CafeTran

 Hi Igor,

I had a Studio project last week, which I was planning to translate in CT, but was forced instead to translate in Studio.

After opened the project package in CT, the label on the tab for the (customer) TM was "en-GB", and every few segments CT asked me if I wanted to save changes to en-GB (I'm afraid I didn't record the exact message). If I clicked yes, it then opened a save TM dialog. I then clicked cancel. It was clear that segments were not being saved in the TM and I abandoned my attempt to translate in CT, having wasted a couple of hours of my time.

Now that I've had time to look into it, I suspect this behaviour is related to the fact that the path in the package file for the TM is "Tm\en-GB\Clientname deDE-enGB.sdltm". I guess that CT is assuming a flatter directory structure.

Could you please rectify this.

Best,

Jeremy

Maybe I simply did not understand or this answer is too easy, but if you do not use a TM (did you?), you will run into problems. 2 possibilities:

- you use your own TM, then put the client TM on read-only and if CT prompts you to save it somewhere on your hard disk (in this case it should not), simply do it (I do not translate too much Studio packages directly with CT) and/or save it in the TM directory of the package.

- you use the package TM. I am not too sure if CT prompts you in this case to save the TM, but anyway I would not recommend to do it this way

As the return package does not contain any TM, it will not matter to your client how you will proceed. 

Hi Thorsten,

that sounds like a perfectly good workaround, but the point is that I don't have time to go looking for that workaround when I'm in the middle of a project with a reasonably tight deadline.
Your reply hints that you consider this trivial, but it's only trivial if you can instantly diagnose the problem and happen to be familiar with the ins and outs of Studio packages. Not being a frequent SDL user, I wasn't aware that the return package contains no TM, for example. It also wasn't immediately obvious what this 'en-GB' tab was, etc., etc.

This doesn't need a workaround, it needs fixing.

Jeremy

Ah, I think I slightly misunderstood your post Thorsten - the TM referred to in my original post was the TM in the package, loaded automatically by CT on opening the package.

 

Indeed, I was as perplex as you with my first package.

It is not a bug, it's a feature.

You as CT user are free to use the package TM as read-only or as working TM (the second case will be a rare one, as you will prefer to rely on your very own resources).

>the path in the package file for the TM is "Tm\en-GB\Clientname deDE-enGB.sdltm"

CafeTran extracts the TUs from this SDLTM and will further use/handle this TM as a TMX file. First time you save this TMX, save it under a unique client name. You can choose to filter out internal tags. You could also run some tasks to clean up the TMX:

Numbers 1, 2 and 4 for instance (at leat, that's what I always do).

After you've saved the content of the embedded TM (the en-GB thing), next time you open the package, when the en-GB dialogue box pops up, just hit ESC and use your saved version of the TM (to which you assigned the client name).

Thanks for the clarification Thorsten and Hans. I now have a much clearer understanding of the issue and the solution.
If CT wants to be used by more than a few enthusiasts, I think it needs to take care of most of this for the user. Since, as you point out, the Studio TM can be used read only, it should just store the TMX automatically in an appropriate location within the project and load it as read only. If the user wants to change this he can, but the default behaviour should ideally be as seamless as using Studio.

 

>Since, as you point out, the Studio TM can be used read only, it should just store the TMX automatically in an appropriate location within the project and load it as read only

I agree. It's always good to hear new user's experiences. Sometimes one's just to familiar with procedures that aren't in fact very intuitive.

One could even argue that the en-GB should be named ProjectTM. But the implications should be discussed.

One might even argue that a pop up should appear that asks the user to perform some suggested (most important) cleaning tasks (like remove TUs with numbers only, just to compact the TMX).

etc. etc.

Indeed, just making it the project TM seems like am excellent suggestion (the only time this would be inappropriate would be if the user wished to retain only their own translated segments as a project TM, but in that case I think the user could sort it out for themselves).
And automatically cleaning it to remove duplicates and numbers seems like a no-brainer too.

amos: ... just making it the project TM seems like am excellent suggestion

I think it's not. You'd want to check your translation against the TM provided by the client, not being "polluted" by your own translation. TMs provided by the client should be Read Only, highest priority.

Quoting my dear self:

Any memories for segments provided by the client. Ideally, they are very important, and should be used for high-priority hits and consistency check. You don’t want to “pollute” them with your own translation, so they should be set to Read-Only. The settings: [Memory Type] Translation Memory, Terms Consistency Check, Read-Only, [Options] High Priority, Automatic, Fuzzy and Hits. Since they are Read-Only, you don’t have to worry about the duplicates. You may have to review those settings, as some client provided TMs are pure faeces

H.

I can see your point Hans, but I think this should be as simple for the novice user, particularly switchers, as possible (and certainly as simple as using Studio) - the advanced user can do all that manually.

"some client provided TMs are pure faeces"
Indeed, but sometimes the client wants you to use the translations from the TM anyway (the job that prompted this thread was one such).

 

Amos: I think this should be as simple for the novice user

I think you're right (but please don't blame me for CT being extremely complicated...). However, if you drop a Trados project (with a TM) on the Dashboard as a beginner (and as an advanced user, actually), you'll see something like this for the TM:

Apart from that, I think (not sure) the ProjectTM has been enabled by default.

So using the Trados TM as the ProjectTM faces two problems:

1. There already is a ProjectTM, so you'll have to rename it
2. You'll have to change several of the settings (like just about all settings)