In earlier chapters, you learned how to open an individual document for translation. What if you want to translate a set of multiple files as part of the same job? This chapter explains how to work with a group of files by creating a project using the New Project feature. Projects also have other advantages discussed in this chapter, such as storing and reusing translation settings, and so they are often used to translate single files as well. We finish by introducing a number of tools for project managers, including project packages, which are a handy way to share material with another person in the translation workflow.
As you learned in Chapter 3, Translating a File, when you translate a single file with the Translate Single Document approach and first save the file, thereby creating the SDLXLIFF, SDL Trados Studio automatically creates a project file (with the extension .sdlproj). However, you can also create your own projects to house one or more files for translation. A project acts as a container for the following:
- All the files that you are translating or using for reference (which we will refer to collectively as project files)
- Any TMs, termbases, and AutoSuggest dictionaries that you use
- Any settings that you configure in SDL Trados Studio
This applies irrespective of whether you are translating a single file or several files (except that a single file project cannot contain reference files).
Using the New Project feature to create a project has a number of advantages, some of which are as follows:
- Projects are a convenient way of translating a group of files as part of the same job. The translation or review part of the process for each file is exactly the same as with the Translate Single Document approach. Projects, however, provide a more intuitive way to benefit from matching content across more than one file.
- Projects also offer more powerful options in terms of running tasks on several files all at once rather than on each separate file. For example, you can run an analysis or generate the translated documents for all the project files together instead of repeating the task for each one individually.
- Projects allow you to store the settings that you use during translation, and review and re-use them later. For example, if you always use certain TMs, termbases, and specific QA Checker settings for a particular client, when you receive new work from that client, you can use a previous project, or a project template, as the basis to create a new project that will pick up all of those settings automatically.
- Projects can contain several target languages, and provide a neat way for project managers to manage the SDLXLIFFs for each target language and distribute them to different translators.
In this section, we will describe how to create a project, focusing on the main settings to look out for in each screen of the New Project wizard. The following example assumes that you are translating several files into one target language, and that the project settings will be configured from scratch, rather than reusing those from a previous project.
Note
In creating the project, SDL Trados Studio automatically makes a copy of your source files in the project folder (in the source languages sub-folder named, for example, en-US). The original source files are left in their original location, and once selected in the New Project wizard described in this section, not used again by the project. This means that you do not have to make a new copy of your source files especially to use for the project. Instead, you can just add them from their existing location during the steps described in this section.
To create a project, perform the following steps:
- In the Projects view, from the Home tab (or from the Welcome screen), click the New Project button (Ctrl + N), shown in the following screenshot:
- In the Project Type screen, leave the option Create a project based on a project template as Default (for the other options in this screen, see the section titled Reusing your project settings later in this chapter on how to re-use settings from previous projects).
- In the Project Details screen, specify the Project Name (this is the name by which the project will appear in the list of projects in the Projects view, so make sure that it identifies your project clearly), and then choose the Location. This must be an empty folder (which we refer to in the rest of this chapter as the project folder), so create a new one at this point if necessary.
Description, Due Date, and Customer are optional settings that will appear in the Projects view to provide additional information about the project. They are most likely to be useful if you work with many projects simultaneously.
The option Allow source editing for supported file types will allow you to make changes to the source segments during translation (in
.doc(MS Word 2000-2003),.docx,.ppt(Microsoft PowerPoint XP-2003), and.pptxfiles only). It can also be activated by going to Project Settings | Project after project creation. - In the Project Languages screen, select the source and target languages. A project has only one source language, but can be given multiple target languages. SDL Trados Studio will create a separate folder for each target language in the project folder, in which the translations will eventually be placed (in SDLXLIFF and, when generated, the original document format).
- In the Project Files screen, there are three options for adding project files (that is, the files for translation as well as any reference files, if applicable), shown in the next screenshot of the Project Files screen.
- To add the project files in the same folder without specifying a folder structure, click Add Files, select the files in their folder, and click OK.
- To add the project files in their existing folder structure (including subfolders), select the folder, and click Add Folder.
- To create a new folder structure within the existing project folder to which to add project files, click New Folder.
To remove files or folders, right-click them and choose Remove. Note that this will only remove files or folders from within SDL Trados Studio; you are not deleting the actual files or folders on your computer.
The following screenshot shows a situation where the project files have been added in an existing folder structure. Click the folder icons on the left to display on the right the files that they contain.
