Idea Delivered

This has now been released:  Trados 25.06.1 Release  

Machine Translation step: Choose "MT for pretranslation" or "MT for lookup"

Currently, if you create a new project and add an MT provider to your Translation Engine, the MT will be automatically pre-filled into the segments. This is useful for some cases, however, in other cases it's better to leave the segments empty and have the MT show up only as an option in the "Lookups" tab like this:

Screenshot of a translation software interface showing a list of segments on the left and a 'Lookups' tab on the right with 'Machine Translations' and 'Fragment Matches' options. The segments are pre-filled with machine translations.

This is especially useful for marketing-heavy texts where you don't want the translator to post-edit, but to only use the MT when it actually sounds good.

Can we have this option as part of the Settings in a Project Template?

Vera Malysheva

  • I think we have this implemented in a roundabout way - the Machine Translation step is disabled in the workflow but we have MT added to the Translation Engine configuration so the MT suggestion only appears in the Lookups panel rather than pre-populating the segments

  • in reply to Terence Tsang

    Thank you for the update Terence! I agree that we still need this feature on PM-level. It's good that the translator has the choice as well, but as you've said, we also need to be able to select it before the project makes its way to the translators.

  • Hi Vera and other users who may be following this: I was informed that a feature was developed to control this behaviour in the online editor. You can find it View > Options (Settings).

    Screenshot of Trados Enterprise online editor Options menu with Automation section highlighted showing 'Apply best match after lookup' checked.

    This was a great first step, but I still suggested some changes to this feature. As the feature is currently enabled by default, this would mean that we as the owners of the MT engine would still need to request every single user of the Online Editor to disable this automatic application of MT. While disabling the setting might be a one-time requirement, the problem remains that we cannot guarantee that the linguist does not re-enable it on their own and our team would have no way to restrict that.

    I suggested that they make this feature toggle to be part of the project settings. That way, project creators or managers can decide to enable or disable such a feature right from the very start, rather than letting it propagate to users of all target languages. This level of control would be much more helpful.

    I can update this thread once I see any new updates.

  • Our team recently filed a ticket to Support about this topic, to check if it was possible (I don't think it is). I agree that being able to control this as two separate MT interactions would be helpful to us as well.