Tips for TRADOS Usersby Tuomas Kostiainen
One of the reasons why TRADOS is so popular is that its features are very versatile. Even advanced users, such as myself, are pleasantly surprised to still find new features and untapped capabilities. Below are some of my best tips to get the most from your TRADOS investment:
1. Many (if not most) freelance translators use several different translation memories. While there might be some good reasons for this in some situations, using one large memory with Attribute fields, such as Client and Domain, would be a much more efficient approach. Attribute fields can also be used as filter criteria in translation memory maintenance (with find & replace) and as selection criteria when searching the translation memory (TM) during translation.
To set up Attribute Fields, go File > Setup... > Fields.
Read the tutorial: How to define translation memory fields (attributes) in Trados (client, project, subject field)2. One rarely needs to bother with Segmentation rules. However, there are situations where a little adjusting of them can make your work much more efficient. I have translated numerous ingredient lists for various products (pet food, nutritional supplements etc.) where each ingredient list often includes pretty much the same ingredients but in different order. If you translate these lists using default Segmentation Rules each list is treated as one translation unit, and you end up translating each ingredient again and again without benefiting from your previous translation. However, if you include comma or semicolon (depending on which one is used to separate the ingredients on the list) as a Stop character you can translate these lists ingredient by ingredient, and by the time you start working on the second ingredient list you will get many 100 % matches.
To change the settings, go File > Setup... > Segmentation Rules.
3. MultiTerm has made it very simple to add new terms into a MultiTerm glossary directly from Word. I use this often to add long product names to a glossary -- not so much to build a long-term glossary but to make it easy to copy these long names into my translation by a simple Alt+arrow keyboard command without having to retype the entire name.
4. The Acronyms Substitution setting (File > Setup > Substitutions > Acronyms) becomes handy when you are working, for example, on software or hardware interface instructions where software commands or names of buttons and switches are written in all capital letters and don't need to be translated. When Acronyms is selected on the Substitutions tab, TRADOS treats all words written in caps as placeables and substitutes them automatically.
5. You know that you just translated a similar sentence or phrase but why doesn't it come up as a fuzzy match? Try lowering your Minimum match value % setting from the default 60 down to 50 or 40. These lower level fuzzy matches often include useful phrases and terms. You will also get some useless matches but they don't cost you anything -- you can just ignore them.
To change the setting, go Options > Translation Memory Options > General.
6. Reference (read-only) translation memory for Concordance is a handy way to utilize a second TM. You can set TRADOS so that every concordance search is also done in the reference translation memory in addition to the active translation memory. If you select "Search first in reference translation memory" the search is done first in the reference TM and then in the active TM (if there were no hits in the reference TM), otherwise the search is done first in the active TM.
To select the reference TM and change the setting, go Options > Translation Memory Options > Concordance.
7. A free utility called MSGloss2TWB (from
www.globalready.com) makes it very easy to convert Microsoft glossaries into a TRADOS memory. This can be very useful if you translate software related texts. However, the program doesn't include Attribute fields but you can do that quite easily in TRADOS using the Find and Replace function (File > Maintenance> Find and Replace), or with a set of proper find & replace commands in a good text editor (such as UltraEdit) or even in Word (Notepad is too slow for this).
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