Tips

Trados Studio is a source of numerous errors, which sometimes turn out to be quite exotic. Troubleshooting methods are [or should be] described in the help section of the SDL portal. Many of them are gathered by hashtag #tradosstudio on our website.

If you encounter a mysterious error, try checking the main trouble spots before diving into help sections and forums. The general method for removing puzzling errors in Trados Studio elaborated in the process of suffering lots of bumps and bruises looks like as follows:

• Check that the general length of the path to the SDLXLIFF files of the project is not too big. The total length should not exceed 255 symbols.
• Check that the names of the folders and files do not contain symbols that are not inherent to the languages you usually work with (hieroglyphs, letters of RTL languages, all kinds of letters with superciliary and suprailiac dashes, circles, etc.). Studio is suspicious of them. For example, the The specified project name is invalid. The name should not contain any invalid characters such as: \ / : * ? " < > | error is caused by the presence of Cyrillic symbols with wrong character encoding in the project name.
• Check that the project files, particularly SDLXLIFF and SDLTM, are not flying in the air, i.e., are not in the standard folders of Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. When you work directly from the cloud, any change of the file will make Trados Studio and the local cloud application fight to be the first to process it, and the translation process will suffer.
• Check the state of the working translation memory (TM) in the imported package:
• it must be present—sometimes users simply forget to add it;
• it must be active—the corresponding checkbox in the project settings must be checked;
• the language direction of the TM must match that of the current SDLXLIFF file;
• the translation memory file (SDLTM) must not have the Read Only attribute, and in the case of the online memory, a connection to the server must be established.
• Repeat this for the termbase.

* * *

If it doesn’t help, try looking for the cause of the error with the help of an exact search through the text of the error message.

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 allows them, but the export procedure is rather complicated.

The export of translations from Passolo file becomes possible with a help of auxiliary macros, attachable to the program.

By default, the macros files are downloadable from here:
http://translation-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Passolo.zip

To enable macros for export in Passolo, please perform the following steps:

Unpack the archive and copy .bas files it contains,

• PslAutoProjectFromFolder.bas
• TEK_Passolo2TMX.bas
• TEK_Passolo2Xliff.bas
• TEKPassolo2TTX.bas

to the Passolo macros folder. The path can be different depending on your Passolo and Windows version, for example:

Windows Vista/7/8:

• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo Translator\2011\Macros\
• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo Essential 2011\Macros\
• c:\Users\Public\Documents\Passolo 2011\Macros\

Windows XP:

• C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Passolo Translator\2011\Macros

etc.

Now you can export the translation from Passolo into text format.

In Passolo, press CTRL + M or select Tools > Macros. The dialog window Macros appears. It contains macros beginning from TEK...

— TEK_Passolo2TTX.bas macro is for exporting text into TagEditor (TTX) format.

Note: When you try to open the resulting .ttx file in TagEditor, the message about missing .ini file appears. You can choose any .ini file from the existing ones. Changing .ini file affects nothing, because the text is already segmented.

— TEK_Passolo2TMX.bas macro is for exporting text into TMX format.

— TEK_Passolo2Xliff.bas macro is for exporting text into XLIFF format.

To run a macro, select the necessary one in the list and press Run button. The resulting file with exported text is created in the folder where the original .tbulic Passolo file is stored.

When your translation performed in Word with Trados (to be exact, Translator's Workbench) is finished, you create a translated file that contains the translation. I. e., you eliminate the source text and leave the translated text (target) only. This operation is called “cleaning”, as you “clean” your file from source, leaving the target only.

Usually, you do it using the Translator's Workbench: you select Tools > Clean Up, then you choose the Word files, press Clean Up. Translator's Workbench deletes the source text and so you get the translated files.

But sometimes something goes wrong and Translator's Workbench fails to clean the files. This usually happens if there are problems with segmentation in the file you are cleaning. Or, you try to clean the files of Word 2007 and higher (.docx files). Or, you need to clean the file from source on a PC where Trados is not installed at all. Then, the following trick helps.

