Transferring terms from the dictionary

Welcome to a new tooltip about Transit NXT. This time we will learn how to transfer terms automatically from the dictionary, rather than typing them manually. Having one or more dictionaries has two main advantages: you will not spend time searching for terminology in the target language (you should be happy), and you will be using the terms that you are expected to use (the client should be happy). However, a dictionary can be used in different ways. Let’s see the simplest procedure.

For TermStar dictionaries to be useful for the translator, they must have pairs of terms in the source and the target languages. When a new segment contains a term that is in the dictionary, by default it will be displayed in the Terminology window and it will be highlighted in yellow in the segment.

To insert the target language equivalence of the term in your target language text, position the cursor just before the highlighted term in the target segment (or anywhere between the boundaries of the term)…

and press the key combination Alt+T. The target term will be replace the source term in the target segment.

The dictionary normally includes the dictionary form of terms, so after you insert the target term in your translation it might need to be inflected, conjugated, declinated, etc. according to the particular context in which it must be used and your particular language. You can also can change the initial letter of the term or expression (from lower case to upper case or vice versa) pressing the shift key too (i.e. Alt+Shift+T).

Transfering terms from the dictionary with a shortcut will make your life easier and will increase your quality of your work. Shortcuts help you save time because pressing a key combination is always faster than typing text, however short the term is, and you will avoid typos simply because you do not have to type the term character by character. If you forget the shortcut, you could also double-click the letter to the left of the term in the Terminology window (each target term has one), with practically the same result.

And that’s all beginners need to know/do to translate terms which are included in the dictionary. In future tooltips we will see more advanced shortcuts that will let you be more precise when inserting terms.

The moral of the story is that learning the important shortcuts can make you save a lot of time. Also, the more populated your dictionaries are, the less searching and typing work you will have to do. I hope this helps you make a more efficient use of Transit NXT.

Thanks for reading, and please do not hesitate to send your comments or questions or to ask for specific tooltips.

Quick Access Toolbar

Welcome to a new tooltip about Transit NXT. This time we’ll be introduced to the Quick Access Toolbar. As its very name indicates, this is simply a bar, in Transit NXT’s interface, used to access something quickly. Access what, precisely? Anything you want.

Do not miss any final punctuation or trailing spaces when confirming a segment

Welcome to this new tooltip about how to ensure you do not miss any final punctuation or trailing spaces.

Segments frequently end in a full stop or some other punctuation mark that has been used as a segmentation point, and there might be a space after the punctuation too. They must be always preserved in the translation but sometimes translators forget to include them in the target segment. There are a couple of settings that will help you as a translator to ensure that the correct punctuation and spacing are always preserved in your translation. So make sure you have these settings on!

Using reference material from an inverse language combination

Ever did a translation in one language combination that you wanted to use as reference material of a new translation in the opposite language combination? That’s very easy. In a nutshell, you must open the language pair from a project having the opposite language combination and change the status for all the segments in the source file. If you want to see what needs to be done in more detail, keep on reading. 

How to handle markup during translation

Welcome to this new tooltip about markup (estimated reading time: 5 min). Here I will explain how you can apply markup in your translation as you move on through the text, and which one is the method that I would recommend among the possible ones. If you prefer so, you can go straight to this screencast, embedded below in this post (which lasts 5 min.), which explains how to assign markup in a nutshell. 

How to run a concordance search

Hello! Welcome to this new tooltip about Transit NXT. Today we’re going to look into a useful feature that can help you as a translator to increase the quality of your work and reduce the time and effort you spend on it: the concordance search. The novelty today is that I’ll include a video instead of screenshots to show the functionality. You can watch the video or keep reading, the content is the same. Wish me luck! :) 

Adding terms to the dictionary

Some preliminary considerations

Terminology is one of the fundamental elements of specialized discourse, and therefore handling terminology correctly is one of the pillars of a good technical or specialized translation. The source terminology must be correctly identified and the target equivalents thereof must be found and used appropriately. Transit NXT’s design takes that fact into account and, through its interaction with TermStar NXT, offers a very convenient way of handling terminology, both from the dictionary into the text and the other way round. This tooltip deals with the latter, that is, how to populate the dictionary with terminology from the text.