Yulia Kovalskaya 

In the help you have this general link: https://docs.rws.com/980998/344856/trados-studio-2022/file--options--editor--automation

That offers a very poor, and misleading (in my opinion) definition of lookahead, but the explanation of the "Enable verification of segment" is accurate and clear.

"When selected, Trados Studio verifies the segment when the translator confirms it."

But there is also this section which is somewhat better:

https://docs.rws.com/980998/535480/trados-studio-2022/lookahead

LookAhead is mostly useful when working with machine translation because the results are pre-fetched for several segments ahead of you and cached.  This way when you get to the next segment the result is instant and you don't need to wait.  There are penalties associated with this however:

• you could pay more for your MT if you don't have a flat rate
• you may not see the benefit from your TM or Termbase with newly added translations/terms until several segments later because the cached results from before you adding new information will be used in preference

It can be a very useful feature... but is best used when you understand the limitations so you avoid any confusion over what you're seeing.

Dear Paul and Jesús Prieto , 

thank you for the answers, they have been helpful!

And the thread  Why can I only see some of the terms in my termbase but not others? unexpectedly clarifed the issue of the newly (and not only newly)-added terms that , in effect, do not appear straight away in the Multiterm window....

So I unchecked the lookahead feature for now, just to see the difference in the Search performance, though, after reading https://docs.rws.com/980998/535480/trados-studio-2022/lookahead I still have questions. Those are not even questions, but doubts related to the mentioned optimization of the search process, if any. I always start with pretranslation, so I guess all "hits" are already found by the moment I get down to work on incomplete segments.... As for actually "looking X segments ahead", there is an option that allows to search automatically in the newly added/ translated and confirmed segments:

So to me, pretranslation+the highlighted option above=LookAhead 

Well, if I notice any difference now that I have this function deactivated, I will report my findings back:).

Best regards!

Yulia Kovalskaya 

Yulia Kovalskaya said:

So to me, pretranslation+the highlighted option above=LookAhead 

Then you have misunderstood what it's for.  The option you mention is something else altogether; and if you pre-translate first and don't work interactively with MT then probably not worth using LookAhead at all in my opinion.

Where LookAhead is useful is if you work interactively with MT and don't want to have to wait for a result to be returned each time you enter into a segment.  You don't have to wait with LookAhead enabled because each time you enter a segment Studio "looks ahead" several segments, actually makes a call to your MT provider and caches the results.  Then when you move to the next segment the MT result is returned instantly from the cache rather than by making a fresh call tat you would have to wait for.

Make sense?

Yulia Kovalskaya 

Yulia Kovalskaya said:

So to me, pretranslation+the highlighted option above=LookAhead 

Then you have misunderstood what it's for.  The option you mention is something else altogether; and if you pre-translate first and don't work interactively with MT then probably not worth using LookAhead at all in my opinion.

Where LookAhead is useful is if you work interactively with MT and don't want to have to wait for a result to be returned each time you enter into a segment.  You don't have to wait with LookAhead enabled because each time you enter a segment Studio "looks ahead" several segments, actually makes a call to your MT provider and caches the results.  Then when you move to the next segment the MT result is returned instantly from the cache rather than by making a fresh call tat you would have to wait for.

Make sense?

Sorry, Paul, and I still misunderstand, I think....

Working "interactively" with MT means to confirm segments one by one, without pre-translation, right. May be useful when several translators are connected to the same MT and besides are working on the same project. In this case, if I enter into a segment corresponding to me and 5 minutes ago another translator did a similar segment in another part of the text, I will have a match, in real time. And this "real time" will be shorter if I have the LookAhead function activated. Something like that? 

Sorry for being so insisitent, just trying to get the best from Trados taking into account our particular needs.

Thanks in advance!

Yulia Kovalskaya 

Yulia Kovalskaya said:

Working "interactively" with MT means to confirm segments one by one, without pre-translation, right.

Not necessarily.  You could still be using MT even if you have pre-translated already, so interactively just means when you work with MT as you are translating you decide how you wish to apply the MT result as you work.

Yulia Kovalskaya said:

if I enter into a segment corresponding to me and 5 minutes ago another translator did a similar segment in another part of the text, I will have a match, in real time. And this "real time" will be shorter if I have the LookAhead function activated. Something like that? 

Yes.  I did a quick demo to show you the difference if you have not thought to do this yourself yet:

Got it, Paul! You are the best! Everything clear. But then I have another question: when working with file-based memories, does this option slows down the search process (which is unbearably slow per se in our case...)? Or is it still somehow benefitial?

Thank you!

Yulia Kovalskaya 

In theory I think it would be beneficial in terms of being able to access the cached results, but does come with the side effects of not readily seeing results from the TM that might have just become available to the TM, or termbase, since you are now accessing the cache instead of what's actually in these recourses.  How much of a problem this is in reality I can't really answer.  We only ever hear of complaints from users when it does happen and this always overshadows far more users who never comment because everything is fine.  When people complain and mention many complaints it almost always comes down to a few complaints... that's the nature of the game.

True, now that I have the concept clear and since I am familiar with our team´s needs, I know what to do with this option.

Thank you so much for your help!