Tips

Machine translation systems often amaze us with the quality of their product, both brilliant and horrible. Mr. Translator by Tencent, for instance, made a fool of itself.

Quote:

As of today, the biggest issue about machine translation lies in reproducing the syntax of the source language in the sentence in the target language. But people do it in another way. We decode the phrase meaning in the source language first and then encode the meaning using the target language.

Generally speaking, the underlying issue of machine translation systems in their current state is failing to work with the meaning. When they give a wonderful text, it is no sign of their excellence in translation. It is the sign of their excellence in imitation. Hence, there is a question of whether it is just to recognize an imitation system as artificial intelligence.

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.

Let’s assume you have a Word file containing a lot of email addresses, like this one:

(All names, addresses, and phone numbers here are random.)

You have to translate this text in Trados Studio. You create a project, and the text there looks this way:

However, as you can see, the text includes a very big number of email addresses that don’t need to be translated. If you “translate” them and confirm each segment one by one, it will take much time. But there is a way to copy them to target and confirm them all in no time.

Let’s take advantage of the distinctive feature of email addresses, that is the at sign, @. We have to find and filter out all the segments containing this sign. To do this, go to the Review tab on the ribbon and enter this sign in the Search field. Since we’re looking for it in the source language only, it’s important to select In Source in the search pane:

Press the ENTER key. The work pane will feature only the segments containing the @ sign, that is, in our case, email addresses:

Now click the cell with the number of the first segment (2), scroll the list to the end, and click the cell with the number of the last segment holding the SHIFT key. All segments will get highlighted:

Now go to the Home tab and press the Copy Source to Target button. 

What’s left is confirming all the filtered segments. To do this, highlight them all again, right-click the number of any cell, and change the status to Translated:

Then, go to the Review tab again and reset the filter with the Reset Filters button:

That’s how we’ve got all the email addresses copied to target cells and all the segments containing the addresses confirmed.

This method can be used for filtering and confirming any segments if they have a distinct feature that can be used for filtering.

We already know how to quickly convert straight quotes into guillemets (chevrons) in Trados Studio and memoQ. Sometimes you get to do this not in the “cat” (that is not in the CAT tool, a computer-aided translation tool) but right in the so-called “monotext,” i.e., the text in the target language in Word.

The easiest way is to use regular expressions that are indispensable in such cases.

In Word, press CTRL+H. The Find and Replace dialog window appears:

Press the More >> button there. Additional parameters will appear in the dialog window:

In this window, select the Use wildcards check box; it turns on the mode of regular expressions. Next, enter in the Find field: request "([!^13]@)", and in the Replace field: code «1»:

Like in Trados Studio and memoQ, this replacement should not be performed blindly. The text may contain unusual cases or simply mistakes, and blind autocorrect will “miss.”

In other words, pressing the Replace All button is reasonable only if you are 100% sure that all straight quotes in the text are actually used as quotes (and not as inch marks, for instance), that all of them are in pairs, etc. Generally, it’s better to go through all the cases one by one pressing the Replace button and checking whether the replacement is correct. Usually, there are only a few quotes in the text.

When you work with texts, it’s desirable to have two monitors. According to studies, the second monitor allows for productivity gains averaging 25-30%.

It’s nice translating or editing on the computer with two displays: throwing a CAT-tool on one monitor and dictionaries with the reference on the other and having a blast. But what should you do if there is no second monitor and the only one you have is too small? Quite a common situation for a translator, particularly a freelancer.

The classic size for a laptop screen is 15 inches. If the screen is smaller, it’s extremely inconvenient to work with; if the screen is larger, the laptop turns out to be too heavy and “ravenous”: its battery dies after a few hours of work.

Let’s consider the working process in Trados Studio and find out what can be sacrificed for the sake of the enlargement of the work pane and how to hide unnecessary elements of the user interface that take up too much space.

The “unprepared” Trados Studio on the 15-inch display looks something like this:

As you can see, the work pane here takes up only about one-third of the screen. It is enough for seven segments only. It’s too small for full-fledged activity; too much space is occupied by other elements.

Let’s free some space for the work pane. First, hide the ribbon by pressing CTRL+F1:

The ribbon is minimized, and there is more space: the work pane holds 10 segments now. When needed, you can show the ribbon with the help of the same key combination—CTRL+F1.

