CAT Project-An Application of SDL Trados

Introduction

CAT tools are very helpful for translation and localization projects. Using CAT tools appropriately will save you lots of time to enhance the localization efficiency and quality by running pseudo-translation, applying TM(translation memories) and TB(termbase), operating QA checker, and configuring filters for MS office files. This post will show you how I manage a translation project with the assistance of SDL Trados.

Language Pairs

Chinese(simplified) to English

Our Talents (Team Coconut)

Project Manager: Xinyue Sun
Chief Translator: Shiyi Tang
Translator: Yiwen Wang
Translator & Editor: Daniel Joeng
Reviewer: Xintian Li

Project Deliverables

Proposal(SOW)
Deliverables
Presentation on Lessons Learned

Tips for Regex with Trados

Regex (Regular expressions) is very useful to prevent potential translation errors in CAT tools. You can identify errors in SDL Trados following these steps:
Project Settings ->Verification -> QA Checker -> Regular Expressions

The followings are some regex rules that we can apply when translating English into Chinese, and tests were operated by regular expression 101.

1.Quotation Marks

Chinese and English have different quotation marks.
For example:
EN: ”… ‘…’ …”
ZH-CN(Simplified): “… ‘…’ …”

In this case, we can use RegEx for all types of quotation marks check: (‘|”|“|‘|’|”|)

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2. Date Format

In English, the order of date is: month, day, and year. However, in Chinese, the order is: year, month and day. Here is an example of regex for the American date format check: \d{1,2}\/\d{1,2}\/\d{4}

3. Number Format

In English, numbers are separated by a comma every thousand. However, in Chinese, numbers are separated every ten thousand. In English, the period is a dot while in Chinese, the period is a small circle. So, there should be a warning when it appears a dot in the target language. Here is an example of regex for the US format check: \d+\d+,\d+

Don’t be intimidated by the terms, abbreviations and diverse buttons on the interface of CAT tools. It will be a breeze to use any CAT tool if you are familiar with SDL Trados. Hope this post can help you know more about CAT tools.