Nigel, for daily work, you should never use the Translation Memories View. It's for highly specialized tasks, not for keeping track of what's in your TM. Instead, stay in the Editor View and use the concordance search function (F3) to look up phrases in your TM to make sure they're in there.

Your observation that the TM settings are mysterious and overcomplicated is exactly right. One piece of advice: never use a Project TM. That's a special feature that only project managers need.

John Fry said:

Nigel, for daily work, you should never use the Translation Memories View. It's for highly specialized tasks, not for keeping track of what's in your TM. Instead, stay in the Editor View and use the concordance search function (F3) to look up phrases in your TM to make sure they're in there.

Your observation that the TM settings are mysterious and overcomplicated is exactly right. One piece of advice: never use a Project TM. That's a special feature that only project managers need.

While I agree with most of these statements, I strongly disagree with the info about a project TM. This is a highly useful feature, if you simply understand how it works. When using a project TM, only your final and checked translation will update your main TM, while all the drafts you may create during the translation process including all possible errors will just fill the project TM.

Thanks Jerzy, so if I understand right, the project TM is essentially a temporary TM that helps you to track your translation choices in the current project, which will aid consistency, while the main TM is for storing your final decisions, which will feed into future jobs. Correct?

Could you help me with a couple of other points? What does the warning "You have set up..." etc., at the bottom of the "All language pairs > Translation memories" view mean?

Then, in the "Swedish-English > Translation memories" view, what does "Use different translation providers.." mean? When I uncheck it, the box fills with a message "From All Language Pairs".

I should say that I set this "project" up before really knowing anything about Trados, just following the invitation "Translate single document", as a way of getting into it. So the settings are a bit random and if there are useful pages in the Documentation/manuals on this then by all means just send links. Thanks. .

Nigel Lindup

Nigel Lindup said:

What does the warning "You have set up..." etc., at the bottom of the "All language pairs > Translation memories" view mean?

Then, in the "Swedish-English > Translation memories" view, what does "Use different translation providers.." mean? When I uncheck it, the box fills with a message "From All Language Pairs".

These are all related.  They are all because you added your TM at the specific language pair here:

As opposed to at the All Language Pairs level here:

Adding at All Language Pairs carries advantages if you work with multilingual projects as you can apply the same settings for all language pairs as opposed to having to change the settings for each individual language pair you work with.  If you only work with a single language pair it makes little difference... other than adding a little complexity for the majority of users who don't work with multilingual projects.

So you get this message on the All Language Pair level because you added your TM to the specific language pair:

You get this because if it was unchecked you would be drawing settings from the All Language Pairs:

For example:

Make sense?

Yes, thanks Paul. At least, it will make more sense as I create more projects and see what happens with the different settings.

Much appreciated.

Nigel

Yes, thanks Paul. At least, it will make more sense as I create more projects and see what happens with the different settings.

Much appreciated.

Nigel