Now it’s time to minimize the project navigation pane on the left. To do this, click the minimize arrow at the top right corner of the pane:

The navigation pane is now narrowed but still functional. Its text has been turned into icons. Thus, the work pane occupies the bigger part of the screen, and the number of visible segments has increased to 12. Two simple commands allowed us to make it almost two times larger.

There is also a more radical way of enlarging the work pane (no, we’re not going to sacrifice the font size). Press F11:

Trados Studio goes into a special mode when only the work pane is actually displayed. The rest, including the translation memory, termbase, concordance windows, the ribbon, and even the Windows taskbar, are hidden.

Since this mode displays only the text and hides all additional elements, it is handy for editing, final self-proofreading before submitting the file when nothing should distract from the text.

To exit the mode, press the same F11 key.

Not so long ago, Protemos, the developer team of which also includes creators of ChangeTracker, has released a new project management system Protemos.

This online service is designed specially for running a translation business. Protemos is a record and process management system designed for freelance translators and translation agencies. It is simple and free for freelancers.

Protemos allows creating an organized database with clients and vendors, monitoring job execution and financial aspects of the business, keeping records, and analyzing results of the activity.

Sign up and get started

To sign up, go to the official website www.protemos.com and press the registration button:

You can import your client list from an Excel file. After this, you can find the client you need by the first letters of their name, code, email address, or status.

In several months, you may find useful the function of report creation that allows assessing results of your work.

The Protemos version for freelancers allows:

• to keep a client database with necessary information;
• to register every potential and real project, link it to a client, enter the price and deadline for a job;
• to store project-related files in the cloud;
• to automatically generate price offers (quotes) and invoices, to send them to the client directly from the system;
• to register all the received payments and control payment deadlines;
• to automatically generate statistics on clients and orders: how your profit has changed during a certain period, which clients bring you the most profit, what is the dynamics of billing and payment, etc.;
• to export any table to Excel.

The Protemos system optimizes the process of solving administrative issues and saves time. It is a much more flexible and reliable way to keep records than Excel and Google Sheets. The simple intuitive interface and flexible price policy allow it to compare favorably with the competitive products.

The system is constantly being improved, and its developers will be grateful for comments, suggestions, and ideas that will help make Protemos as useful and user-friendly as possible.

More details can be found on the website www.protemos.com and on Protemos social media profiles, such as Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/protemos.

In summary, Protemos lets you manage your freelance activities in a simple but very helpful way. This approach is definitely much more flexible and reliable than using Excel spreadsheets alone. It may also be preferable to other competing products in terms of the interface and price (remember, it’s free for freelancers).

This system allows a freelancer to streamline project management activities, freeing up more time for actual translation work.

Moreover, Protemos developers are gathering feedback to make Protemos even more of what users want. The Protemos team would love to hear your ideas. Just sign up at www.protemos.com, try the system, and send us your feedback.

A web browser is one of the most frequently used programs. Many people don’t know the difference between a browser and the Internet. Today, the most popular web browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Explorer (a Windows platform). Together they hold 98% of the market.

The websites and web pages you view with your browser are created by different people for different purposes; sometimes they might have too large text, sometimes the text might appear too small.

The quickest way to customize the font size of a web page in Windows is scrolling the mouse wheel with the CTRL key pressed: 

• CTRL + wheel scrolling up—increase
• CTRL + wheel scrolling down—decrease

Unfortunately, these commands won’t apply if you use a laptop because it is equipped with a touchpad instead of a mouse. In this case, the commands below can be used:

• CTRL + PLUS—increase
• CTRL + MINUS—decrease

The plus and minus can be pressed on both main keyboard and numeric keypad.

All these commands are equally applicable in all the browsers. Web browsers usually remember the scale you used for a certain website and show it accordingly the next time you visit this website automatically.

Save your vision!

In the previous post, we learned to convert straight quotes into guillemets in Trados Studio at one blow. In this post, we’ll learn to perform the equivalent operation in memoQ. This is how it’s done.

Call the replace dialog box. Press CTRL+H and the Quick find and replace box will appear:

(The screenshots are taken in memoQ 8.7, they are similar in other versions.)

