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.

For example, in the post Adding terms to the dictionary we saw how to launch the Rapid Entry by clicking on the Review menu, then clicking on the button in question. That means: two clicks, but they could be more. You could run it using an accelerator, but still it’s three key strokes (Alt,T,R). If you want to launch it with just one click, you can add the relevant button to the Quick Access Toolbar, and it will always available on the upper left side of the interface. Obviously, this is valid for any function or dialog, but it can be is especially useful for functions you use very frequently.

So, in order to add a shortcut button for the Rapid entry to the Quick Access Toolbar, you must go to Transit button | User preferences | Quick Access Toolbar (alternatively, in this particular case you can also click on the toolbar’s downside arrow, and then select Customize Quick Access Toolbar).

In the customization dialog that will be displayed, select Terminology tab and add Rapid Entry to the list on the right (you need to have some language pair open to see the Terminology option, read the footnote to see why):

Once you have done that, you will be able to launch the Rapid entry dialog by clicking on it.

Or, alternatively, pressing Alt,<num>, where <num> is the number associated with its button in the Quick Access Toolbar (in this example: Alt,3).

You could also create a macro so that the dialog is launched with a keyboard combination or shortcut (two or more keys pressed at the same time), but let that be the topic of a future tooltip.

One footnote: We used the dialog Rapid entry to show the Quick Access Toolbar functionality. As this is a Transit function, you need to “be in Transit” so as to have that option available, meaning that you need to have some language pair open. Otherwise, you’ll be in TermStar, and only TermStar options and functions will be displayed in the user preferences.

And that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and please do not hesitate to send your comments or questions or to ask for specific tooltips.

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!

First of all, you should always see where there is some whitespace, be it a space, or a line break, or a tabulator. You can easily make whitespace visible by assigning some visual mark to it, which will be visible in Transit NXT’s interface only but not in the final document after exporting. Otherwise, you will be unable to see when there is a space or not, as in the screenshot below:

You cannot see any trailing spaces

So, to make spaces visible you must activate the option Special characters in the menu View | Text/Markups:

Activate the special characters

If you want or need it, you may choose the visual marks of your preference in the User preferences, tab Special characters. In the screenshot below you can see mine:

Choose the visual marks of your preference for special characters

Now the whitespace is easily spottable (notice the middle dots after “money.” and after “productivity.”), and it will be more difficult to forget to include them:

The middle dots stand for spaces

Secondly, there is a couple of checks that you may enable to run in the background every time you confirm a segment. To enable them, you should select the options Check spaces and Check end punctuation in Processing | Translate | Confirm:

Check final punctuation and spacing when confirming

Now, with these settings you will get a warning should you happen to forget any trailing spaces or final punctuation:

Transit NXT warns you if you miss a training space

The same thing would go for missing final punctuation (full stops, but also colons or semicolons).

And that’s all for now. Thank you for your attention and see you in the next tooltip.

In Transit NXT, the reference material is the set of files from where both pretranslation and fuzzy matches come, when creating the project and when translating, respectively. As you know, segments in Transit NXT language pairs have a number of attributes, including status (Translated, Checked 1, etc.), not unlike the state attribute in XLIFF files.

In order to leverage a reference segment to pretranslate or assist translating a new segment, by default its status must be at least Translated. You can check or change this setting in the project settings, tab Pretranslation:

Default minimum status for pretranslation: Translated

or in the User preferences, section Dual fuzzy:

Default minimum status for fuzzy matches: Translated

So, now imagine we did a translation ENG-ESP, which we will call project 1. We have that reference material (the language pairs) from that project and we are now faced with a new translation in the inverse combination, ESP-ENG, which we will call project 2.

When a document is converted into a Transit NXT language pair, the segments in the source file do not, and do not need, any status information. In other words, all source segments have status Not translated. If we want to use project 1 as reference material, we need to change the status for all segments and set it to Translated (at least), otherwise the reference material leverage would be zero for pretranslation or the translation memory.

Therefore, we need to open the language pairs from project 1 in Transit NXT and change the status of all segments in the source file. The easiest way is to open them from project 2, using the Browse button in the Open language pairs dialog.

Open language pairs | Browse

When we browse the folder containing the language pairs that we want to open, we will only see the files corresponding to the source language of the project from which we are browsing. In our case, you just need to select the ESP files.

Select the source file to open a language pair

When you open the language pair, you will see that the target segments have no status information (either in the status column, or the color of the segment, or in the status bar below). Instead, you can see that the source file does instead have status information in all segments.