Tip
Project files added in a folder structure are displayed with this folder structure in the Files view, as in the preceding screenshot (and the folder structure is also retained in the target language folders). This can be useful when you want to perform an operation on certain project files only, by allowing you to isolate those files easily. For example, you can right-click the files in a particular folder in the Files view to run batch tasks such as Analyze Files on those files only. This method is also useful if you need to retain a certain folder structure, such as when you are translating a website.
For information about file usage, see the section titled About file usage later in this chapter.
- In the Translation Memory and Automated Translation screen, under All Language Pairs, add existing or create new TMs. If you have more than one target language, do this for each. Penalties and other TM settings can also be configured here. To add an AutoSuggest Dictionary, select the relevant language pair on the left and choose AutoSuggest Dictionaries.
- In the Termbases screen, click Add to add the desired termbases. Using a termbase is optional and you can skip this screen if you do not have or do not want to use a termbase.
- In the SDL PerfectMatch screen (this feature is available only in the Professional version of Studio; you will not see it if you are using the Freelance version), click Next to ignore this screen, or under Previous Document, select any previously translated SDLXLIFF or TTX files to pair with your project files (the PerfectMatch topic is addressed in more detail later in this chapter).
- The Project Preparation screen lists the tasks that SDL Trados Studio will now perform on your project files to finish creating the project. The usual choice here is to leave the Task Sequence as Prepare without project TM (as an alternative, the Prepare task is used to create a project with project TMs, a concept described later in this chapter. Project TMs can be very useful in project management situations). The tasks listed in the Batch tasks list tell you that SDL Trados Studio will create SDLXLIFFs from your project files, make a copy of your project files in the project folder, and run certain batch tasks on them such as Analyze Files and Pre-translate files.
- The Batch Processing Settings screen allows you to modify the Analyze Files and Pre-translate files settings. The corresponding reports will be available in the Reports tab once the project is created.
- In the Project Summary screen, click Finish.
- Wait until the Preparing Project screen shows that all tasks have Completed. The Project Template options are now displayed at the bottom of the screen. To save your project settings for subsequent re-use, choose Create a new project template based on this project and then click Close and save your project template file. Alternatively, to exit the wizard without saving the project settings, leave the default setting and click Close.
Any file in a format that is translatable in SDL Trados Studio is, by default, assigned the Usage of Translatable, as you can see on the right of the preceding screenshot. Translatable files are converted to SDLXLIFF format and included in the Analyze Files and Pre-translate files word counts when the project is created.
To specify that a file is not for translation but to be used for reference, select or right-click the file and choose Change File Usage | Reference. Reference files are excluded from the word counts and do not get converted to SDLXLIFF format. If you double-click them in the Files view, they will open in their native format instead of in the Editor.
The Localizable usage is for designating project files that need translating but cannot be translated in SDL Trados Studio (usually these are image files with embedded text that has to be dealt with in an image editor). No word counts or SDLXLIFFs are produced for such files.
Tip
You might find that MS Word files intended for translation are occasionally and against expectation given the usage Reference instead. If this happens, and you cannot change the usage to Translatable, try saving the files in a different format (from .doc to .docx or .rtf, for example) and reselecting them.
This section describes how to work with a project once you have created it. Any projects that you create are added to the projects list in the Projects view, with, as default, the most recently added project at the top, as shown in the following screenshot:
One of the most useful features of projects is that they stay in the Projects view when you shut down and reopen SDL Trados Studio. In other words, you do not have to go through the process of locating the project files on your hard drive each time you want to resume work on them. Instead, you can simply access them from the Projects view. This applies equally to documents translated with the Translate Single Document method.
- To open a project file for translation or review, double-click the project in the Projects view. This takes you straight to the Files view, which displays the individual files in the project, as shown in the following screenshot. The Progress indicator on the right updates as you translate each file.
- To display the files in a folder structure, click the folder icon on the left.
- To open a file in Translation mode, double-click the file. Alternatively, select the file in the list and choose the mode in which you want to open it (Review mode, for example) from the Home tab in the Open group, or right-click to access the same options.
To open a project not displayed in the Projects view, choose File | Open Project (Ctrl + O). In the project folder, select the blue project file (.sdlproj), shown here:
The project will now appear in the Projects view. To open an entire project on a different machine from the one on which it was created, copy the project folder (along with any TMs and other resources used by the project) over first. If you do this, ensure that the folder structures on the source and target machines are identical. For example, if the TM is stored in D:TMs and the project in Z:Projects, the target machine must have access to both folders on the same drives and with the same relative folder structure; otherwise, SDL Trados Studio may be unable to locate the TMs and other resources.
