Trados Limitations and Textboxes

This week I've learned that I hate embedded and grouped text boxes in Word. Why do I hate them? Well, Trados apparently does not pick up text that are embedded in text boxes when you attempt to translate the file in a tagged word format. If you use Tag Editor it hides the text between formatting tags, and the text in the boxes are not editable. Solution, SDLX actually picks up the text for text boxes that are grouped, but it ignores embedded boxes. By the way, text in embedded boxes show up as live text, they don't get picked by SDLX, and there is no option to have it pick up or extract the text. Therefore, the best was is to try and copy and paste the text into a word file, ignoring the boxes and hoping you copied and pasted all the text correctly. So, if you must use Trados, be careful of the grouped and embedded text boxes, you'll be missing a few words if you don't.

5 Rules You Need to Know

Here are 5 basic rules when you send files for translation and localization:

1) Send the final version you want translated without any comments or markups.This ensures things that don't need translation don't get translated.

2) Include all the fonts and links with you source file in an organized folder structure. This allows us to find what we need easily, and locate any words if they appear in the graphics. (If you can't get those links and fonts, please send a printer optimized PDF of your source file. Thanks!)

3) Avoid sending content typed in emails. I know it's time consuming to write two lines or two words in text editor or MS Word. This eliminates confusion, and it's easier to manage and track the file.

4) Specify your target language and regional flavor, for example: Spanish (Europe), Spanish (Mexico), etc. This will allows us to conduct an accurate analysis for your target audience.

5) If you need a website translated, provide a list of what's in the website that actually needs translation, for example: just the homepage, only webpages and not flash files, etc.

Thank you for reading and following these rules.