🖍 By default, Trados Studio checks spelling using the free Hunspell dictionaries, but you can enable the Word spelling module in Trados Studio instead. This is how to do it:

😁 In Trados Studio, choose File > Options. The Options dialog box appears.

😁 In the left pane, select Editor, and then, in the list that appears, select Spelling.

😁 In the drop-down list on the right side of the Active Spell Checker dialog box, select MS Word Spell Checker.

We recommend checking the Check spelling as you type checkbox: Trados Studio will highlight spelling mistakes in red as you type. Below you can also specify whether spelling mistakes in locked segments, 100% matches, and CM/PM segments are to be ignored.

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#tradosstudio #techtips #spelling

🤖 What you need to pay attention to when using machine translation (MT):

😃 Meaning: This is the most important problem of machine translation and the dividing line between it and human translation. MT easily produces complete nonsense at the same speed as the seemingly well-thought text.

😃 Omissions and additions: MT may simply throw out some parts of the source text or invent something that was not there. This mistake is also made by humans, but for other reasons. Technical translators working in CAT tools most often make such mistakes when they are in a hurry and thoughtlessly confirm fuzzy matches, mistaking them for 100% matches.

😃 Terminology: The same term can be translated by MT differently even within the same sentence. For a technical translator, this is a disaster. They try to get rid of it by “training” MT engines. But this requires a large amount of text in a particular terminological field, at least 500,000 segments translated by a human. In most cases, they do not exist at all.

😃 Gender and sex: This is the area where MT services are extremely politically incorrect. MT will mix formal and informal ways of addressing people. The woman from the previous sentence can be easily transformed into a man in the next one. If you use machine translation, make sure that your agent, including the inanimate one, does not change its gender unnoticed (“Maria picked up the watch. He was beautiful.”). Particular attention should be paid to personal pronouns (he, she, his, hers, etc.) and other parts of speech that have morphological signs of gender.

😃 Short sentences: They have many flaws because MT lacks context. Translation in the absence of context is a challenge for humans as well.

😃 Letter case and punctuation: Sometimes, the result of machine translation changes as soon as you change the case of the first letter of the sentence, add or remove a period, etc. Most MT services have successfully overcome this flaw, but it has not disappeared completely.

😃 Lower quality if neither the source nor the target language is English: English is the language of international communication and, most often, the native language of MT service developers. English datasets used to train their neural MT networks (NMT) are the largest in size. For a rare language pair, such as Hungarian—Swahili, there is simply no dataset of sufficient size to train a neural MT network. Therefore, machine translation in such language pairs often occurs through the mediation of English: Hungarian → English, then English → Swahili. That is, double machine translation is performed, and the number of all the defects mentioned above doubles. They are trying to fight this drawback, too.

😃 Humor, wordplay, allusions, hints, allegories: For machine translation, this is still terra incognita: it simply does not identify them and translates them literally. MT is not good at humor and wit.

#machinetranslation #editing #english

🖍 Just like Trados Studio, memoQ allows you to check spelling using free Hunspell dictionaries or Microsoft Word.

😃 To enable and configure spell checking in memoQ, choose: memoQ > Options > Options > Spelling and grammar (on the left pane).

😃 A dialog box appears where you can turn on spell checking and set different options for different languages.

😃 To enable spell checking, select the Check spelling as you type checkbox.

😃 To “teach” memoQ to use the Word spelling module to check texts in the language you need, select it in the language list and then set the two radio buttons below to Microsoft Word.

Now memoQ will use Word to check spelling and underline unfamiliar words in red, just like Word does (of course, Word must be installed on your computer).

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This and other publications are also available on our blog.

#memoq #techtips #spelling