We need to access additional parameters; therefore, select Change these to unfold the dialog box (its name will change to Advanced Find And Replace):

Uncheck Source text (we need to perform the replacement in the translated text only) and click the button to toggle between plain-text and regular-expression search—the one with angle brackets to the right from the Find what field. The dialog box will transform again:

After that, enter "(.+?)" in the Find what field and «$1» in the Replace with field.

Precautions associated with the similar operation in Trados Studio are also valid here; this method fails in the following cases:

• When the text contains a mistake, and either opening or closing quote is missing.
• When the fragment is big, and the opening and closing quotes of the pair are found in different segments.
• When at least one quote is used as a symbol for inch.

However, during this replacement, unlike Trados Studio, the tags between the straight quotation marks remain; i.e., memoQ cares about them more than Trados Studio. Even though we don’t recommend selecting Replace all: it’s better to look through each case thoroughly in your interest.

From time to time, there is a problem: in the long text, you have to change all straight quotes ("") to chevrons, aka guillemets («»). It’s difficult to do with the help of Find and Replace feature: opening and closing straight quotation marks are the same symbol, whereas opening and closing chevrons are different symbols.

It’s difficult to determine whether a straight quote must be turned into an opening or closing chevron. Supposedly, this might be indicated with the help of spaces: the “space + straight quote” combination is to be replaced with the “space + opening chevron” option, and the “straight quote + space” structure must be converted into “closing chevron + space.” However, if you try to perform such a replacement, very soon you’ll find that this rule has so many exceptions that it is easier to change straight quotation marks to chevrons manually.

Nevertheless, there is a quick semi-automatic replacement method. It is based on the use of paired quotation marks: if the text contains one opening quote, there must also be the closing quote of this pair.

For fishing out paired straight quotation marks, we are going to use regular expressions. In Trados Studio, press the CTRL+H combination and customize the displayed Find and Replace dialog box as shown:

Enter "(.+?)" in the Find what field, put «$1» in the Replace with field, and don’t forget to select the Regular expressions check box in the lower part of the window.

Press Find Next, and Trados Studio will find the closest fragment enclosed in straight quotes. Press Replace to turn the quotes into chevrons (with the text inside remaining); after that, the next fragment will appear.

Of course, there are some exceptions. In certain cases, this request misses the mark:

• When the text inside the quotes contains tags (after the replacement, the text remains, but the tags are gone).
• When the text contains a mistake, and either opening or closing quote is missing.
• When the fragment is big, and the opening and closing quotes of the pair are found in different segments.
• When at least one quote is used as a symbol for inch.

Therefore, one can’t simply place their faith in the Replace All key. Go through all cases pressing Replace and ensuring correct replacement. This is faster than changing quotes manually anyway.

As we already know, sometimes Trados Studio misleads users by hiding tags and provoking mistakes branded as a tag mismatch. Trados Studio is not to blame here: the task of the program is to provide translators with opportunities, and translators must decide for themselves how to use these opportunities.

Trados Studio allows for fast formatting of tag display in the text with the help of the CTRL+ALT+D keyboard shortcut. Continuous pressing changes tag display modes in the order as follows: No Tag Text > Partial Tag Text > Full Tag Text > Tag Id.

Let’s have a closer look at these modes.

* * *

No Tag Text (tag text is not displayed). This mode is helpful to learn about the presence of tags ignoring information of what these tags are. The visual tag representation in this mode is a small triangle:

Press CTRL+ALT+D to switch to Partial Tag Text (tag text is displayed partially). This mode is helpful to learn about the type of each tag without crowding the whole text with them. Tags will look like this:

Press CTRL+ALT+D once more to switch to the Full Tag Text mode (tag text is fully displayed). This mode is helpful to see the whole text of all tags. It’s not comfortable to work in this mode because tags take too much space. Thus generally, this mode is used for the time being: switched it on—had a look—switched it off. In this mode, tags are fully unfolded (sometimes they can take several lines):

Press CTRL+ALT+D once more to switch to the Tag Id mode (tags are numbered). It is helpful in case of numerous tags in the text or if they change places while translation, and one has to make sure each tag is in its place. Visually tags turn into rectangles with numbers. Please note that tag pairs become directed and feature the same number:

Two things:

1. Tag display switch works only when tag display is on, i.e., when the Toggle formatting display switch is turned on:

If this switch is off, tags will be hidden permanently regardless of the display mode.