Understanding the way translation settings and other user preferences are applied is essential for working effectively with SDL Trados Studio. You will find the options for configuring your translation settings in two places: File | Options, and Project Settings (which appears in the Home tab in each view). Both are shown in the following screenshot:
Three of the settings groups appear in both, namely File Types, Verification, and Language Pairs. For these duplicated settings groups, which are outlined in the preceding screenshot, the key points to remember are as follows:
- The three duplicated settings groups in File | Options define how SDL Trados Studio will behave the next time you create a new project or open a new document for translation. Changes to these settings will not affect files currently open in the Editor or projects that you have already created. We will refer to them as the global profile settings.
- The settings under Project Settings, on the other hand, are used to affect the behavior only of specific projects to which you apply them, that is to say, by changing the settings for projects that you have already created in the New Project wizard or documents currently opened via Translate Single Document. We will refer to them as the active project settings. These settings are also available when you open a file via Translate Single Document; to access them, in the Open Document dialog box, click the Advanced button. In the New Project wizard, they can be found at the end of the wizard, in the Project Summary screen, via the Project Settings button at the bottom right.
- For these duplicated options, the active project settings (set via Project Settings) always overrule the corresponding global profile settings (set via File | Options).
- If you have made changes to the default settings of a particular settings group under File | Options, you can restore them to default by selecting the relevant settings group on the left of the Options window and clicking the Reset to Defaults button at the bottom left.
The remaining groups under File | Options affect both the active project and future behavior. These groups generally contain settings less likely to be specific to any one translation or project, such as font sizes, spellchecker options, or default keyboard shortcuts. You can therefore use them to configure your own standard settings for all work that you do in SDL Trados Studio from that point forward. The remaining group under Project Settings is Project, which houses basic settings about the active project (such as its name and location).
The following table illustrates the different uses of the global profile and active project settings for the options under File Types, Verification, and Language Pairs:
|
Use of File | Options |
Use of Project Settings | |
|---|---|---|
|
Verification |
To set up or modify the Verification options (including QA Checker) with new default settings to run on all files that you open via Translate Single Document or include in a project created in the New Project wizard from this point forward. |
To set up or modify the Verification options to run on a file currently opened in the Editor (via Translate Single Document) or included in a project that you have created in the New Project wizard. These settings will override the settings in File | Options. |
|
Language Pairs |
To set up the TMs and other resources used in all future projects, such as by adding or removing TMs, termbases, or AutoSuggest Dictionaries, changing the TM settings (for example, penalties or minimum match value), or configuring default preferences for Batch Tasks such as Analyze Files. |
To reconfigure the TMs and other resources and settings described in the Use of File | Options column in a way particular to the active project only (such as if you decide that you want to use an additional TM on a document that you have started translating in the Editor). These settings will override the settings in File | Options. |
|
File Types |
File Types are the means by which SDL Trados Studio extracts text in different types of document for translation. Some examples are: for MS Word, you can specify whether you want comments to be made available for translation in the Editor; for PowerPoint, you can specify whether or not presenter notes are to be included for translation; for Excel, you can specify whether or not worksheet names are to be extracted for translation. Changes to File Types are, by their nature, likely to be project- or project template-specific. If you have made changes to these settings under File | Options that you do not want to be permanent, you may wish to restore the original default settings before your next project. |
File Types settings generally take effect at the point when the source document is converted to bilingual format (such as on being opened in the Editor via Translate Single Document or processed in the New Project wizard). They have no effect after this stage, that is to say on SDLXLIFFs that have already been created (whether as part of a multi-file project or by saving a single document in the Editor). To configure File Types for a particular project, change the settings during the New Project wizard (in the Project Files screen) or when using Open Single Document (in the Open Document dialog box, by clicking the Advanced button). |
Tuomas Kostiainen has written a useful blog article on this topic, which will allow you to explore it in more depth. See http://tinyurl.com/trados-settings.
In practice, an efficient way to control changes to your translation settings is to create project templates, dealt with in the following section, Reusing your project settings.
The reusable content in a project includes the selected languages, TMs, termbases, and AutoSuggest Dictionaries, as well as—importantly—any batch-processing settings that you have configured (such as QA Checker or Analyze Files). If you use a similar setup from one project to the next, you can therefore save time by reusing your settings.
To re-use the settings stored in a project template file created at the end of the project-creation process described earlier in this chapter, do as follows.
In the first screen of the New Project wizard, under Create a project based on a project template, select a project template from the drop-down list, or browse to select it from a folder. Alternatively, select Create a project based on a previous project and select a project from the drop-down list or browse to find the .sdlproj file for the desired project.
