I’ve heard numerous complaints about CAT tools hindering the speed and accuracy of translations, because it hogs a great part of the translator’s attention, and deflects it towards useless tasks as “keeping an eye on the tags”. One of the most common complaints I’ve encountered is that Tag Editor slows proofreading tasks.
A simple exploration of the “unpopular” menus combined with a bit more knowledge about Trados features can go a long way and can vastly improve your proofreading speed.
A small warning is necessary, as this trick can be “dangerous” if you are not careful with what you delete.
First things first, open Tag Editor and go to Tools – Options
Let’s explore the Options section a bit to see a few “hidden” but useful features.
GENERAL
In the “General” tab you will find some options that influence TagEditor Startup.
As you well know the interaction between TagEditor and Translator’s Workbench is dictated by a strict order of loading (i.e. the order should be TWB and then TE). Tag Editor even prompts you if you want to start Translator’s Workbench. You can choose to start Translator’s Workbench automatically by ticking the checkbox.You can also select which default language to use when starting Tag Editor without Translator’s Workbench.
VIEW
The “View” tab is where you can edit tag colors and aspect. This can be very useful in case you want to highlight them and make them easy to notice.
EDIT
The “Edit” tab is where you can edit the AutoText file location. We will not be getting into the subject of AutoText as this is not the point of our incursion in this section of Tag Editor.The “Edit” tab is also where you can change the name that appears under the comments.
But the most useful feature so far is the “Keyboard” section. If you are familiar with more languages it has an option to automatically change the keyboard language to the language found in the target field (If that language is installed from the Regional and Language options in your Windows Control Panel);
PROTECTION
By far one of the most interesting parts is the “Protection” tab. This is where you can toggle certain restrictions and where you can improve your proofreading speed, and also change some features that will help you in more specialized tasks.
Most of the elements under “Tag protection” are somewhat self explanatory. My suggestion is, if you want to turn tag protection off, be sure you will be careful not to delete external tags by accident. The best choice is to disable the protection of only internal tags.
The “Document protection” tab is where you can improve the rate of your proofreading. This enables you to edit text throughout the document without opening the Translation Memory (TM) and opening each Translation Unit (TU) you want to edit. This is where tag coloring has its benefits as you can see more clearly which part of the segment is the source and which is the target.
If you untick “Protect document” you will be able to simply edit everything within the document (delete, insert text, insert tags) without opening the TM or the TU to do that. Just remember that you do need to update the TM also to complete the job. That can be done by cleaning the reviewed bilingual file (.ttx) with “Update TM” selected.
The Perfect Match is another very useful feature in case you wish not to waste time on old translations on an updated document. We will make an incursion into the Perfect Match units in a future article so stay tuned.
VERIFICATION
This tab is related to the Verify (F8) function in Tag Editor. This dictates the strictness of tag check-up when running the verify features.My suggestion is to keep it strict as the “knowledge” of tags and their use is a bit fuzzy in many cases and it’s better to keep them as they are until you are more experienced.
SPELLING
The final tab is the “Spelling” tab and obviously it is the place where you edit spelling options. Tag Editor is similar in spell checking to MS Word, even has an option to use the spell checking dictionaries from your Office Package.
Feel free to experiment with all these features to discover the settings that suite your work style the most.
Wow, superb blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your website is wonderful, as well as the content!. Thanks For Your article about Tag Editor 101 .
This is interesting but I have a very simple question. Why shell out for the SDL Trados Tag Editor (however it happens to be bundled)? Surely, any really good tag editor could do the same job for free? I simply cannot believe that SDL Trados has the only ‘foolproof’ text editor.
Through the years, SDL has been developing software programs that have become industry standards. It’s not the case of encouraging big software companies, it is just the case of popularity among translators and agencies (earned in various ways). As some linguists tend to be “rusty” when it comes to technical know-how (I apologise if I offended the ones that have technical skills also), they tend to stick to the programs that are popular in order to avoid learning 10 software programs when agencies ask for specific programs to begin with. We’re not calling SDL the best in the domain, but it is one of the popular developers which agencies have become fond of.
Many thanks for an incredible publish, would read your others content. many thanks for your thoughts on the Tag Editor, I felt a little bit struck before i read this article. Thanks again! You earn an excellent moment. Article displays quality info.
