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Crossing segment boundaries with Trados files
Thread poster: Kevin Lossner
Kevin Lossner
Kevin Lossner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 08:42
German to English
+ ...
Apr 17, 2009

Maybe I missed something in old discussions, but for about 9 years now I've been doing Trados projects in DVX under the assumption that one must never, never delete the codes for the Trados segment boundaries (which are seen if one combines segments). On rare occasions when I have done so by accident in an MS Word or RTF file, the results have been disastrous.

Well, that bit of wisdom does not apply to segment boundaries between sentences and paragraphs (caution with the latter, may... See more
Maybe I missed something in old discussions, but for about 9 years now I've been doing Trados projects in DVX under the assumption that one must never, never delete the codes for the Trados segment boundaries (which are seen if one combines segments). On rare occasions when I have done so by accident in an MS Word or RTF file, the results have been disastrous.

Well, that bit of wisdom does not apply to segment boundaries between sentences and paragraphs (caution with the latter, may depend on the source formatting) in TTX files.

I had a bit of an issue yesterday with a client who wasn't too pleased about "junk translation units" in a Trados TM after I had liberally combined multiple segments to rewrite the text into smooth-flowing English in the target. This issue has never been raised before, because the clients generally don't care or they want to stick with the default segmentation (for automated translation processes), but this client wanted good segments for his concordance. I respect that idea a lot. However, at first I was a bit snippy about the matter and explained that these junk segments were a necessary evil in my process.

Then I slept on it, and when I woke after a few hours, something told me that I was full of sh*t. I understand why DVX screws up the pre-segmented Word and RTF files if these segment boundary codes are deleted. But those reasons do not apply to the TTX filter. So I ran a test on Word, Excel and HTML files converted to TTX and pre-segmented before importing them to DVX for translation. I then proceeded to combine segments and boldly delete the codes for segment boundaries in the source column. And everything worked perfectly in all formats tested, even combining paragraphs.

A discussion of the experiment with some screenshots is here.

I really wish I had noticed this earlier. It is a very useful technique, though of course one must always be very, very careful when deleting codes from the source column and make sure that they do not represent elements such as Excel cell boundaries! ▲ Collapse
 
Wolfgang Jörissen
Wolfgang Jörissen  Identity Verified
Belize
Dutch to German
+ ...
Thanks a lot for this Apr 17, 2009

Can't wait to try it out myself. My only hope is that it will work the same way with the future XLIFF-based format that Trados is about to launch.
 


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Crossing segment boundaries with Trados files






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