Verifying your TagEditor files

Difficulty Level: Low

For the perfectionists out there, here’s a tip that will guarantee your TagEditor files (file extension: .ttx) are fully translated and have no tag/punctuation/consistency errors.

Open the TagEditor file you wish to verify and from the menu select Tools -> Plug-ins… A dialog box will pop-up with various options. For this tip, we’ll concentrate on the Plug-in category Verifiers.

Enable (by ticking) the check-boxes SDL TRADOS Generic Tag Verifier and SDL TRADOS QA Checker, as shown in the screenshot below:

Note: Depending on the Trados version you have installed on your system, or whether SDL Trados Studio 2009 is also installed, you might see an extra option appear as SDL TRADOS QA Checker 2.0. In this case you can use either one of the QA Checkers as they contain more or less the same options.

Click on the SDL TRADOS QA Checker and then click on the button Properties. In the new dialog box that appears we can now fine-tune the QA checks we want. As you will see there are quite a lot of options to fiddle with. For the purpose of this tip, we’ll only focus on enabling the options that will catch missing/inconsistent translations, tag & punctuation problems, which from the basic checks for a good delivery.

Thus, enable (by ticking) the following:

In tab Segment Verification:

- Enable Check for forgotten and empty translations

- Enable Check for target segments that are identical to their source segments

In tab Inconsistencies:

- Enable only Check for inconsistent translations

In tab Punctuation:

- Enable whatever you think is applicable to your target language

In tab Numbers:

- Enable Check for numbers

Once you’re done, click on the OK button in the Properties dialog box and, again, OK in the Plug-ins dialog window.

To run the verification checks either from the menu select Tools -> Verify or press F8. After a short while, the Messages pane will appear at the bottom of your TagEditor window showing the results from the checks applied. You then just have to sort through the results and locate the valid ones (usually there are some false-positives). Once you locate such a case, double-click it and instantly the cursor will move to that segment. You can then process it as usual and make the necessary correction.

Note: Once the verification checks are run, and in the same folder where your TagEditor file is located, two log files will appear containing the results of the verification. If you click on the HTML version of the log file (the other is in XML format) you will see the same results as in the Message pane but in a nicer output. These files can safely be deleted if not needed by you.

Once you’ve made the necessary corrections, it’s a good practice to run one last verification just to be sure that everything’s indeed OK now.