Dear RWS Support Team,

I hope this message finds you well.

I am writing to report what appears to be a set of issues with the AutoText and AutoSuggest functionalities in Trados Studio when working with Arabic (Saudi Arabia) as the target language. I have tested these thoroughly and documented the behavior in the attached screenshots for your reference.

1. AutoText Import and Non-Functionality

• After importing an existing .autoTxt AutoText list (via Options > AutoText > Import), no suggestions are shown when typing the expected entries in Trados Studio Editor (e.g., football player names such as "ليونيل ميسي").

• Even though the imported entries are visible in the AutoText list in the settings dialog, they do not appear during typing in the editor.

• This persists even with AutoText properly enabled in the AutoSuggest options list.

2. Limitations in Managing AutoText Lists

• It appears that Trados Studio saves AutoText lists to a single settings file, without allowing multiple .autoTxt lists to be added in parallel.

• Importing a new list does not seem to overwrite the previous entries or I am not sure if it appends or what, it is not clear at all!

• This prevents batch management of entries and forces manual editing of one list at a time, which is both restrictive and error-prone.

• Ideally, AutoText should allow multiple .autoTxt files to be loaded, merged, or edited externally, with Studio applying changes automatically.

3. Priority Confusion Between AutoSuggest Sources

• I noticed inconsistent behavior depending on the order of AutoSuggest providers:

  • When I moved AutoSuggest Dictionaries to the top of the list, suggestions began working.

  • However, when I moved them down to the 4th rank, the suggestions also worked, which was confusing and not aligned with my expectation (I wanted Termbase suggestions to always take priority). It is amazing why it worked now after reordering the priority list! Before it was not working at all as per the screenshot.

• This suggests that AutoSuggest source prioritization may not be functioning consistently.

4. AutoSuggest Dictionary Not Triggering in Arabic

• Even when using an AutoSuggest Dictionary (.bpm) that I confirmed contains multiple entries for “Lionel Messi” (verified directly via the database), suggestions are not triggered when typing in Arabic.

• Curiously, the same dictionary setup works correctly for English terms.

• This indicates a possible issue with AutoSuggest recognition for Arabic script.

Impact

• These issues significantly reduce productivity when translating into Arabic, especially in projects requiring consistent terminology and frequent insertion of predefined entries.

• The inability to manage multiple AutoText lists or reliably use AutoSuggest dictionaries in Arabic creates unnecessary manual overhead and inconsistency. There should be also an option to batch delete the entries instead of having to reset to default! 

Request

Could you please confirm:

1. Whether this is a known limitation or bug in Trados Studio?

2. If there are any workarounds for making AutoText and AutoSuggest work reliably with Arabic?

3. If the handling of multiple .autoTxt lists and Arabic AutoSuggest dictionaries is planned to be improved in future updates?

I would be happy to provide additional test files or logs if required.

Thank you very much for your time and support.
I look forward to your guidance on resolving this matter.

Best regards,
Sameh Elsharkawy