Autopropagation Issue Causing Unpaid Rework – Need Urgent Attention

This is not a question but a formal complaint.

I’m currently working on a revision task for a project with heavy repetition. I enabled Autopropagation for 100% matches to confirmed segments, as I usually do. However, I noticed that segments began autopropagating to non-100% matches, which is not the expected behavior.

In the attached image, you can clearly see inconsistencies in the source text caused by this faulty autopropagation. This issue has resulted in multiple rounds of rework—none of which will be compensated by the client.

This situation is not only exhausting but entirely demoralizing. I feel trapped in a workflow that punishes diligence and wastes hours of labor. I sincerely ask the Trados team to look into this malfunction and provide an explanation or fix.

This kind of software behavior is unacceptable in a professional environment.

Screenshot showing a list of segments in Trados Studio with source and target text columns. Some segments are marked as 100% matches, but inconsistencies are visible in the source text.



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[edited by: RWS Community AI at 6:59 PM (GMT 1) on 30 Apr 2025]
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  •   and others in this thread

    Well, would you sue the vendor of a digicam in the same way, if your photos would bad due to wrong setting of the shutter or sharpness or diaphragm? Certainly not, as these settings must be properly used. In that respect Studio is exactly the same as a very professional digital camera. A good artist can create perfect pictures with it, while an amateur will achieve only average results.

    The autopropagation in this very case was triggered by the recognition of alphanumeric strings. Such strings consists only of so called "word characters", which are letters, numbers and underliners in this case. Something like Ab_2 is an alphanumeric string. Another setting with similar effect are acronyms, as when activated BMW or AUDI will be treated the same way as DANGER or CAUTION.

    Please do not get me wrong, but this is OUR responsibility to use the tool delivered by RWS in proper way. The settings responsible for this "error" may be very useful in certain scenarios, while in other scenarios they are problematic. But these are only settings, which can be changed. This is not in any way an error in the software and does not need to be fixed at all.

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  • Sorry but I never talked about a sue, nor a claim or anything like this... The answer is maybe a bit overreacting. I was just suggesting that maybe a fix or a control could be provided, as I've heard of this issue several times and by experienced linguistis. If I'm wrong, apologies, t.

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  • My intention was only to offer another possible explanation from on my own experience. In my case, the issue was caused by a prior mistake made during translation (I blame my habbit of pressing CTRL+Enter too quickly). As far as I'm concerned, the autopropagation feature works as expected.

    Some kind of verification sounds like a great idea. But I think this has to be implemented by the user, because only they know when they do want autopropagation and when they do not want it. IMHO the software provides quite a few options that can be used to that end.

    Wishing everyone a great week! Slight smile

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