2. It is very convenient to switch tag display modes on the fly, but there is one inconvenience: you can accidentally miss the target and press CTRL+ALT+F instead of CTRL+ALT+D. This key combination confirms the current segment and moves the cursor to the nearest segment that isn’t included in the translation memory.

If you have installed Trados Studio or had it installed, it’s worth changing several default settings immediately before you start working.

• Turn off automatic update when running Trados Studio

Basically, it’s worth working with the latest version of Trados Studio. By every update, developers get rid of errors and improve security. And if you want the application on your PC to receive latest updates constantly, you’d better leave the automatic update on.

However, if you don’t fancy paying for updates, if you’re okay with the current version of the application, or if you don’t want to bother yourself with installing updates, turn off the automatic update.

How to do it: go to File > Options > on the left panel Automatic Updates > on the right panel uncheck Automatically check for updates when the application starts:

And press ОК.

• Turn on spelling check

There is no point in explaining why it must be done: in the modern world, spelling mistakes in translation are atavisms. And we discussed how to do it here.

• Set display scale

Why it is important and how to do it we discussed here.

• Turn off automatic error correction

Why it must be done we discussed here, and how it can be done—here.

• Configure correct tag display

It was discussed in this post.

• Turn on hidden text (desirably)

What hidden text looks like is described here, and how to display it—here.

* * *

Now you’re fully equipped for a fight!

Why it is worth turning off automatic error correction and how to do it in Word, we’ve already discussed in our previous post. Now we will show you how to set the same in Trados Studio.

Select File > Options > in the Options dialog box on the left panel choose Editor > choose AutoCorrect > on the right panel specify the language of the TARGET text (here it is Russian) > uncheck the items in the Change how Studio corrects text as you type menu:

If you work with several languages, repeat this procedure for other languages too. And press OK.

After this, Trados Studio won’t be messing up with your translation.

Modern CAT tools are doing their best to make translator’s work easier. For instance, they try to correct errors made by users. Some error types are considered extremely obvious by them and therefore corrected automatically without asking users for the permission to do so.

Driven by the desire to help, however, “cats” tend to do more harm than good adding errors to the text automatically instead of correcting those made by users.

It is sad when the translator makes an error. But it is even more sad if the translator makes no error, and the program inserts it artificially.

Let’s look how the autocorrect function works in Word.

Choose in Word: File > Options > on the left panel of the dialog box Proofing > on the right panel AutoCorrect Options... (the screenshot is taken from Word of Microsoft Office 2013). The following dialog box appears:

Let’s see what these check boxes do:

• Correct TWo INitial CApitals. Seems logical. But if it is on, your GHz (gigahertz) will turn into Ghz etc.
• Capitalize first letter of sentences (or segments). Another good thing, but if the phrase is no separate sentence (for instance, being a list component) or  one sentence is split into several segments in the “cat”, the letters which are to be lowercase will appear as uppercase.
• Capitalize first letter of table cells. This is needed far too seldom; table elements are often written with the help of lowercase letters on purpose.
• Capitalize names of days. Indeed, in English names of days are always capitalized. Nevertheless, when you work with Ukrainian or Russian, this check box is useless.
• Correct accidental usage of cAPS LOCK key. There are lots of proper names which start with a lowercase letter on purpose.
• Correct keyboard layout. A dangerous function since it’s hard to notice when you’re typing a text in the wrong language. Moreover, it may work incorrectly in systems with three or more languages set.

Being familiar with this nasty side of the autocorrect feature, seasoned translators turn it off immediately after the installation of the program. We recommend that you do the same. Don’t entrust programs with the power of changing your texts automatically.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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. 

Word offers a lot of commands for selecting text fragments. They are very well-chosen and easy to memorize:

Symbols:

• SHIFT + →  — one symbol to the right
• SHIFT + ←  — one symbol to the left

Words:

• CTRL + SHIFT + →  — one word to the right
• CTRL + SHIFT + ←  — one word to the left

Lines:

• SHIFT + END  — from the cursor to the end of the line
• SHIFT + HOME  — from the cursor to the beginning of the line
• SHIFT +  ↑ — one line upward
• SHIFT + ↓  — one line downward

Paragraphs:

• CTRL + SHIFT +  ↑ — one paragraph upward
• CTRL + SHIFT + ↓  — one paragraph downward

Pages:

• CTRL + SHIFT + END  — from the cursor to the end of the page
• CTRL + SHIFT + HOME  — from the cursor to the beginning of the page

As we see, the distinctive feature all these commands share is the usage of the SHIFT key.

