Under Community Review

Please enable Trados to translate the names of files and folders

Currently, Trados can only translate the content within files, but it cannot automatically extract and convert the names of various files loaded into Trados translation projects—such as Word, Excel, PPT, PDF, sdlxiff formats—as well as the names of folders and multi-level folders loaded into the project, into sdlxliff files. Consequently, in the final translated documents, the file names do not change to the target language.

 

In practical translation work, if only the content of the documents is translated into the target language while all the file names remain in the source language, then users of the target language will still not be able to understand the source language on the file names.

 

Please enable Trados to translate the names of all files and all folders loaded into Trados translation projects.

Screenshot showing a list of folder names with red arrows pointing to a note saying 'translate the names of all the folders'. Folder names are in a mix of English and transliterated Chinese.

Screenshot displaying a list of file names with various file type icons and red arrows pointing to a note saying 'translate the names of all the files'. File names are in a mix of English and transliterated Chinese.

jack zhong
  • in reply to Daniel Brockmann

    Dear, Mr. Daniel Brockmann，

    Thank you for your reply and concern.

    We believe that the wisdom and professional skills of you and your team can help make trados studio better and better.

    Best regards

    Jack

  • in reply to jack zhong

    Hi Jack - we are looking at various aspects for this and not only votes for sure - they are an important indicator but by far not the only one.

    Re. market share, the ProZ report from 2023 said the below. We intend to keep it this way and extend our leadership :) but of course this is a competitive market and as we Germans say "competition is healthy" as it helps accelerate innovation for everyone. It's interesting to see that many users prefer using Studio also for MemoQ, XTM and Phrase content. When it comes to Trados Studio, very interesting AI capabilities are coming up next among other very interesting features - watch this space!

    Thanks, Daniel



    Bar graph titled 'My favorite CAT tool is...' top 10, showing Trados with the highest preference among translators using more than one CAT tool, followed by memoQ and Memsource.

  • in reply to jack zhong

     

    This decision is not the basis for our decisions either. But in a long list of priorities it helps.  If a request like this is not commonly asked for, and only a handful of people vote for it in here too then why should we prioritise this against other more important requests?  

    I thank you for your other comments, but don't see the relevance in the context of this request.  Which of these tools offers the ability to do what you have asked for here within the features of the product itself?

  • in reply to Paul

    Dear Mr. Paul,

    Thank you very much

  • in reply to Paul

    Dear Mr. Paul,

    Thank you for your help. You are very professional. 

    However, there is one thing that we feel sorry to mention. the decision to develop or add features to Trados Studio should not be based on the number of votes from the Trados community alone.

    I have found that only part of translators use or rely on Trados for their work. Moreover, among the approximately 50,000 translation companies in China, only a small portion uses Trados. Additionally, I checked a 2023 report on the American translation market, which indicated that memoQ is the most used translation software in the current U.S. translation market.

    There are many reasons for this, including users' dissatisfaction with Trados due to frequent errors, slow feature updates, user-unfriendliness, and the availability of other more convenient alternative computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools in the market.

    Furthermore, for large translation projects requiring collaboration among several or many translators and the use of real-time shared translation memory and termbases, although Trados offers GroupShare, its high pricing deters many translation companies from investing in it. For instance, in the Chinese translation market, translators prefer memoQ's online translation cooperatioin over Trados's online translation. Additionally, some online collaborative translation platforms in China are developing rapidly, costing less than one percent of Trados GroupShare but still offering good functionality and free technical support from real-time online engineers for quick problem resolution during translation processes. Therefore, in the translation market, for many large projects requiring collaboration among many translators, translation workers are opting for other collaborative translation CAT tools, already excluding Trados Studio from their choices.

    Also, even if some users choose Trados Studio, they may not be willing to spend time writing about issues or making suggestions in the Trados community if they encounter problems with Trados or make recommendations.

    Therefore, the number of votes in the Trados community cannot accurately represent the actual work needs of the broader translation market. Decisions regarding the usefulness of a translation feature should not be made based solely on these limited votes.

    There are many valuable suggestions in the Trados community. We hope that software developers will participate in translation practices and consider actual translation needs to further improve Trados studio, rather than merely focusing on these unrepresentative vote numbers.

    Best regards

    Jack