Probability score: 0.8  

Question improvement suggestion: Provide a specific example of the text you are working with to clarify the context of the segmentation rule exception you want to create.  

In the meantime, based on the information you have provided, here is a suggested answer to your question:  

Hello,  

To create an exception to the semi-colon segmentation rule in Trados Studio, you can follow these steps:

**Step 1:** Open your Translation Memory (TM) in Trados Studio. Right-click on the TM and select **Settings**.

**Step 2:** Navigate to **Language Resources** and select **Segmentation Rules**. Click on **Edit**.

**Step 3:** Find the semi-colon rule in the list and click on **Edit**.

**Step 4:** At the bottom of the **Edit Segmentation Rule** window, click the **Add** button next to the **Exceptions** pane.

**Step 5:** Click on the **Advanced View** button in the window that opens to access the **Add Rule Exception** window.

**Step 6:** In the **After break** dialogue box, you will need to specify the condition for your exception. For your case, you can add a regular expression that captures the phrase you want to segment after "and". For example, you might use something like `\s+and\s+` to ensure that the segmentation rule is ignored when "and" is present.

**Step 7:** After entering your exception, click **OK** to save the changes and close the dialog boxes.

**Step 8:** If your file was added to your project before making this change, you will need to remove it and add it back to ensure the new segmentation rules take effect.

By following these steps, you should be able to create an exception to the semi-colon segmentation rule that allows for breaks after "and". If you have any specific text examples or further questions, feel free to share!  

I hope this answer addressed your question. If not, please reject the answer, add the question improvement suggestion information, and click the RWS Community AI checkbox on the right to try again.  

RWS Community AI

Nathalie Deslauriers 

A key thing to know before doing this is what's in the native file and what sort of file is it?  Also what rules for segmentation have you already added to your TM?  The default segmentation would not do this, so there some things that need to be clarified:

In 2022 and 2024 the defaults with a simple text file gets me this:

So there is clearly more to this story than meets the eye, and you need to make sure we know as well if you want a helpful answer.

Thanks for your reply, Paul. 

The native file is a regular Word document in English.

I'm not so sure about the rules already there, as they were added by my organisation. 

Does this help you in any way?

Nathalie Deslauriers 

And then I thought better about what you have shown.  So I did this:

Which works:

The difference could be two things:

1. the most likely is you didn't select "Regular expression" when you added the exception and you used regex syntax in the rule.
2. another possibility is that your example doesn't have a space after the word "and"

I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I can't get it to work. 

Example used:

Exception:

Nathalie Deslauriers 

Maybe you can send me an empty TM with your rules?  Right click on the TM in the Translation Memories view and select "New Translation Memory from":

That will create a new TM with the same settings but no translations.  Then share that with me so I can check with your settings.

Nathalie Deslauriers 

Maybe you can send me an empty TM with your rules?  Right click on the TM in the Translation Memories view and select "New Translation Memory from":

That will create a new TM with the same settings but no translations.  Then share that with me so I can check with your settings.

I've deleted the semi-colon rule altogether.

I'm not sure how useful it's supposed to be... but I like the results without it! 

Side question, though: will it impact the merging of my TM with those of my colleagues if we don't have the same rules?  

Nathalie Deslauriers 

Nathalie Deslauriers said:

will it impact the merging of my TM with those of my colleagues if we don't have the same rules?  

Merging or importing with TMX/updating via a project?  What exactly is your process here?

Probably it won't affect anything, but if you are truly merging you are asked to choose which language resources to use and in this case it could make a difference if you and your colleagues are then going to work with the newly created TM based on a different set of resources.

But if you are just updating or importing... won't make any difference at all.

We merge our individual TMs each week to create a global one for the team.

All TMs are imported in an empty template. So if that template has no semi-colon rule and some TMs do, is that a problem? 

Nathalie Deslauriers 

I specifically separated the term "merge", and "update" or "export/import", because they carry very different meanings.  So better for my clarity even if it doesn't make any difference for you to be clear about what you are doing.

Nathalie Deslauriers said:

All TMs are imported in an empty template.

What does that mean exactly?  If it means you do this:

1. export all the individual SDLTMs to TMX files
2. import all the TMX files to one new SDLTM

Then no problem because a TMX doesn't carry the segmentation rules.  So you are only importing translation units and presumably handling duplicates etc. as part of this process.

That would be different to "merging" TMs which in the context of Trados supports the merging of SDLTM files, each of which have their own segmentation rules, and you need to address that in the merge to decide which rules apply going forward in the merged TM.

Hope that gives you what you need?

We're dealing with SDLTM files only. 

I'll see how that impacts us. Thank you for all your help and patience!