Forum: SDL Trados support
Topic: Where do I buy another license for Trados 2007 Freelance?
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: Trados 2009+ can't display context, though
[quote]Natalie wrote:
[quote]Oleg Prots wrote:
I still have work coming in fom clients in TTXs and ITDs.[/quote]
Studio treats old file formats perfectly well: you work with them in Studio and then just save as target and return to the client as TTX or ITD. [/quote]
Well, "perfectly well" is an overestimate.
I just tried opening a TTX file in Trados 2015, and immediately I see two issues:
1. Trados 2015 did not ask for an INI file, even though there is an INI file associated with this particular TTX file, which means that Trados 2015 won't display the file correctly.
2. Trados 2015 shows only the translatable text, but no context. The TTX file viewed in TagEditor shows useful context for all translatable text, but Trados 2015 shows only the translatable text.
Compare the view in TagEditor with the view in Trados 2015:
In this particular case, it is clear that the text "Enrolment Confirmation" should not be taken as context for the text "Sent when an assessment..." even though the one segment appears immediately before the other in Trados 2015, but what if the text did appear to make sense as context? The translator using Trados 2015 might/would have translated the second segment based on the assumed context provided by the first segment.
When opening the file in TagEditor, it is clear that the first segment in Trados 2015 is NOT context for the second segment. And, in fact, TagEditor shows the actual correct context for the segment.
This is a well-known problem with extraction-only type CAT tools such as Trados 2009+, MemoQ, WFP/WFA, etc -- context contained in untranslatable text within the file is not displayed to the translator.
I made one small change to the TTX file in Trados 2015 and then generated an export TTX file to see what was changed. What I found was telling:
1. At several segments (which I did not edit), Trados 2015 changed the target language code. This is the biggest and most problematic issue.
2. Trados 2015 escaped certain characters throughout the file (e.g. apostrophes and quotes). This is still valid XML, but we don't know what kind of a parser the client uses -- it may be one that treats cleartext character entities as literal text.
3. Trados 2015 added extra information to TUs that were altered. For example, [b]<Tu MatchPercent="100">[/b] was changed to [b]<Tu Origin="batch100" MatchPercent="100">[/b], even though batch100 is not a defined TU origin in the original file. This change did not seem to bother TagEditor, but it is worth noting.
All these issues will also affect clients who use document comparison tools for QA, as it will flag segments as edits even though the translator did not edit them.
[Edited at 2018-03-22 16:27 GMT]