Segments in the target language have no status information

You must change the status for the whole target file (don’t get confused: what was originally the source is now the target). You do that in the menu Review | Proofreading section | File status, choosing the Translated option.

Changing the file status

That’s it! And that’s all for now. Thank you for your attention and see you in the next tooltip.

What is markup?

Transit NXT represents the formatting information in the source text by means of markup, or in other words, markup stands for the formatting data contained in the original file. For example, if a string is assigned the markup <b>, as Airplane mode in in the screencast, this means that this string is displayed with bold formatting in the document. Markup may also be text formatted in italics, a footnote, a hyperlink, an image, etc.

Markup tags might be double (as inline codes adding format to text) or single (as images, or objects which do not affect text). They might be on their own, or grouped, or nested with other tags, or one tag in one language might need to be split in two in the other language, and some markup may also contain translatable text (e.g. text which should be displayed in HTML files in the place of an image file or the title of a link). See the third slide in the presentation below.

In section 6.5.2 “Working with markup IDs” on page 232 of Transit NXT’s User Guide, you can find more information about what types of markup exist and how to use them.

Formatting information, and therefore markup, needs to be replicated or maintained in the target language, so that equivalence is preserved and so that, when exporting the translated document, the corresponding formatting information is recreated in the translation.

Recommended view settings

Transit NXT can represent markup in numerical form using so-called markup IDs, which have two main functions. Firstly, they contribute to having a clear overview, as some tags might be very long and cumbersome and clutter the view, so markup IDs let you work more efficiently. Secondly, they link the source-language markup to the corresponding strings in the target segment, i.e. each markup ID in a source segment has an equivalent in the target segment. By the way, IDs are enumerated within paragraphs, that is, every time a new paragraph begins, the ID counter is restarted.

You can activate markup IDs in the View menu, Text and markups section, option Markup ID. You will note that next to each markup tag there is now a superscript number. Thanks to the IDs you can now know where there is some markup that needs to be handled, without needing to see the markup tags at all. You can hide them in the same section, Markups: Hide. Another option that you may want to select is to see, not the tags, but the formatting itself, because it usually provides semantic information that might be relevant for the translation: option Formatting in the same section.

Assigning markup in the target language

Now, for the translation to be correctly formatted, the user has to assign these markup IDs to the corresponding text strings in the target segment. There are several ways of doing this. Some translators might find it easy to replace the source text with their translation and then enter the text affected by some markup within the markup borders.

However, that’s not the most efficient way to do it. What if I prefer to clear off the target segment before typing my translation? What if the order of markups in the target text is different from the source one? I would recommend to apply the markup using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+<ID> (where <ID> is a number key in the keyboard, not the keypad) plus the rightward arrow (or any other movement key). For example, if a term has markup ID 2, once I have entered my translation in the target segment, I can select the term that takes that markup and press Ctrl+2, followed by the arrow.

Let’s see an alternative way. Instead of entering the text first and then applying the markup, we can proceed the other way round. For a string that has markup ID 3, if you press Ctrl+3 where the string should begin and start typing there, the text will have the correct markup. After the translation of the term is inserted, to carry on typing without the markup you need to jump the markup ending border, with the rightwards arrow. Now you can continue with the translation.

What if the order of markup in the target segment must be different from the source? Let’s consider the translation of the “[1»Airplane mode«1] [2»check box«2]” into Spanish. The translation of “check box” comes before the translation of “Airplane mode”. I insert “check box”’s italics markup with Ctrl+2, then type the text “casilla de verificación”, and then press Ctrl+1 to apply bold and finally type “modo Avión”. Piece of cake, right?

In the following video you can see all these steps in action:

One extra comment to illustrate what I said earlier about tags that do not affect text. They are called point markup and they are single markups that start and end on the same point (they do not embrace text with a beginning tag and an ending tag). For example, if an image is inserted in the text, you will see a markup like ‹1›. You would just need to insert it with Ctrl+1 and that’s all. The method to insert this is not different from double markup.

And that’s all for now. Thank you for your attention and see you in the next tooltip.

Sometimes, when you have to translate a new segment, the translation memory yields no result, so you have to translate it from scratch. The terms in the dictionary will assist you, but sometimes not all terms and expressions to be translated are included in the dictionary. This is the case, for example, of Übertotpunktverriegelung in this segment.

