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Merged segments not showing merged text

I have had to merge segments – and now find that while everything looks good in the source and target in Trados, when I hit preview [source or target] the rest of the sentence – except the first line, or the orgignal first segment – has disappeared: any ideas how to fix this?

[IE] 3 merged segemnts, for example, forming one full sentence in both source and target in Trados, only display the first line [presumably the initial segment] for both source and target in both html and embedded preview.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Former Member

    hmm, I am not good at this kind of tedious manual job - I prefer to use VBA.

    You'd better do it "One Go" style, I mean...  find "All Select TABLE" something and do the procedures I mentioned above.. OK ?

    Good Luck To You

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Former Member

    if you want..

    Dim myTable
    If ActiveDocument.Tables.Count > 0 Then
    For Each myTable In ActiveDocument.Tables
    myTable.Rows.HeightRule = wdRowHeightAuto
    Next
    End If

  • It is a TABLE, the height of CELL has restriced

    That's EXACTLY what I thought when I saw the original post the first time...
    And that's what also Jerzy asked right away...

    So the whole story is rather about lack of user Word skills than a Studio problem.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Former Member

    SDL Trados Studio's translated final docx has lots of "<w:trPr><w:trHeight w:val="someFigure" w:hRule="exact"/></w:trPr>" element.

    I my opinion it is NEEDLESS.

    And it is the root cause of SDL Preview's unusual behavior too.

    So, if possible, it should be disappearead. 

  • If that is in the source file as well, Studio MUST NOT remove it.
    And yes, if that is in the source file, the source file is formatted stupidly not localization friendly, as also already mentioned in this thread.

    So again, not a Studio problem in fact.

  • This is entirely a Studio problem, since

    1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
    2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

    To say "the whole story is rather about lack of user Word skills than a Studio problem" shows a complete ignorance of the process:

    • As with many projects worldwide, a pdf was machine translated and the bilingual file sent to me for post-editing.
    • IE at no stage was there ever any "user Word skills" involved in the xliff file sent to me.
    • The machine translation was obviously done by machine and the file created was created by Studio.

    Second, DL Trados Studio's translated final docx is also necessarily nothing to do with a user and everything to with Trados.

    Equally, if the source file [created by Trados] has these errors, why were thy not flagged up by Trados when the source xliff was created?

    If "the source file is formatted not localization friendly", why?

    Why has Trados not caught this?

    Finally, regardless of all this, the fact remains that while the merged segments work in most cases, the translator will see the translation as perfect in the editor view of Trados, but will only know about this problem by generating a preview.

    Clearly this fact alone is entirely a Trados problem and nothing to do with the user or with word: Trados [not the user, not Word] shows the translation as complete in the editor view, but not in the preview.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to John Kingsmore

    easy, my friend

    you are quite right

    "Machines are idiot" including the most advanced DeepLearning and AbyssLearning WhatSoEver...

    It needs smart people's touch, just like you.

    And never mind biased opinions, just ignore it.

    Regards

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member in reply to Former Member

    it is hard to say as a BUG, but it is very clear that something should be done form SDL side not from user side. 

  • Thanks for the "sample" file.  I created the sort of file I was looking for from your file by saving the source, editing the source and then using that.  File attached so you can see what I was getting at:

    small_test.docx

    The conclusions I can draw from this are these:

    1. The docx is really poorly prepared so I 100% agree with Evzen here.  You for example see that these two rows are on completely different table rows... separate paragraphs:

      Screenshot of Trados Studio showing two separate table rows with text not aligned properly.

      And here, the second part of the sentence is a header and also part of a separate table row and different paragraph:

      Screenshot of Trados Studio with a header incorrectly formatted as part of a table row.

    2. Studio should still be able to handle the preview in my opinion.

    You can sort of see what's happening since a merge with the initial preview shows the highlighted segment of the first one even after the merge took place and it doesn't pick up the fact that there is more text there.  So the link between the original source file where this is a completely separate table row is still there and the preview associates the merged text with the second row in the table and not this segment.  As soon as you refresh the preview it won't see this additional text at all:

    Screenshot of Trados Studio preview highlighting a segment that fails to merge with additional text.

    So yes, the document that has been presented is a terrible (or really good) example of a file given to anyone to localize when they are using a CAT tool that really does care about formatting to the extent Studio does.  But sometimes I think Studio needs a "lenient mode" where it's a little more forgiving to make the translation process easier for the translators since we will never change the ability of our clients, or many translators (by this I mean technical ability AND the time they have available to turn the translation around), to be able to fix a document like before translating.  Might be worth looking at the tools being used for the PDF conversion though as there may be much better ones available that don't put things into lots of tables like this.  I think I've seen some free online PDF converters do things like this and in these cases it would be simply better to hand the PDF to the translator since most CAT tools can do a better job handled the right way.

    It's also another very good example of why we never supported merge across paragraphs before as it can present some challenges because of the way Studio handles paragraphs to provide additional information to the user that most CAT tools don't.

    I'll log this example as a bug and let you know when I have some comment on this from the deveopment team.

    Paul Filkin | RWS

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    [edited by: Trados AI at 6:09 PM (GMT 0) on 28 Feb 2024]
  • This is entirely a Studio problem, since

    1. a) the original source xliff/project was made by Studio and
    2. b) the target file, also produced by Studio, is also coming out wrong when segments are merged.

    Sorry man, but this clearly indicates that you have no idea about the technicalities behind the whole story and therefore make totally wrong conclusions.

    First of all, if you would mention right at the beginning that the source was a PDF, the entire discussion would have been MUCH shorter!

    It's notoriously known that PDF as a source is evil and very bad idea.
    PDF was ALWAYS meant ONLY FOR VISUAL CONSUMPTION and NEVER meant for editing... therefore it lacks some information needed for editing... therefore the applications attempting to edit PDFs have to GUESS these information since they have no way to know the original intentions of the creator of the actual source format from which the PDF was created... and therefore the result is way too often just as sh*tty as in your case.

    It's also notoriously known that Studio uses 3rd party automatic PDF-to-DOCX conversion behind the scenes.
    Since it's automatic, the above paragraph applies...
    And since it's 3rd party, Studio has no way to influence the result... hence it's NOT Studio problem.

    Second, it's also notoriously known and mentioned everywhere that the intermediate DOCX file coming from the automated conversion should be manually edited and cleaned from the sh*t before stuffing it to any localization software (i.e. not only Studio!!!).
    So yes, it's indeed about lack of user knowledge (either knowledge about the required cleaning, or the knowledge WHAT and HOW to clean)....

    And third, the entire problem has nothing to do with merging segments in fact, the same issue - caused by the sh*tty Word source! - can be seen without merging as well.
    The preview DOES contain the entire text, indeed... it's just not/hardly visible due to the fixed table row height.
    The following screenshot shows the hard-to-see artifacts of the remaining text without any merging, just previewing the SDLXLIFF you posted.

    Screenshot of Trados Studio showing a segment with overlapping text, making it hard to read, and a red box highlighting the issue.

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    Generated Image Alt-Text
    [edited by: Trados AI at 6:09 PM (GMT 0) on 28 Feb 2024]