Blog Archive

You can convert all straight quotes in the text into chevrons with one replacement. 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 “mono text,” i.e., the text […]

Don’t let programs change your text automatically 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 they consider extremely obvious by and therefore correct automatically without asking users for the permission to do so. Driven by the desire to help, […]

The hidden text allows us to rectify hidden issues. Seasoned translators know that while working with a text, they should display hidden text: it often conceals problems that 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 […]

You can select rectangular fragments in Word. Word offers a lot of commands for selecting text fragments. They are very well-chosen and easy to memorize: Symbols: Words: Lines: Paragraphs: Pages: 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 […]

Word easily converts a table into text. The main “problem” with this operation is not to perform the converting itself, but to find when the necessary button is 🙂 1. Select the table you want to convert into text, or just place the text cursor into any of its cells. On the ribbon, the Layout menu […]

Xliff Editor can be configured to underline mistakes like Word. Recent posts in this blog described how to enable check spelling with Microsoft Word spelling engine in the following programs: Now we shall talk about Xliff Editor. This CAT is a part of the Translation Workspace system, and it works with usual “offline” files by connecting to online resources (translation memory, termbases, etc.). […]

Passolo can check spelling using Word spelling engine. In earlier posts, we configured spelling checks in Word, memoQ, Trados Studio, and Wordfast. Today our point of interest is Passolo. Passolo is a CAT tool developed by SDL for the translation of user interfaces (UI) and video games. It is available in several editions: In all of them, the method is the same: In Passolo, […]

Trados Studio can check spelling using Word spelling engine. After Word, memoQ, and Wordfast, we get to Trados Studio. Here is how to enable and configure spelling checks in SDL Trados Studio. In Trados Studio, please select File > Options. Options dialog window appears: (The screenshot is made in Trados Studio 2021, but the process in the other versions is similar.) Select Editor on the left pane > click Spelling in the list […]

memoQ can check spelling using the Word spelling engine. A week time ago, we discussed how to enable and configure spell-checks in Word. This time we will make similar adjustments in memoQ. memoQ allows you to check spelling with open-source Hunspell dictionaries or with Microsoft Word engine (that is why we started the series of posts about spelling from Word). To configure […]

Word is the most important program for spell-checking. According to modern quality standards, spelling mistakes are a relic of the past: they are not acceptable at all. If some word is underlined with red, it is an obvious reason to check it. This may seem strange, but in many programs, both “regular” ones and CAT tools, by default […]