Tips

Seasoned translators know that while working with a text they should display hidden text: it often conceals problems which are not visible in an “ordinary” text.

We’ve already spoken of how to display hidden text in Word and why it is worth doing that. Today we’ll learn how to do it in Trados Studio.

An “ordinary” text in Trados Studio looks something like this:

The Home tab contains the same key you see in Word, but the name here is different—Show Whitespace Characters:

After pressing the key, you’ll start to see hidden characters in the text—all “ordinary” spaces get replaced with dots, and non-breaking spaces—with circles:

In Word, you can show or hide hidden characters with the help of the CTRL+SHIFT+8 key combination. In Trados Studio, it doesn’t work by default, but it can be activated manually. To do this, select File > Options. The Options dialog box appears. On the left panel of the box click Keyboard Shortcuts, then choose Editor:

Find Show Whitespace Characters in the list of commands on the right panel of the box, place the cursor inside a cell of the Shortcut column, press CTRL+SHIFT+8 (or you can mention any key combination that you would like to use—but be sure that it’s not in use for another command in Trados Studio) and select ОК.

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.