John Fry

John Fry said:

(1) Why it would want break segments at the colon;

I think the majority usecase for a colon is that you have two independent phrases, or a break prior to lists perhaps, and most users probably split these anyway for better leverage.  It was also the default in the old Trados Workbench.  The old SDLX didn't break on a colon, but Trados won the day when Trados Studio was created!

John Fry said:

(2) why segmentation rules like these are associated with individual translation memories

This is a good question and I have always held mixed views on this one.  Being able to manage the segmentation rules independently of a TM means you can very easily make wide ranging changes to multiple resources in one go.  However, there are are other resources that are relevant to the behaviour of a TM and having them all in one place, and portable as they travel with the TM, also has advantages.

John Fry said:

Is there a way to simply once and for all tell Trados Studio 2021 to never break segments at the colon?

You can make use of a language resource template to create your TMs.  When you do this you will then have that exception in the template and then all new TMs will always be created with the default behaviour you prefer.

If you've already got hundreds of TMs then it's a little more problematic.  But we have created an app on the appstore to try and help with this... applyTMTemplate:

https://appstore.sdl.com/language/app/applytm-template/966/

Using this tool you can apply the settings in a language resource template to multiple TMs in one go.  There's a little more information on this tool here in case it helps:

https://multifarious.filkin.com/2019/03/04/apply-a-tm-template/

Thanks Paul, I did as you suggested and created my own language resource template for Japanese. In the segmenting rules, I deleted the colon rule. While I was at it, I added the character ． (U+FF0E), which sometimes appears in Japanese documents instead of 。, to the full stop segmentation rule. (You might want to think about adding that as a default in Trados Studio.) Hopefully this will save me a lot of manual splitting and merging of segments going forward!

Thanks John Fry, glad you managed to make this work for you.

+ Maria Sarau for information on potentially changing the default settings for Japanese.