When you create a new project from a project template, the settings from the project template are configured automatically during project creation. You can tweak them (such as by adding new TMs or Analyze Files settings) as necessary each time you re-use the template. When you go through the New Project wizard, you can therefore leave most of the settings unchanged, except:
- In the Project Details screen, set the name and location for the new project
- In the Project Files screen, add the new file(s) for translation
By default, projects listed in the Projects view have the status In Progress. If you work with lots of projects and want to distinguish those that you have completed, you can change a project's status to Completed by right-clicking and choosing Mark as Complete. To change the status back to In Progress, right-click and choose Revert to In Progress.
To remove a project from the list, right-click and choose Remove from List (Ctrl + Alt + F4). This does not delete the project from your computer; it can be reopened by choosing File | Open | Open Project.
To add project files to an existing project, double-click the project in the Projects view to jump to the Files view. At the top of the Navigation pane, click in the languages dropdown and select the source language of the project.
To modify the folder structure or change the usage of the project files, in the Navigation pane, select the project or folder name and right-click or, in the Home tab, choose the desired action from the File Actions group, shown in the following screenshot:
To add the new project files, choose Add files and browse to select the files. Alternatively, you can drag-and-drop files into the Files view. Once the new project files appear in the files list, select them and, from the Home tab or right-click menu, choose Batch Tasks. The Batch Tasks menu now displays the same tasks that you saw earlier in the Project Preparation screen when you first created the project. To ensure that the new project files are processed in the same way as the existing ones, choose the same task as when you created the project (usually Prepare without project TM) and follow the instructions in the wizard.
This creates the SDLXLIFFs ready for translation and adds a new Analyze Files report to the Reports tab covering only the newly processed project files.
Finally, to make the new project files available to open in the Editor, reselect the target language in the Navigation pane.
This section describes how to generate original file format versions of all your project files in one go (usually after you have translated them in the Editor). We also show you how to find them in the project folder or export them to a folder of your choice so that you can, for example, send them to your client.
You can use the following approaches to generate the translated versions of your project files:
- Generate Target Translations: Close any SDLXLIFFs that are still open in the Editor. Switch to the Projects view, and select the project. From the Home tab or right-click menu, choose Batch Tasks | Generate Target Translations, and then complete the wizard.
This places copies of the (translated) original format documents in a subfolder of the project folder named for the target language (such as
fr-FRorde-DE). To access the project folder from the Projects view, select the project and, from the Home tab or right-click menu, choose Open Project Folder (Ctrl + Alt + O). Alternatively, in the Files view, right-click on the name of a file in the project and choose Explore Containing Folder. You can also navigate to the respective folder using Windows Explorer. - Export Files: SDL Trados Studio provides an easy way for you to copy the translated documents to a convenient folder of your choice without having to look for them in the project folder. In the Projects view, select the project name and choose Batch Tasks | Export Files. In the Settings screen, under Batch Processing | Export Files, specify the export location (as shown in the following screenshot), and then click Finish:
To export your files as SDLXLIFFs instead (for sending to a reviewer, for example), change File version to export to Latest bilingual version.
Tip
Once you have applied the Generate Target Translations batch task, most of the options in the Batch Tasks menu disappear, because SDL Trados Studio assumes that you are no longer translating the files. To restore the options to the Batch Tasks menu, in the Files view, select the project files and, from the Home tab or right-click menu, choose Revert to SDLXLIFF (this can also be done on several selected files at once).
Batch tasks can be run at any time on an entire project, selection of one or more project files, or individual files opened via Translate Single Document (provided the individual file has been saved as SDLXLIFF first). To run a batch task on a project, in the Projects view, select the project and, from the Home tab or right-click menu, choose Batch Tasks. To run a batch task on one or more individual files, in the Files view, select the file(s) and choose Batch Tasks.
The following are some of the most commonly used of these batch tasks:
- Update Main Translation Memories: Any TMs that are enabled and set to update are updated with the translations in the SDLXLIFFs based on the segment statuses (such as Translated and Translation Approved) that you specify. Project managers often use this technique at the end of a project to ensure that the translation memories contain the final, approved versions of the translations. For example, if you add a new TM to a project and want to update it with the content of the project files, this is the way to do it.
- Finalize: A handy way to generate all of your translated documents and ensure that your translation memories are up-to-date in a single operation. Finalize consists of Update Main Translation Memories and Generate Target Translations.
