Tips

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.

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.

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.

The main “problem” with this operation is not to perform the converting itself, but to find when the necessary button actually 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, Layout menu appears. (It is missing when the text cursor is places outside of a table.)

2. Select Layout > Convert to Text.

3. A dialog box appears where you can choose how cells are divided in the resulting text: with paragraph signs, tabs, semicolons or some others (you can choose yourself).

From the recent posts in this blog, we know how to enable spelling check with Microsoft Word spelling engine in the following programs:

• Word itself (sometimes you have to enable spelling check manually)
• Trados Studio
• memoQ
• Wordfast
• Passolo
• Browsers (Chrome or Firefox)

Now we turn to Xliff Editor. This CAT is a part of Translation Workspace system, and it works with usual “offline” files by connecting to online  resources (translation memory, termbases etc.). The standard file extension of Xliff Editor file is .xlz.

By default, spelling check “on the go” is not enabled in Xliff Editor. To enable and adjust it, please do the following:

In Xliff Editor, select Tools > Spelling Check Configuration...

Spell Check Configuration dialog window opens. There, select the check box Use MS Word Spell Checker check box. Then, choose the language in the Language list. If you want to underline incorrectly written words immediately after they are typed, set the Check Spelling As You Type check box.

After that, restart Xliff Editor. All erroneous words are now underlined with red lines, like in Word.