1. Usually, you see only visible text in Word, like this:

You see the translated text only, while the source text is present in the file as well, but it is hidden. To see the source text, you need to make hidden Word text visible: press  button on the Word ribbon or press CTRL+SHIFT+8 (just 8, not F8). You will see something like this:

2. To get rid of the source text is in fact to get rid of the hidden text. This can be done right in Word, without Trados. To do this, press CTRL+H to open Search and Replace dialog window, then press More, then press Format button > Font > Hidden:

Then, press OK and Replace All.

This command deletes all hidden text from a Word file, leaving only visible one — i. e., only your translation.

Usual Trados 2007 translation memory (aka TM) consists of five files: .tmw container and four additional files with extensions iix, mdf, mtf and mwf.

Sometimes glitches happen with such 5-file TMs. With 95 % probability, you can restore them using the algorithm described below.

First thing to do is performing so called “reorganization”. This operation re-creates the index TM files.

In Translator's Workbench, select File > Reorganise:

Wait for completion of the reorganization (it lasts for several minutes in big TMs) and then try to work with the TM as usual.

If the reorganization does not help, export the TM to TMX, then create new TM with the same language direction in Trados 2007 and import the TMX into it.

If the TM does not allow neither to perform reorganization, nor to export/import segments, sometimes the following trick helps.

• Create an empty TM with the same name, the same language direction and the same custom fields structure.
• Close this TM in Translator's Workbench.
• Replace .tmw file of the new empty TM with the .tmw files of the corrupted TM.
• Open the resulting TM in Translator's Workbench (usually, it opens safely) and try to export its segments to TMX.
• If the export fails, try to reorganize the ТМ and then to export it again.
• I the reorganizations fails, too, try to add several new segments into the TM via “usual translation” and then to reorganize and export the segments once again.

If, after all these efforts, the TM still does not work, hence, the SDL itself is hardly able to help :(

A Wordfast TM file has .txt extension. Actually, it is an usual .txt file delimited with tabs in a special way. Converting it into TMX format that allows TM exchange between all other CAT tools can be done in several ways. The easiest and quickest way involves Xbench (either free or paid version).

Step 1: Load your Wordfast TM into Xbench. There is a special file type Wordfast Memory there:

Do not forget to set the checkbox Ongoing translation.

Step 2: In Xbench, select Tools > Export Items, or simply press CTRL + R.

Export Items dialog box appears. Specify the settings in Output section: what languages are considered to be source and target, and the path and the file name for the .tmx file of the TM.

Press OK button. The .tmx file you get is the converted Wordfast TM.

Trados 2007, one of the aged CATs, becomes history gradually. But experienced translators who worked in it still store old translation memories in Trados 2007 format in their archives. Occasionally, it makes sense to involve these antiques in some projects.

Sometimes translation memories become corrupted, due to different reasons. It is still possible to open them in Translator's Workbench, and even to perform translation in TagEditor, but they do not allow you to convert them into some “more modern” CAT format, because when you try to export them into TMX, the program crashes.

The procedure described below can help in such a situation.

1. The first thing you should try is preforming the so called reorganization of the corrupted translation memory. During the reorganization, the index files (i. e., .iix, .mdf, .mtf, and .mwf files) of a 5-file translation memory are being re-created anew from the information from the “container” file (.tmw).

To perform reorganization, in Translator's Workbench, select

File > Reorganise:

The translation memory is reorganized. After that, try to export it to TMX:

File > Export > OK > choose the format, file name and folder where it must be stored.

NOTE: The export command is not accessible, if Exclusive check box was not set when you opened the translation memory in Translator's Workbench.

Is this is a case, close the translation memory and open it again with this check box set.

2. If reorganization or export is failed, sometimes the following trick helps.

• Create an empty translation memory with the same name, language direction and structure of custom fields.
• Close this translation memory in Translator's Workbench.
• Rewrite the .tmw file of the empty TM with the .tmw file of the corrupted TM.
• Open the TM you created this way in Translator's Workbench. Opening usually runs smoothly. Do not forget to set the Exclusive check box.
• Try to export the TM into TMX format.
• If export fails, try to reorganize the TM and to export it one more time.
• If reorganization does not help, try to add several new segments into the TM via “usual” translating, and then try to repeat the reorganization/export cycle.

If you fail to export the TM after all these steps, most likely even SDL, the Trados developer, will not help you :(