SDL Trados Studio uses a system for tracking changes that will be familiar to you if you have used the Track Changes feature in MS Word and that works in more or less the same way. Track Changes is a useful feature for translators reviewing their own work or exchanging information about review changes in the SDLXLIFF with a reviewer.
The Track Changes group in the Review tab, shown in the following screenshot, has options for toggling Track Changes on and off, previewing the effect of tracked changes in the SDLXLIFF, accepting and rejecting changes individually or globally, and moving between tracked changes.
To activate and deactivate Track Changes, click the Track Changes button, shown on the left in the following screenshot, or press Ctrl + Alt + F9. Track Changes is active by default when you open a document in Review or Sign-off mode, but not in Translation mode. This setting can be changed from the Review tab, in the Track Changes group, via the options launcher (small arrow icon) at the bottom right, or via File | Options.
You can use the sample file to try out the techniques described in this section.
The following screenshot of Segment 8 in the sample file shows a segment containing (in left to right order) a deletion, replacement (addition), and change of formatting, all of which are tracked using colored text:
To display a tool tip showing the name of the reviser and the date and time of the revision, move your mouse pointer over the tracked change.
To accept and reject tracked changes, click in the tracked change and choose the appropriate option from the Track Changes group. Click the drop-down arrow on the Accept and Reject buttons to access options for accepting or rejecting changes individually or globally, as shown in the following screenshot:
Tracked changes can also be accepted or rejected from the right-click menu.
In the case of .docx files, tracked changes are preserved when you generate the translated document (such as via File | Save Target As). You can then use MS Word to accept or reject the changes. Try this with the sample file. For all other file formats (including .doc), the translated document is generated with the tracked changes accepted.
The same applies to .docx and other file formats respectively when using the preview feature under File | Print & View | View In.
To preview the effect of accepting all of the tracked changes in the Editor view, in the Track Changes menu, click the Final Mode button, shown in the following screenshot:
Click the button again to redisplay the tracked changes.
You can open .docx files containing tracked changes and display the tracked changes in the source column of the Editor. If a TM contains a 100% match for the segment as it was prior to the tracked changes, the TC icon appears in the Status column and the mouseover displays the information TM match with source tracked changes rejected. In the sample file, Segments 9 and 10 would have been 100% matches for Segments 4 and 6 were it not for the tracked changes in the source segments. The following screenshot shows how the TC match remains blue (as in Segment 9) until the target segment is edited (as in Segment 10):
The Translation Results window will also display any matches for the segment with the tracked changes accepted.
Note
Opening a document with tracked changes preserved in the source makes most sense if your TM contains the translation of the source file before the changes were applied. Typically, this arises when you translate an updated version of a file you have already translated using a TM, and the new source document has been updated with Track Changes. Perhaps for this reason, SDL Trados Studio, by default, opens source .docx files containing tracked changes with the changes accepted. To display tracked changes in the source segments in the SDLXLIFF, before you open the .docx file via Translate Single Document or create a project that includes it, choose File | Options | File Types | Microsoft Word 2007-2013 | Common. Change the Track changes extraction mode from Apply changes before opening to Display pending changes. Click OK to exit and then open the file. Note that this will affect your global profile settings for all future work (unless you reset the defaults later).