Under Community Review

EDITOR — Display two (or more) project windows at the same time

Most of the time, I work on projects with multiple languages.

I therefore very often need to compare the files in the Editor and the way specific segments have been translated in different languages.

It is however, until today, impossible to display two (or more) Editor windows at the same time.

You must switch between the tabs using the mouse because there is not even a keyboard shortcut for that.

I know that there is a “workaround” since you can still open two instances of Trados Studio at the same time.

This “workaround” is however not satisfactory because it takes so much space on the screen.

I just can’t understand how it still can be — in 2023 — that an application would not allow the display of multiple windows at the same time.

In that respect, Trados still seems to be stuck in the Windows world of the 1990’s — or even the 1980’s!

PLEASE IMPLEMENT THIS FEATURE AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!

It should be standard as it is in every other applications I know.

Philippe Lorre
  • in reply to Jerzy Czopik

    I’m not biased at all and I’ll give you a concrete example.

    I called the technical support today concerning another issue with Trados Studio. It concerned an option in some of my translation memories which caused a specific problem.

    The fact is that, once again — and I’ve been doing this since I’ve begun to use Trados in 2006 —, I mentioned in passing how totally user-unfriendly the application is on the one hand and how utterly ugly and unfriendly the application looks on the other.

    This is by the way also what I constantly hear from other colleagues who use Trados too. And again today from one of my translators.

    And oddly enough, the person who took my call at the technical support told me that most users express the same complaints, that these complaints are forwarded to the developers, but the developers simply ignore these facts and don’t seem to give a shit about how the customers feel.

    This person also told me that the coding structure of the application hasn’t really changed since its beginnings.

    So there never has been a real revamp of the application and this is the reason why it still looks like an application of the 1990’s. All these facts demonstrate that I can’t have been that wrong in my perception of the situation.

    What we users and customers suppose is that SDL is solely concerned with money and profits, and doesn’t really give a shit about its customers.

    SDL seems to have been faring well over the year — in spite of the growing competition.

    However, the question is: how long will that last?

    At some point or another, products from the competition will have become as good as Trados, or even better. And they will then leave Trados behind.

    This has been the fate of so many applications so far. A good example is QuarkXPress which has been overrun by InDesign right from the beginning. QuarkXPress may still exist but I know of nobody who would be using it anymore. And I know that for a fact because I work as a designer too.

  • in reply to Philippe Lorre

    From what I read here you will never be satisfied with Studio or even other Windows apps. The problem I see here is, that you simply hate Windows and thus you're simply biased. For me all MacOS is a complete mess :)

  • in reply to Jerzy Czopik

    I tried it and it work. It’s at least a bit better than Ctrl+W which I had assigned before.

    Thanks.

  • in reply to Daniel Brockmann

    I have tried everything before, that is assigning a new shortcut.

    The point is that I can’t use the Tab in the shortcut although this is the way it should always be working in any operating system.

    Ctrl+Tab definitely doesn’t work, not even when deleting the shortcut and try to reassign it afterwards.

    I’ve tried a whole bunch of shortcuts. These were however all highlighted in red.

    I finally found one (Ctrl+W) which works but is totally inconvenient.

    What’s more, it doesn’t toggle automatically from one window to another but open a small window with a whole bunch of different options.

    And this is even more unsatisfactory.

    This is why I just loathe everything that has to do with Microsoft Windows and runs under this operating system.

  • in reply to Philippe Lorre

    I have changed that to CTRL+< and it works with CTRL+> the other way.

    CTRL+Tab is toggle between source and target for me (changed, of course).