Segmentation Rule

Question

Dears, 
 
 I would like to ask the below questions. 
 
 I have created TM with a segmentation rule full stop and translate the file against it.Can i export the TM as TMX and re-create new TM with the exported TMX but with a Paragraph mark segmentation rule ? if yes, How can I see the changes? as i can't see any change and the segments are still segmented with a full stop. 
 Can we change the segmentation of a translated bilingual file from full stop to paragraph mark?

Best Regards, 
 Samar

Paul · Answer

Hi samar magdy 
 A TMX file doesn't hold segmentation rules. 
 If you want to use paragraph segmentation for all future files then creating a new TM with this option will work for all future files. But if you import your TMX into this new paragraph based TM the segments will still only be sentence based as these are already defined in the TMX. I'm not aware of any tools that can go from sentence to paragraph... only a few that go the other way around. Part of the problem I guess is that a TM is not a true reflection of the original documents so making sure the paragraphs were really correct would be tricky if not impossible and technically the TMX puts all segments, whether sentence based or paragraph based into a single TU. So there is nothing in the TMX to tell any tool whether the TUs were part of a larger entity or not. 
 What may be useful if is that if you do this the fragment matching feature can pick out the TUs. So whilst you won't get proper pretranslation leverage at least you would still be able to leverage the work interactively: 
 
 Once you have converted your bilingual file that's it. You can't change the segmentation at this point, you need the source file for that. Perhaps a potential solution would be to align the source and target files with a TM set up for paragraph based segmentation instead of trying to change the bilingual files... although I wouldn't hold my breath! 
 If there is a solution for this out there I'd also be interested to learn.

Paul · Answer

Hi samar magdy 
 This is a bit of a tricky problem because only the source language will be segmented correctly. There is no way to segment the target based on a target TM as you can only set a TM to act on the source. So you have to do this sort of thing when you align: 
 
 The source gets segmented correctly, by paragraph, but the target will be by sentence as the default rules are used for target whether you specify a TM or not.

Paul · Answer

Hi Evzen Polenka 
 I would never of thought of doing that as I usually select an existing TM and it's too late at this point. But you are absolutely right... and I'm really happy to see this: 
 
 Thank you for sharing this information.... something we should definitely document somewhere as I'm sure it will be useful to many users. Or maybe I was the only one who didn't know this!! 
 Thanks 
 Paul

Paul · Answer

Hi samar magdy 
 Unknown said: 
 
 Write the TM Name and Select the Source and Target Language in the General Page. 
 Select paragraph based segmentation in the Segmentation Rule and Click Finish.

Can I just clarify that this means the following: 
 - select the source language in the general page 
 - select paragraph segmentation rules 
 - select the target language in the general page 
 - select paragraph segmentation rules 
 It's not clear foir me what you have done, but when this worked for me I selected each language one at a time and set paragraph segmentation for them both. Then it worked.

Paul · Answer

Hi Evzen, 
 
I have actually found a few more interesting things... albeit embarrassing! 
 
1. I was aligning a completely different target file (same name, different location) and didn't notice 
2. Studio 2017, current version, actually handles the custom rules exactly as you said and works as expected 
3. Studio 2015 completely ignores the use of custom rules so actually 2017 SR1 CU9 works correctly for me. It's an improvement. 
4. Retrofit alignment works differently and won't apply any custom rules

Trados Studio > 1. Trados Studio

Segmentation Rule