Translation memory segments not identified when they have hard line breaks

Question

Hello,

I've been working on a project (with Excel files) where the occurrence of 100% and fuzzy matches is high. However, I realized that when the source strings have hard break lines, Trados Studio 2022 does not identify them automatically and I have to search for the translations manually to paste them into the target text.

An important information about the TM in question is that it was created by importing a .tmx file generated by memoQ.

Is there any way of getting Trados to recognize these strings automatically without me having to look for the translations?

Paul · Answer

Marcus V. Santos 
 This won't be possible unless you use a TM that is not using Paragraph segmentation. The whole point of this method is to keep paragraphs together and not separate text that doesn't have a paragraph break in there. I know you said a "hard line break" but you probably meant a "soft line break" as you cannot put a hard break (paragraph break into an Excel cell). So these for example: 
 
 If you try to enter these, with these breaks into Excel, the hard break (paragraph break) will get converted into a soft line break. I think your solution, seeing as this is Excel and by default each cell is usually treated as a paragraph anyway, would be to create a new TM that is sentence based, add it to your project as the first TM in the list, and then when you open your project that is the one that will be used to segment the file. Then just use the memoQ imported TMX for lookup etc. 
 I am surprised to see the memoQ imported TMX uses paragraph based segmentation though. Did you do that on purpose?

Paul · Answer

Marcus V. Santos 
 If I translate my excel file with paragraph segmentation so it matches everything like this: 
 
 And then open it in a new project using a set up like this, but with sentence based segmentation I will get this, which presumably is what you're seeing: 
 
 And this is because you will be having a TM setup something like this where the TM at the top of my list is the sentence based TM (my own TM) and the sentence at the bottom is the memoQ TM I imported (based on paragraph segmentation): 
 
 So if I reverse the TMs BEFORE I create my project so I have this: 
 
 Then now when I open the file I have this: 
 
 Now I can benefit from the memoQ TM completely and use my own TM to update the work. The downside however is that the whole file will be segmented this way which might be a problem for you if you actually want to save the segments at sentence level and not paragraph? 
 Ultimately this all comes down to whether or not you want to have to use concordance search every time you don't get a match to see if the sentence is in the memoQ TM or not. 
 Marcus V. Santos said: PS. Yes, the client usually works with paragrah-based TMs due to the projects particularities. 
 On this basis you can solve the problem easily by simply doing the same thing yourself or do as I just explained and use the memoQ TM to prepare the segmentation for the project by making sure it's at the top of the list. 
 It might also be that your memoQ TM is not actually set up to be based on paragraph segmentation at all. It's just holding content at sentence level that is not segmented and that could be because of how the content in the TMX is provided. 
 Either way the only way to solve it I think it to segment the Excel file so that it's treating each cell without segmenting at all and the only way to do that is to create a new TM that is 100% paragraph based segmenting and make sure that it's at the top of your list BEFORE you create your project:

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Translation memory segments not identified when they have hard line breaks