Tagged Documents
To translate websites, software or some other file formats is quite different from the translation of standard documents due to one important feature: the use of tags.
Working on a document with tags requires experience and attention. The simple act of adding or removing a space before or after a tag may generate errors in the final file, and switching the position of any two tags may be enough to make it impossible to convert the file back.
How do these problems occur? In general, there are two main reasons for that:
1) The way Trados (or any other CAT tool) is configured.
If tag penalty is 0%, the program will assume that the string “The <b>Book</b> is on the table” in your document is exactly the same as the string “The <i>Book</i> is on the table”, which was previously stored in TM. This change from bold to italics will cause the error.
2) TM fuzzy
During the translation process, you can have the following string:
“The <b>Book</b> is on the table”
However, Trados suggests the following string:
“The <i>Cat</i> is on the table”
and informs you that TM leveraging is 80%. In a rush, the translator replaces “Cat” with “Book” and does not notice that the bold tag was changed to italics.
This case is even worse than the first one. To check and fix them, one should rely on how experienced and attentive the translator is. Tag verification programs can be helpful, but are not always reliable, often take a long time to run and provide frequently irrelevant results, discouraging the use.
This is why as an engineer one should be totally focused and have sharp eyes to detect such potential problems.