Hello

You have bought a CAT tool. CAT tool is not a tool for doing any formatting, but just to keep exactly the same formatting as the source text had.

Any comparison with Word is not necessary, as no CAT is Word. CAT can handle Word and InDesign, Framemaker and many other formats. So please familiarize yourself with the concept of a CAT tool first, please.

Search options are not that limited, you can search upwards and downwards the text.

And you can apply all the formatting of the source to the target - so you can apply bold or italic, if there has been bold or italic in source. With certain formats (Word for example) you can even apply formatting like bold or italic even if the source did not have it - bold is for example CTRL+B, italic CTRL+I. However, you first need to select the text to be formatted.

But when we are on formatting, please bear in mind, that all formatting (also in Word) is done with so called tags. Please familiarize yourself also with the concept of tags to be able to work efficiently.

TBH, all the segments and shortcuts are precisely a very fast way of working, the only thing is this is a fully different way of working.

Thank you for you answer, jczopik.

“CAT tool is not a tool for doing any formatting, but just to keep exactly the same formatting as the source text had”

In an ideal world, that would be fine. The ideal world would be a world in which all the texts send by my clients would be Word texts, so, yes, Trados would keep the same formatting, and I would not need to do any change. But the reality is that 80% of the documents are pdf documents, and the conversion tool embedded in Trados is not as good as one could expect: it makes funny thinks, like changing the font, creating text boxes… so yes, formatting becomes a must, and in Trados it cannot be done.

“Search options are not that limited, you can search upwards and downwards the text.”

I am sorry, but please show me where is the option to search upwards. There is no option. Either you have to search backwards, or in the full text. This is quite important for me (and I suppose for many others). For instance, at one moment (maybe in segment 2,560) we may have “the Seller” in a contract, which is a particular seller that must be written with a capital S, and is not the same seller of which we were talking about until segment 2,560. So, in my revision, I would change all the “seller” to “Seller” from segment 2,560, and not before: this can’t be done in Trados.

“bold is for example CTRL+B, italic CTRL+I. However, you first need to select the text to be formatted.”

That’s in the English version of Word. Unfortunately, in the Spanish version of Office they decided (from the beginning, maybe 30 years ago?) to change this shortcuts and translate them. So every Spanish user is used to CTRL+N for bold, o CTRL+K, for italic. Unfortunately, in Trados they have not translated those shortcuts, so it becomes a mess: bold in Word is CTRL+N but in Trados is CTRL+B….

“all the segments and shortcuts are precisely a very fast way of working”

I think that working with segments is tedious. It stops translation every sentence. Translation must be fluid, like a river, not like hundreds of separated blocks…

As I am used to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking (a piece of software that really speeds up translation), I am used to dictate at very fast speed, with no need to stop at every sentence. In Trados, I have to stop at every sentence, since I have to change segment. Really disappointing.

I forgot: I just made a translation in which “joint venture” is said hundreds of times. My client wants me to keep joint venture in Spanish, but in italic, joint venture (as it’s an English term). This is something I cannot do automatically in Trados by searching and changing all, changing to italic, as I do in Word: in Trados, it cannot be done. And changing manually each and every “joint venture”, hundreds of them, takes a lot of time…. A petty.

I forgot: I just made a translation in which “joint venture” is said hundreds of times. My client wants me to keep joint venture in Spanish, but in italic, joint venture (as it’s an English term). This is something I cannot do automatically in Trados by searching and changing all, changing to italic, as I do in Word: in Trados, it cannot be done. And changing manually each and every “joint venture”, hundreds of them, takes a lot of time…. A petty.

gonzalo.pradera said:

I forgot: I just made a translation in which “joint venture” is said hundreds of times. My client wants me to keep joint venture in Spanish, but in italic, joint venture (as it’s an English term). This is something I cannot do automatically in Trados by searching and changing all, changing to italic, as I do in Word: in Trados, it cannot be done. And changing manually each and every “joint venture”, hundreds of them, takes a lot of time…. A petty.

Hi Gonzalo,

You're right in that a CAT tool is not a word processor so there are many things that you can do in Word that you could never do in Studio.  There are however many other benefits to to using a tool like Studio but they will take a little time to get used to before you see the advantages.  And if I'm honest, you may not see this at all!  It really depends on the type of work you do the how willing you are to adopt new ways of working.

There is an article here about working with tags in Studio and this might help a little - http://wp.me/p2xDjK-9I - but to be honest if you want to work by searching and replacing formatting rather than as you go then Word is the way to tackle it because this isn't possible with Studio.  Actually I'm not sure this is possible with any tool other than Microsoft Word.

Regards

Paul