I agree with you!

Maybe the right place is the Ideas section:

https://community.sdl.com/ideas/translation-productivity-ideas/i/trados-studio-ideas

where Trados user can give their opinion.

I'd vote for it!

I'd rather vote for this issue to be sorted:-)

0 votes so far

Well, in fact Studio HAS a very simple method of replacing all kind of quotes with any other kind of quotes you wish. First, you get typographic quotes when typing them. And for the remaining ones use a simple search and replace operation with regex. For Polish quotes I run two:

(?:“|”|")(\w)
„$1

(\w\b)(?:"|“)
$1”

You can adapt the regexes to your needs. It also will be possible to put all this in one run.

I do not see any issue here. Studio does work as any other software would. It inserts typographic quotes, when actively typed, but does not, if the text is being inserted there. Use the search and replace and the "issue" is gone.

Hello Jerzy,

Thank you for your insights.

Well, the problem is that I don't know anything about Regexes, which means that I don't understand your regexes. As far as I understand, that would allow me to do exactly what I want, namely, to make Studio automatically change all straight quotes in a target text (when the original has curly quotes, I must produce curly quotes in the target text as well). While I know that I can do this by typing quotes, this is impossible to do when the target is automatically generated (because I tell Studio to copy source to target or because I generate some translations automatically. Inevitably, Studio always generates target text with straight quotes, and when there are many to be replaced, doing that manually is an endless work. Someone in the forum suggested, years ago, to use the search and replace tool and search for this: (s)"(.+?)" and replace it with: $1“$2” - this did not work, because Studio told me that no matches were found (untrue - there were) and to be honest, I don't understand all these marks/signs ... what is the meaning of $1????!!! or the dot, or the ? I assume this is a language, but I don't know it.

It is a regular expressions language. In a nutshell, each character in regex matches itself. So if you search for "a", it will find "a". If you search for "AbbA", it will find what you entered. So far, so logical. To make it really interesting, some characters have special functions. So you can combine literal search for characters with some meta-characters. It is similar to what you would do with wildcards in Word. Such special characters are the dot . which replaces any character. Brackets () are used for grouping and capturing search results. $ signs refer to the group in the search expression—$1 means insert what you have found in the first bracket (first capturing group) in your search expression.

Your expression cannot work, as it looks literally for a letter s followed by a quote. And it just looks for straight quotes, while you need to correct wrong quotes too.

Try this: (\s)(?:„|”|")(.+?)(?:"|“) and replace with $1“$2” 

Make sure regular expressions search is activated.

Hi Mara Rambaudi,

Mara Rambaudi said:

this is impossible to do when the target is automatically generated (because I tell Studio to copy source to target or because I generate some translations automatically. Inevitably, Studio always generates target text with straight quotes

Did you try to disable the automatic conversion feature?

I work with files full of hyperlinks. Those hyperlinks all include straight quotes that must always remain stright. On the other hand, there are also buttons, commands, panes, sections, etc. that normally go in smart quotes in my target language. I had to disable the option that automatically converts straight quotes into smart ones and I am using Ctrl+Shift+6 for other instances where I need smart quotes.
Unfortunately this feature is only available in Options, but not in Project Settings, which actually means that you apply this setting to all of your projects and have to change it from project to project if need be. Good for me I mostly do jobs for a single client. If I did it for different clients with different quotation mark requirements, it could be extremely annoying for sure. But with Trados, I'm affraid this is the only solution so far.
Asking them to fix an issue is dangerous sometimes. Once I complained about too small font — they "fixed" it by making big icons instead, while the font itself [that I was complaining about] remained exactly the same. Now it looks even worse than it was before their mocking fix.
Careful what you wish / You may regret it / Careful what you wish / You just might get it (c)

You are right about that.
I just wish that the option in your screenshot would be represented by a button in the ribbon. I usually have several projects open and need to go through the selection option every time I switch to another project. Very annoying.

Otherwise it would be great to have the option in the "Project Settings", overriding the software options. It would save a lot of time.