Tips

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.

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.

There is a relatively easy and quick way to insert special characters into the text. To do this, you need to press ALT key and then to enter a special code on the additional numeric keypad (yes, exactly: entering via numeric keys above the basic keypad with letters is impossible). It is so called entering via ALT codes. A special 4-digit code is assigned to each character. Try to remember several ALT codes for the most frequently used characters. But what to do, if there is no separate numeric pad at all, for example, on a 13" laptop? In this case, Fn key helps: it allows to enter digits by letters keys :) Here are the equivalents:

• ALT+Num 0 = ALT+Fn+M
• ALT+Num 1 = ALT+Fn+J
• ALT+Num 2 = ALT+Fn+K
• ALT+Num 3 = ALT+Fn+L
• ALT+Num 4 = ALT+Fn+U
• ALT+Num 5 = ALT+Fn+I
• ALT+Num 6 = ALT+Fn+O
• ALT+Num 7 = ALT+Fn+7
• ALT+Num 8 = ALT+Fn+8
• ALT+Num 9 = ALT+Fn+9

Here is how they look on the keyboard: