage of the fact that autocorrect and search boxes are technically different tabs of the single window though called out with the help of different commands. Thus, open the search box first by pressing CTRL+F:

As a rule, there are no problems with that. Then just choose the second tab, Replace:

It is notable that this second tab may even not appear after calling up the search box. But it appears when you press CTRL+TAB.

This is the second (and not final yet) part of the post about the multifaceted Object reference not set to an instance of an object error. You can find the first part here.

The error has many causes which means there are many potential ways to get rid of it, too.

If Trados Studio gets started in a regular way and the message about this error appears when you switch between display modes (Projects, Files, Editor in the lower left corner) or dialog boxes, the method below may help sometimes:

• Open Trados Studio.
• Go to the mode where this error appears.
• Click the View tab of the ribbon > press the Reset Window Layout button:

• In the box that appears press the OK button.

All the settings for displaying boxes will be restored to their factory defaults.

In case this method doesn’t help, there are others, and we will tell about them, too.