Arabic Diacritics

I have a problem in reviewing Arabic texts in terms of diacritics. When an Arabic word has diacritics and you want to edit the diacritics, the new diacritics are not shown. When you select a word with diacritics by keyboard (Shift + CTRL + left arrow), it does not select the entire word, but only select unti the letter which has a diacritic. When you want to remove a diacritic, it removes the letter itself along with the diacritic. For example: If I have a word like (سعيًا) and I want to remove the symbol (ً) before Alef (ا), three things happen: 1- When you select by keyboard, the selection stops before the letter (ا). 2- When you want to remove the diacritic, it removes the letter (يـ) along with its diacritic. 3- When you want to change the diacritic to another diacritic, it does not show up. All these happen only in review mode. Surely, there is a problem in the editor or may be caused by track changes. I do not know.

emoji
Parents Reply Children
  •  

    Can you help here?  Perhaps provide a short video of how this is supposed to work?  It's very difficult for me to reproduce this without a better explanation or preferably a short video while making the changes.  In fact showing how it works in MS Word would also help.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

    ________________________
    Design your own training!

    You've done the courses and still need to go a little further, or still not clear? 
    Tell us what you need in our Community Solutions Hub

    emoji
  • Here is an example of selection in Microsoft Word of a word with diacritics

    Screenshot showing a word in Arabic with diacritics. The diacritic is highlighted in red with a strikeout, indicating it has been removed without affecting the black letter.

    Here is another Example of removing a diacritic without affecting the letter and note that when remove the diacritic, it only removes the diacritic without the letter. You can see the letter is still in black, the strikeout is under the diacritic in the first line. To illustrate this I remove a letter and you can find that a letter is removed with its diacritic in red in the second line

    Screenshot displaying two lines of Arabic text. The first line shows a diacritic removed with a red strikeout. The second line shows a letter and its diacritic removed, both highlighted in red.

    emoji


    Generated Image Alt-Text
    [edited by: Trados AI at 10:00 AM (GMT 0) on 29 Feb 2024]
  • emoji
  •  

    Can you show me this as if you were showing it to a child for the very first time?  What keys are you pressing to remove or add a diacritic without affecting the underlying letter?  I don't even know where to start explaining this to a development team and I'm not going to just throw it over the fence!

    If you can help me to explain this, keeping in mind I don't speak Arabic and I don't even know which part of the script is a letter or a sequence of letters, then I am very willing to make sure we are in a position to address it.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

    ________________________
    Design your own training!

    You've done the courses and still need to go a little further, or still not clear? 
    Tell us what you need in our Community Solutions Hub

    emoji
  •  

    ok... I think I've got it!!  Can you look at this and let me know if it's correct?

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

    ________________________
    Design your own training!

    You've done the courses and still need to go a little further, or still not clear? 
    Tell us what you need in our Community Solutions Hub

    emoji
  • I got you. Let me explain this simply. In Microsoft Word, they treat every single character as a separate character, so you write a letter it is a character and when you write a diacritic, it is a separate character. As for how they appear on word whether above the letter or below the letter, this is something else. So, in older versions of Trados, programmers did this, so when you delete a diacritic, the editor removes the diacritic alone as it is a separate character. However, in the new editor of Trados 2022, you made the letter and the diacritic whether above the letter or below the letter one unit, so when you move either of them, the other is removed. You have to find a way to separate the two or even inherit from the old editor its characteristics. I guess the old editor was a class, so you can inherit from the class its features and add your new updates, if any. As for the keys I use to write or remove a diacritic, when you install Arabic Keyboard, the shift + keys are activated. When you press shift + Q,A,W,E,R,A,S,X,` the Arabic diacritics are activated in any editor

    emoji
  • You are right Paul, but try it in review mode as there is no problem in translation mode because you will translate from scratch or using MT and edit it in translation mode; this is not a problem. But if you are an editor like me and you want to deliver your files in review mode, the client needs to see the changes made to assess whether or not you have done it right. So, I am focusing on review mode for this reason. When you edit a diacritic in review mode, it does not show up; and here the problem pops up. Try the example you made in the video in review mode and you will find it hard to edit diacritics.

    emoji
  •  

    Thanks for that explanation... it supplements my understanding well.  I learned something new today... always good!

    try it in review mode as there is no problem in translation mode because you will translate from scratch or using MT and edit it in translation mode; this is not a problem. But if you are an editor like me and you want to deliver your files in review mode, the client needs to see the changes made to assess whether or not you have done it right.

    Indeed... but it is exactly the same problem.  The only difference is now track changes (which works as expected) is removing the possibility to see that only a diacritic was changed because of the way the problem occurs generally.  If the Editor handled this correctly then the track changes would display it correctly too.  We just need to fix the underlying problem.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

    ________________________
    Design your own training!

    You've done the courses and still need to go a little further, or still not clear? 
    Tell us what you need in our Community Solutions Hub

    emoji
  • I have been trying to reach you about a month ago through the online chat system, but no one could understand me as you did. Thank you

    emoji
  •  

    I have tested a little in an experimental build the dev team are working on.  Perhaps you can comment on this for me and I can take this back to the dev team to improve it?

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

    ________________________
    Design your own training!

    You've done the courses and still need to go a little further, or still not clear? 
    Tell us what you need in our Community Solutions Hub

    emoji