Wow, superb blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you made blogging look easy. The overall look of your site is great, let alone the content!. Thanks For Your article about Tag Editor 101 .
Hello! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy reading your posts. Can you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same subjects? Thanks!
Nice post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Very useful information specially the last part 🙂 I care for such info much. I was looking for this certain info for a very long time. Thank you and good luck.
Excellent post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I am impressed! Extremely useful info particularly the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this certain information for a very long time. Thank you and good luck.
Great post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Very helpful info specifically the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was seeking this particular information for a long time. Thank you and best of luck.
Hi, And how do I check consistency in Trados 2009 in the fowinllog scenario:2 files. Both are already translated. Now, during review I am making corrections in the first file. These should be reflected in the second file, because most of the segments are exactly the same as in the first file. So there is no need to review the second file, just change the segments to what is already in the memory. But I can’t seem to find any way to do it.Yes Trados displays a message Target differs from memory (or similar), but only when the cursor is in that segment.In other words how do I find segments that are different than memory translations, and how do I do it fast and automatically, without the need of reviewing every single segment?In Trados 2007 it was so easy, you just needed to run Translate to fuzzy command and wait for the program to stop after encountering the first segment inconsistent with the memory.Am I missing this function in Trados 2009?MickPS. I could perform pretranslation on the second file, but this does not yield any good results in this case (many multiple translations and Trados always matches incorrect one during pretranslation). I would have to review this second file again.
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Wow, superb blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your website is wonderful, as well as the content!. Thanks For Your article about Tag Editor 101 .
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This is interesting but I have a very simple question. Why shell out for the SDL Trados Tag Editor (however it happens to be bundled)? Surely, any really good tag editor could do the same job for free? I simply cannot believe that SDL Trados has the only ‘foolproof’ text editor.
Through the years, SDL has been developing software programs that have become industry standards. It’s not the case of encouraging big software companies, it is just the case of popularity among translators and agencies (earned in various ways). As some linguists tend to be “rusty” when it comes to technical know-how (I apologise if I offended the ones that have technical skills also), they tend to stick to the programs that are popular in order to avoid learning 10 software programs when agencies ask for specific programs to begin with. We’re not calling SDL the best in the domain, but it is one of the popular developers which agencies have become fond of.
Hey, thank you for sharing your opinions in Tag Editor 101. This is actually a very nice blog.
Many thanks for an incredible publish, would read your others content. many thanks for your thoughts on the Tag Editor, I felt a little bit struck before i read this article. Thanks again! You earn an excellent moment. Article displays quality info.
Wow, superb blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you made blogging look easy. The overall look of your site is great, let alone the content!. Thanks For Your article about Tag Editor 101 .
Very good blog post. Much obliged.
Hello! This is my 1st comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I genuinely enjoy reading your posts. Can you recommend any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same subjects? Thanks!
Nice post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Very useful information specially the last part 🙂 I care for such info much. I was looking for this certain info for a very long time. Thank you and good luck.
Excellent post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I am impressed! Extremely useful info particularly the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this certain information for a very long time. Thank you and good luck.
Great post at Tag Editor 101. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed! Very helpful info specifically the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was seeking this particular information for a long time. Thank you and best of luck.
Hi, And how do I check consistency in Trados 2009 in the fowinllog scenario:2 files. Both are already translated. Now, during review I am making corrections in the first file. These should be reflected in the second file, because most of the segments are exactly the same as in the first file. So there is no need to review the second file, just change the segments to what is already in the memory. But I can’t seem to find any way to do it.Yes Trados displays a message Target differs from memory (or similar), but only when the cursor is in that segment.In other words how do I find segments that are different than memory translations, and how do I do it fast and automatically, without the need of reviewing every single segment?In Trados 2007 it was so easy, you just needed to run Translate to fuzzy command and wait for the program to stop after encountering the first segment inconsistent with the memory.Am I missing this function in Trados 2009?MickPS. I could perform pretranslation on the second file, but this does not yield any good results in this case (many multiple translations and Trados always matches incorrect one during pretranslation). I would have to review this second file again.
Thanks for finally talking about > Tag Editor 101 < Liked it!