Tips

• Microsoft decided it is high time to change their default font. In ancient times, it was Times New Roman, since 2007—Calibri, now there are five new fonts at once, and Microsoft is pondering which to prefer.
• Google Lens will soon get a new useful feature, automated translation of the text on screen captures. Users will be able to translate it instantly or send it to the pre-installed Google Translate.
• Starting from Android 12, it will be possible to automatically localize applications for Android. This should come in handy for small companies and indie developers. Nothing is said about the quality of such translation.

* * *

And about cats.

• XTM has improved video operations: XTM Cloud 12.7 now features a preview of video subtitles. They can be translated in real-time; to do this, you need to provide the link to a video on Youtube or Vimeo and assign a subtitle file to it. The new version is much more user-friendly: you don’t have to switch between video and text all the time, there is no need for rewinding the video to find the right fragment, you can instantly see whether the text fits the allocated space, etc. Currently, it is a beta function; it will become standard in XTM Cloud 13.0.

Another piece of news: XTM Mobile 2.3 has been released.

• A post about translating subtitles on the Smartcat website. They speak of Smartcat in the second part of the article, and the first part is dedicated to several third-party applications. This is what it looks like.

Smartcat has also introduced a preview for Microsoft Word documents, here they show how it works.

• Multiple updates in CrowdIn. There are so many that they deserve a separate post. Here are some of them:
• CrowdIn + Intercom integration has been realized to facilitate help text localization.
• Issue Notification Manager now enables sending scheduled notifications.
• The auto-approve option for editors has been added.
• ModernMT support has been added.
• Java Play Properties and Java Properties XML files can now be edited.

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.

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.

Did you know? Just as you copy and paste the text itself, you can copy and "paste" its format. The only change is adding SHIFT key to the same shortcuts:

• Copy text: CTRL + C
• Copy format: CTRL + SHIFT + C
• Paste text: CTRL + V
• Paste format: CTRL + SHIFT + V

In other words, you can copy, for example, "COURIER NEW + bold + underlined," and then apply ("paste") this format to another text fragment.

Use this little but useful hint!

When you work in Word, you can easily look for synonyms and antonyms of a selected word. To do this, select a word (or just place the text cursor on it) and press SHIFT + F7. On the right, the additional windows appears, where you can see the synonyms and/or antonyms:

When working on a huge document in Word, sometimes you need to return to the place where you edited the text recently. By bad fortune, this place in most cases appears to be beyond the screen, and you have to scroll the document up or down and seek for it, losing your time.

Word is packed with useful commands and shortcuts, and, of course, there is a special shortcut for returning to a place of the last editing. Here it is: SHIFT+F5.

• Feature #1: Word remembers five last places of editing, so pressing SHIFT+F5 again “scrolls” you through them.
• Feature #2: SHIFT+F5 works in all recent versions of Word: 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016.
• Feature #3: Even if you close the document and open it again, Word still remembers where the cursor was put earlier and returns it there!

The easiest way to perform such conversion is to use Xbench. The free 2.9.0. Xbench build is enough. Yes, this tool is good not only for QA :) You do not even need Wordfast itself.

1. Load the .txt file containing the offline Wordfast TM to the Xbench, as if it is a regular bilingual file. (If the TM is big, this process can last for some time.) Xbench recognizes it:

2. Export the loaded segments into the .tmx file. To do this, press CTRL+R or select Tools > Export Items:

In the Language section, choose source and target languages of the TM.

The result of this operation is the .tmx file containing the segments from the initial Wordfast .txt translation memory. TMX is the industry standard format for exchanging translation memories data. Actually, TMX = Translation Memory eXchange. Now you can import it in any CAT tool.

Look at the picture:

It is a screen shot from Word document. Yes, it is the first stanza from famous Lewis Carroll's “Jabberwocky.” Of course, there are many non-existing words there, that is why Word underlines them. But everything else seems to be ok. 

BUT no: there are many defects in these four lines! The problem is your eyes do not catch them, as they are hidden.

To see them, you need to make the hidden text visible by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+8 (number 8, not F8 key) or clicking the following button on the ribbon:

(It is on the Home tab of the Word ribbon.) Then we see:

As we can see, the defects are many. The 1st line ends with multiple trailing spaces. There are several double spaces in the 2nd one. (This is the only problem on the picture, that could be caught with “unaided eye.”) The 2nd and the 3rd lines have line breaks instead of paragraph signs (and due to this, lines 2-4 are actually a single paragraph with two line breaks). The 4th line contains unnecessary non-breaking spaces instead of regular ones. (The small circlets here are not the degree signs, they are non-breaking spaces. We will discuss them in the upcoming posts.)

Strictly speaking, all these issues are errors, and they require correcting. And, to catch such issues, you need just to make them visible.

A month ago we talked about hidden characters in Word. Since it is useful to see them when working on texts, it makes sense to know how to toggle them in the mainstream CAT tools. 

Trados Studio

When in Editor mode, select Home tab on the ribbon and press this button:

There is no special shortcut for enabling/disabling hidden characters, but you can set it yourself in the Trados Studio settings. 

memoQ

In memoQ, showing hidden characters is somewhat trickier:

Select memoQ (on the ribbon) > Options > Options. Options dialog box appears. On the left pane, select Appearance. Then, select Show non-printing characters on the right:

Xliff Editor

In Xliff Editor, there is a toggle similar to the one in Word and Trados Studio:

TagEditor

The same in TagEditor (from Trados 2007 bundle):

Transit NXT

In Transit NXT, select View tab on the ribbon, then set the checkbox Special characters:

Wordfast Pro

The toggle enabling hidden characters in Wordfast is similar to the one in TagEditor, Word and Xliff Editor:

Memsource

The same button is used in the Memsource Editor:

All commands mentioned below are accessible from the dialog window that appears after right-clicking a file on the Project home tab in memoQ interface.

• How to create .mqxlz file:
  - Right-click the memoQ file > Export > Export Bilingual > memoQ XLIFF
• How to convert memoQ file into Trados-compatible format (as if it was translated in Word with Trados 2007):
  - Right-click the memoQ file > Export > Export Bilingual > Trados-compatible bilingual DOC
• How to create .mqback file in memoQ:
  - Right-click the memoQ file > Deliver/Return
• How to create clean file in memoQ:
  - Right-click the memoQ file > Export > Export (Dialog)

In some Word files you can encounter abracadabra like this:

As you can see, codes are somehow shown instead of hyperlinks. That is because a semi-secret checkbox was, intendedly or unintendedly, selected in your Word. It is semi-secret because few users know even about its existence, to say nothing of where it could be found in the bowels of Word.

Here is where you can find it:

File > Options > Word Options > Advanced:

If you deselect this checkbox, values (i. e., actual text) instead of formulas are shown in all fields:

BTW, a paragraph from our recent article is used in the screenshot.

If you use WordFast Pro 5.6 or another version older than Wordfast Pro 5.12 and try opening TXLF files generated in the new version, you may get the following error message:

Attribute ‘gs4tr:uuid’ is not allowed to appear in element ‘file’

It takes place because earlier WF versions can’t recognize this attribute. To solve this problem, you can download and install a new 5.12 version. But there is another bypass solution.

Open the TXLF file in the text editor Notepad++, use the search function (CTRL+F) to find “gs4tr:uuid,” and delete the attribute together with its number and the redundant space as shown in the screenshot. Click the Save button and close the file tab.

After this, the file opens in WordFast 5.6, and no error messages appear.