What’s new in Trados – Q2 2023 round-up
27 Jul 2023
6 mins read
The past three months have brought about exciting advancements to Trados, notably machine translation from Language Weaver’s now being included across all editions. The addition of machine translation is crucial in helping our customers achieve the goal to translate everything. While this capability was previously available in Studio and Enterprise, it has now been expanded to Team and Accelerate editions, with an annual allowance of 60 million characters. To learn more about how Trados and Language Weaver provide the perfect combination to translate everything automatically, watch our webinar recording.
To further support our customers, we continuously introduce new innovations to our cloud-based environment and seamlessly integrated desktop CAT tool. These updates are automatically available to our customers when they are released for our users to enjoy! To keep you up to date with the many developments to Trados, this blog provides a quarterly round-up of our key updates. For more information on all the enhancements we’ve made to Trados, please visit the RWS Community.
Improved quality and flexibility with new translation management functionality
Improved translation quality: Trados can help you to improve quality to help at each stage in the translation process from the start, maintain during translation and measure quality objectively.
- Effective terminology management plays a vital role before a project starts in ensuring accuracy and consistency. Failing to use or update terminology can lead to problems like the use of incorrect or forbidden terms. Trados has enhanced its built-in terminology management by introducing a new feature called ‘Status (System)’, allowing users to designate forbidden terms and provide detailed explanations. This status field triggers specific actions in the online editor, enabling easy identification of forbidden synonyms and excluding them from smart actions. These measures prevent linguists from using non-approved terminology, resulting in improved translation quality, consistency, and increased productivity.
- Trados efficiently addresses translation errors through a robust set of fully automated quality assurance (QA) controls integrated into the platform. These controls actively ensure that translations align with predefined rules, promoting accuracy and consistency. These rules can now be further customized to suit the language with the new ability to configure Language specific QA checks in Project Settings. This feature enables tailored QA checks, reducing false positives by accounting for nuances in target languages. Additionally, it is now possible to configure the number of times a file will be returned in the workflow after a QA check identifies verification errors, or to only move forward when there are no verification errors reported.
- The translation quality assessment (TQA) feature in Trados offers an objective evaluation of translation quality, eliminating ambiguity and subjectivity. Linguistic reviewers can pinpoint specific errors in translations based on predefined criteria, ensuring clarity and setting expectations from the outset. With the option of six existing TQA models, as well as the new ability to create custom models, users can tailor the evaluation process to their specific needs. This includes defining new categories, adding sub-categories, and modifying severity levels as necessary. Additionally, when reviewers conduct a TQA and provide feedback to improve the quality of the work, translators now have visibility into and the ability to address individual issues raised by the reviewers.
Screenshot showing a custom TQA model
Streamline project creation and keep them running smoothly with translation collaboration enhancements
Flexible vendor management: Trados simplifies translation vendor communication and workflow, ensuring efficient collaboration and eliminating miscommunication. With the vendor management feature, you can maintain a centralized database of vendors and benefit from automatic vendor quoting based on project-associated templates. We have recently introduced increased flexibility when assigning tasks between vendors and other users or transferring tasks from one vendor to another. At various stages, such as project planning or vendor quote approval, it is now possible to reassign tasks to a different vendor. This ensures that if a vendor is unable to work on a task, you have the resources available to keep your projects on track and progressing smoothly.
Screenshot showing vendor reassignment
A range of enhancements improve the user experience for Project Managers. These include:
- A new ‘Short Project ID’ field to simplify project identification in Trados and facilitate easier communication among stakeholders.
- Enabling filtered Translation Memory exports from the Translation Memory view for exporting Translation Units created by specific users or within certain time periods.
- Introducing shapes to represent different types of Users, Groups, and Vendors in the system, making it easier to identify them.
- Allowing the creation of projects with the same source and target language. This enables offering source language editing services, optimizing content for consistency and adherence to language-specific rules, and improving machine translation output for subsequent translations into other languages.
- The ability to batch replace files across multiple projects within a group. Users are prompted to select the projects for file upload and specify the source and target languages, with the system automatically matching uploaded files with tasks.
Screenshot showing a project with the same source and target language
Speed up translation processes and improve consistency with new translation productivity features
As part of our commitment to assisting localization professionals in translating everything, the latest service release (SR1) of Trados Studio 2022 introduces powerful new capabilities and enhancements to the features delivered in our initial 2022 release. These include:
- New desktop editor technology, resulting in faster file opening, seamless handling of larger files, and enhanced visual quality, providing a better user experience.
- Full support for Trados GroupShare projects in the Manager view: You may recall that we introduced the Manager view (BETA) with Trados Studio 2022, which offers a more unified approach to managing projects and files. Originally supporting only local Studio projects, this new view now also handles GroupShare projects, completing support for both local and server projects. Compatibility with cloud projects and other project types will be available soon.
- Continuous improvements to Studio’s seamless integration with the cloud, such as supporting the migration of large translation memories and termbases to the cloud.
- A new app, OpenAI Translator, that brings the power of the large language model behind ChatGPT to Trados Studio.
Find out more in this dedicated SR1 blog or watch our ‘What’s new in Trados Studio 2022 SR1’ video.
We hope you have enjoyed this quarterly round-up, and we look forward to bringing you our next round-up in October! As we continue our cloud-first strategy across the Trados family of products, we’re excited to keep delivering features to help you achieve your business goals.
If your organization is not using Trados, please get in touch to find out more about the solutions we offer.
Camille Avila
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