Apart from these selection methods, Word offers another astonishing opportunity known to a few: one can select random rectangular text fragments.

Where can this feature come in handy?

Let’s say you have a text fragment like this:

And you need to delete the bullets—those circles in the list lines. How to do it quickly?

You can delete them one by one. You can use AutoCorrect—replace “a circle with a space” with “nothing.” And you can also take advantage of the circles being placed aside the text, select them all at once and delete them all at once.

In other words, there are only two actions to do:

1. Press and hold the ALT key (not SHIFT!), select an area in the file capturing all the circles and leaving the text untouched:

2. Press the DELETE key:

And that’s it—all the circles are gone.

The only thing is that it’s impossible to do this rectangular selection without a mouse.

While opening certain packages, Trados Studio gives you a mysterious unsupported culture message, something like this:

In this case, there is only one thing clear about this message—it says that Trados Studio package can’t work with the Norwegian language (NO-NO is the code for Norwegian). But what does this language have to do with the package if it is English-Ukrainian translation?

This message appears because of the conflict between language identifiers of SDLXLIFF files and in the termbase connected to the package.

The only way to get rid of this error we know is to remove the ill-fated termbase. To do this, choose Project Settings > on the left panel choose Language Pairs > choose All Language Pairs > Termbases > unmark the term base check box > press ОК:

Sometimes, Trados Studio gives a mysterious message while importing a package:

Given that, it doesn’t import the package, the project doesn’t appear in the list, and it is impossible to work. At the same time, the System Volume Information folder is in the drive indeed, but it is hidden, and who knows how it is connected with Trados Studio projects.

It is not entirely clear what causes this error; however, it’s quite easy to fix:

• Close Trados Studio.
• Delete the UserSettings.xml file in the Trados Studio folder. It is usually located in the c:\Users\[USER NAME]\AppData\Roaming\SDL\SDL Trados Studio\[Trados Studio version] folder.
• Start Trados Studio.
• Re-import the package.

This method works in Trados Studio 2015 and 2017, but it has to work in other versions too.

Some of you use Protemos as a translation project management system. It is simple and convenient, and if you create many projects a day, you can speed up your work and get rid of tedious and routine actions.

To create a project in Protemos, you need to select Projects tab and press New project button:

This action is simple as it is, yet it consists of several even more simple actions:

• running/selecting a browser
• opening the Protemos web page
• selecting Projects section there
• pressing New project button

If you have many projects a day, you have to repeat these actions many times. This is where automation can help.

Recently we talked about how start programs quickly. Creating projects in Protemos can be done in a similar way. To do this, perform the following:

• Right-click it on the desktop of your PC to create an icon on it and select Create > Shortcut.
• In the field Type the location of the item, enter the following URL: https://cloud.protemos.com/project/create. Then, press Next.
• In Type a name for this shortcut, enter the name for the icon, for example, Protemos project. Then, press OK.
• After that, right-click the icon, go to the Properties and enter a shortcut that will be used for opening, like we did it in the post about starting programs quickly. 

When done, you can open the Create Project page in Protemos with one shortcut you entered.

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.)

99.9% of users start programs with a mouse.

The quickest way to start a program with a mouse is to double-click its icon on the desktop. This action seems to be as simple as possible, but it consists of several even more simple actions:

• To move your palm on the mouse
• To move the cursor to the necessary icon on the desktop
• To double-click it
• Optionally, to return your palm to the keyboard

Starting programs from START Windows menu is even longer, because, additionally, you have to chose the program you need in the list. If you work in one or two programs, no need to worry. But if you constantly have to start and close different programs, you lose time. There is a way to speed up this process: shortcuts!

Each “serious” program has its shortcut on the desktop. (If not, you can add it manually by copying it from the START menu.)

Right-click the icon and select the last item in the menu that appears, Properties. There, go to the Shortcut tab. There is a field called Shortcut key. Enter the shortcut in it, that will be assigned to the program. After clicking OK, this shortcut will run the correspondent program.

NOTE: Try choosing a shortcut that is easy to remember, for example, CTRL+ALT+W for Word, CTRL+ALT+M for memoQ etc.

And almost all programs can be closed with CTRL+F4 shortcut.