Matthew S-anonymised 

Two observations based on your posts in this forum:

(1) From my experience with texts that are challenging from a segmentation point of view: It might take some tweaking, but it's worth getting your segmentation settings right. Studio is not great at changing a setting and checking whether it works, it's a bit cumbersome. I use Ratel for that and transfer the information to Studio. If you are familiar with Omega T then you are likely familiar with Ratel as well, which is part of the free Okapi Toolkit. IHMO, splitting or merging a segment should be an exception. If it's not, then your segmentation rules are lacking.

(2) If you have Trados Studio, you should not need to use the export/retrofit functionality. I use this to have people who do not have Trados Studio or who would not know how to use it proofread translations. It is only intended for very minor changes. Did you try the preview function:

You can read the document in Word, usually with perfect layout, and when you click into the text, the Studio cursor jumps to the respective segment. You make your changes in Studio, which is then reflected in the preview (the Word version of the preview often lags a bit). I usually use the faster HTML preview, because my source texts (if they are Word docs) usually have a simple layout:

I'd give that a try.

Daniel

PS BTW there is an XLIFF Manager app, which exports and imports "vanilla" XLIFF, esp. if you are exchanging files with somebody who uses not-Trados Studio. But I think trial versions don't allow you to install apps.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for your suggestions!

I'm not sure that tweaking segmentation rules would help me. When I translate, I often do not translate one sentence as one sentence - I break them up and change the flow of the text to work better in the target language. Like:

Dies ist ein einziger Satz. Dies ist ein zweiter. Nun ein dritter. Dies ist ein vierter. Und jetzt ein fünfter.

This is one sentence, then this is a second and a third: then a fourth. And a fifth.

Segmentation rules won't help with this, or with another issue: academic footnotes, which contain many full stops and colons, and thus trigger segmentation, often in unwanted places (German separates title from subtitle with a full stop, for instance, which always triggers segmentation). But if there's a segmentation rule that can turn one footnote into one segment - I'm all for that.

Also, I often work with people who don't use CAT tools. People just edit things in Word, so I need something like retrofit/aligner to import their changes back into whatever CAT tool I'm using. And for that, I need to be able to split and merge segments without limitation. OmegaT allows this. Am I right in understanding that Trados simply does not?

XLIFF Manager looks very interesting. One thing that Trados and MemoQ do well is that they import footnotes close to the footnoted text. I look forward to trying it out. It's open source, too - the license is just for technical support, and sounds well worth it.