Alignment issue and my word file has been replaced with a pdf conversion.

Question

I'm a Trados newbie and have just tried to align a recent translation in order to improve my TM. I tried to align a pdf and my translation in Word. However, all I now have is the pdf and a conversion of the pdf which has replaced my translated Word file. I can't seem to restore my translation. Firstly, can anyone help me restore my translation? Secondly, what did I do wrong?

Oana Nagy · Accepted Answer

Hi Michael Robson , 
 
Welcome to the SDL community. 
 
As a new user you will for sure have quite a few questions and the SDL Community is a great place to find help. 
 
1) 
If I understand the situation correctly, you have already completed your first translation (adding a new empty TM to the project/single file translation option). 
Should this be the case and you have confirmed the translated segments to the TM (populating the TM as you work through the translation) then you will already have the cleanest TM possible and wont get any further benefits of trying to align the same translated documents again. 
 
If you have made errors in the original translation, reopen the project- make the necessary changes and then update the main translation memory via batch tasks. 
If you have not used a TM in your translation, you can still createa TM from the bilingual SDLXLIFF file- which will again provide you with a clean populated TM 
 
2) 
In a different scenario- 
if you have for instance, previous translations that you have done in Word/Excel for example, then you can use the alignment tool in Studio to create a TM from these documents. 
If you have PDF's, I would strongly suggest converting these to Word format first (using maybe a tool such as Adobe Acrobat), cleaning up the Word document before using the alignment tool. 
 
Please take a look at the following- 'How to translate in 10 easy steps...' 
 www.sdltrados.com/.../translate-a-file-with-sdl-trados-studio-2017.html 
 
Please let me know if you still have questions.

Paul Filkin · Answer

Hi Michael Robson , 
 
When Studio handles a PDF it converts it to Word. So if your filenames were exactly the same then this is probably how the conversion of the PDF overwrote your Word file. Try changing the name of the files, maybe add the language code to the start of each one for example.

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Alignment issue and my word file has been replaced with a pdf conversion.