- Pre-translate Files: This option populates the target segments of the project files with content from the selected translation memories. By default, project files are pre-translated when you create the project, but you may want to apply the content of other TMs that you add to the project later, for example. The Settings screen of the Pre-translate Files wizard allows you to specify which TMs to pre-translate from, choose a match level to apply, and specify via the Translation overwrite mode option which segments get overwritten or retained. There are useful options for confirming and/or locking 100% and context matches, and for copying source to target in segments for which no TM match is found.
- Analyze Files: You may wish to run this task repeatedly during large projects so that you can gauge your progress at different stages via the Analyze Files report. It is useful in a project context to set the option Report internal fuzzy match leverage, to see how many fuzzy matches are produced by the project files themselves rather than by the TM. Translators may, however, want to exercise caution when using this option for analysis, since it forms the basis for a quotation or invoice: revealing to the customer the similarities within the file itself may encourage the customer to negotiate for a lower fee.
The SDL Batch Find and Replace tool is an SDL OpenExchange app that gets installed along with SDL Trados Studio. It enables you to find and replace text in selected or all SDLXLIFFs in a project.
To open the tool, go to the Welcome view and select it from the list at the top left, as shown in the following screenshot:
To add a selection of SDLXLIFFs in which to find and replace text, in the Files tab, choose Add and select the files from the project folder. You will find the SDLXLIFFs in the target folder (which has a name such as fr-FR or en-US).
Tip
If you are unsure where to find the project folder, before you add the files, in the Files view, right-click the name of a file in the project and choose Explore Containing Folder. Rather than trying to remember the file path, you can copy its path from the address bar in Windows Explorer and paste it back when you add the files in SDL Batch Find and Replace.
To add all the SDLXLIFFs in a project, in the Files tab, choose Load files from Project, and select the project (.sdlproj) file. When prompted, select the target language(s) for the find and replace operation. You can then use the Find and Replace tabs to specify various parameters for finding and replacing text across the selected SDLXLIFFs.
Following a replace operation, you will see a Replace Results window highlighting the changes in their segment context, as shown in the following screenshot:
To see how many instances were replaced in each file, click on the Statistics tab, shown in the following screenshot:
Bear in mind that the TMs will not be updated with any changed segments. You can update the TMs separately using, for example, the Update Main Translation Memories batch task, described earlier.
If you are working with a number of smaller, or very similar, project files, it can often be beneficial to merge them during or after project creation so that you can translate and review them in a single SDLXLIFF. This has several advantages: you save the time of opening and closing lots of small files, and you can compare document contexts (in the Display Filter, for example). You can also use auto-propagation and find and replace text across different files. There are two ways to merge files, described in the following sections.
To merge files during project creation, in the Project Files screen of the new project wizard, add the files and select those that you want to merge, and then click the Merge Files button. In the Merge Files window, in the Merged file name field, type in a name for the merged SDLXLIFF and click OK, and complete the New Project wizard as described earlier in this chapter.
When you open the merged SDLXLIFF in the Editor, the Navigation pane displays the names of the separate files, which you can use to jump between them. Once open, the merged files retain their original segment numbers. To jump between segments with the same number, find them with Go To (Ctrl + G), and then use Previous and Next (Ctrl + J) to move between different segments with the same number.
The segments in the Editor are separated by the filenames, as shown in the following screenshot:
When you run Generate Target Translations on a merged SDLXLIFF, the translated documents are generated as the original, separate files.
Most usefully, it is possible to select files in an existing project from the list in the Files view to merge on the fly. This offers all the advantages of merging files during project creation, described in the previous section, but creates a virtually merged SDLXLIFF, which disappears as soon as you close it. This feature is called QuickMerge.
Translator Emma Goldsmith sums up the usefulness of QuickMerge nicely in her blog article on this feature at http://tinyurl.com/quickmerge:
The other day I wanted to change something in a set of files I'd translated, but I couldn't remember which file it was in. I opened them all with QuickMerge and found it immediately with Ctrl + F.
To merge files with QuickMerge, select them in the list in the Files view, and press Enter. This opens the merged files in Translation mode. To open them in Review or Sign-off mode, select the files and then, from the Open group or right-click menu, select Open For Review or Open For Sign-off.
Adjacent files selected with the Shift key are merged in the order in the list. To change the order, you can first re-order them by clicking on the relevant header, for example alphabetically or by date or size. Alternatively, simply select them one by one in the desired order with Ctrl + left mouse clicks.
If you generate the target files from a QuickMerge file via Save Target As, you are prompted to save the original files individually. Note that you cannot use QuickMerge to open files already merged during project creation.