This is a typical case in which I need to search for a concordance. To do that, I just need to select, either in the source or in the target segment, the term or expression for which I want to find concordances, and right-click on it. A contextual menu will be displayed, where I must chose the option Dual Concordance.

How to launch the concordance search

The Dual Concordance window shows me the segments containing that term in the source language, so all I have to do is check in the target segment how the expression at stake has been translated. In this case, I see that this term must be translated as bloqueo, and I can finish translating the segment.

It is called Dual Concordance because I can look up pairs of expressions. For example, if I want to see translation units where a certain source expression has been used in the source segment and it has been translated as a certain target expression in the target segment, I must select them in the source and in the target and launch the Dual Concordance from the contextual menu that appears on any of them when right-clicked. The Dual Concordance window will show me translation units containing occurrences of that pair of expressions.

Now that you found the equivalence in the target language of Übertotpunktverriegelung, a very wise thing to do would be to add that pair of terms to the dictionary, so next time you can just transfer the target term from the dictionary and won’t need to run the concordance search again.

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. 

This task can be carried out by the translator herself, as she translates every segment, right after finding the target terminology. To put it plainly:

1. The translator is faced with a new segment, which contains some terms, not handled previously;
2. She looks up these terms’ target language equivalents in the resources of her preference;
3. She adds both the source and the target terms to the dictionary;
4. She translates or completes the translation of that segment, inserting the terminology with one simple shortcut.

Notice that steps 3 and 4 could be performed in inverse order, that is, first she translates the segment, typing the terminology manually, and then she adds both the source and the target terms to the dictionary.

In this tooltip we will see each step at a time. But let me just first of all point out the main advantages of this apparently extra effort:

1. If the term is added to the dictionary, it will not be necessary to look it up again the next time it appears.
2. It is much easier and faster to transfer the term into the translation with the shortcut Alt+T (or one of its variants) than to type it manually, and this can only be done if the term is in the dictionary
3. Term consistency: the risk of introducing a different target term is significantly reduced and, in any case, it can always be corrected afterwards using the term check utility.

All of this contributes to better quality and higher productivity, not to mention the satisfaction of the client, so it goes without saying that it is in the interest of the translator herself to enter terminology as she translates.

Right, let’s get our hands dirty, at last!

First of all, the translator must make sure that her user preferences are correct for the task at hand. So click on the Transit button | User preferences | Terminology search, and select options Highlight in language pair: if target language exists (which tells you when you can use a term from the dictionary) and Display in terminology window: always (which shows you the term pair or a source term that needs to have its equivalent entered). Obviously, these settings could be different if the task was a different one. Also, it is better to choose Morphology-based as the search type setting, so that the term is recognized even if the form in the segment is inflected, derived or declinated.

When the translator translates a segment containing terminology that is translated in the dictionary, she can just transfer the target terms with Alt+T, as we said. On the contrary, the translator might face a segment containing terms whose target language equivalents are not in the dictionary (as for example, segment 14 below), although the source term might already be in the dictionary.

In this case, two alternative courses of action are possible. One option would be to translate the term and then add it to the dictionary. Another option would be to add it first to the dictionary and after that use it for the translation. The only difference would be where the target term is typed (either in the segment or in the rapid entry dialog), but the outcome would be the same in any case. Let’s choose the former option.

If you select the terms first (at least the source term, and the target term only if you have typed ir already), then you will not need to enter them in the rapid entry dialog. So, first select the terms, then go to the Terminology menu, then click on the Rapid entry button, and in the dialog that appears check and, if needed, edit the term fields (or enter the target term if you had not translated it yet).

As you can see, the Rapid entry dialog contains the terms you had selected in the segments, but if you didn’t (for example, because you haven’t translated the term yet), you can always fill the fields in at this stage. You will also see the name of the dictionary and, between parenthesis, the name of the database containing it. This is probably the dictionary chosen by your project manager for you, so you should not change it and should not add terminology to other dictionaries other than that one.

Depending on what your project manager asks from you, you might still need to edit the terms a bit, for example, changing capitalization, or removing inflection or declination, etc. in order to have the terms in their dictionary form. In our example, you would need to retype them if you want to change the case (preferably, terms are to be entered in lower case).

To finish, just press the Save button and the pair of terms will be added to the dictionary. The Rapid entry dialog will remain open, in case you want to add more entries to the dictionary, but you’ll have to type the terms manually. If you want to dismiss that dialog, just press the [X] on the corner or press Escape.