Working with Terminology | Transit Training
Overview
A key component of Transit is the TermStar NXT terminology management system. In TermStar NXT, you can create dictionaries and save general or project-specific terminology to them.
You use TermStar NXT in Transit in the following ways:
- Terminology search (see section 5.7.3 “Searching for terminology”).
- View terminology suggestions in dictionaries for the active segment and transfer these to your translation (see section 5.7.6 “Transferring a translation from the dictionary”).
- Add terminology from Transit to a dictionary (see section 5.7.7 “Adding terminology to the dictionary”).
- Check terminology to determine whether you used the translations from the dictionaries (see section 6.6 “Format check”).
- Automatically accept all terms from the dictionary (see section 5.7.8 “Accepting all terms”).
- Add specialist terminology from a language pair to a dictionary (see section 3.11 “Creating, editing and managing dictionaries”).
If you have already created a dictionary for your terminology in TermStar NXT, you can assign it to a Transit project. If you do this, Transit also opens the dictionary simultaneously with the project.
If you add terminology to a dictionary, Transit saves the new terminology to the ‘current‘ dictionary. This dictionary can be defined in the project settings. Please refer to section 3.6.13 “’Dictionaries’ project settings” for more detailed information on how to assign a dictionary to a project and how to specify your ‘current’ dictionary.
You will find detailed information on TermStar NXT in the TermStar NXT User’s Guide.
With Dynamic Linking, Transit can display all the segments which contain particular pairs of terms. This quickly and easily provides you with an overview of where, and in what context a source-language term and its translation are used. It also allows you to effortlessly obtain up-to-date examples at any time in the context of the current project for terminology maintenance purposes (see section 5.11 “Dynamic Linking”).
5.7.2 Switching between the Transit editor and TermStar
You can switch back and forth between the Transit editor and the TermStar project dictionaries by clicking on the corresponding tab or by pressing the keyboard shortcut CTRL+TAB:
Fig. 5-41: The language pair and TermStar (project dictionaries) tabs
5.7.3 Searching for terminology
Searching for Terminology in TermStar dictionaries
Information on searching for terminology in TermStar can be found in the TermStar NXT User’s Guide, section 5.4 “Searching for a word”.
Searching for terminology via TermStar Gate
Using the TermStar Gate plug-in, you can search for translations or enter terminology from Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker. This gives Microsoft Word or Adobe FrameMaker direct access to TermStar NXT and thus your local project dictionaries.
Information on these plug-ins you find in the “TermStar Gate for Word – Installation & Usage” and “TermStar Gate for FrameMaker – Installation & Usage” documents.
5.7.4 Searching for terminology and translations via Web search
Web search allows you to access the internet from within Transit, to search for translations and terminology online:
Fig. 5-42: Web search window
The icons at the top of the window are used to access the following functions:
Tab. 5-9: Web search: functions
1 Open the Web search window (detailed information on calling up tools can be found in the section “How do I display a floating window?”).
Alternatively, it is also possible to open this window via Windows | Open | Web search.
Transit displays the Web search window.
2 To search for a term or a translation on the internet, proceed as follows:
– Select the services which you want to search from the Search in list.
Select a service by checking the box on the left of the service name. Alternatively, you can also select all services by clicking on the Check all option in the icon bar.
– Select Source language from the icon bar if you want to search for the search term in the source language of the project which is currently open. Select Target language from the icon bar if you want to search for the search term in the target language of the project which is currently open.
– Enter a search term into the field and press the Enter key or click on Search.
If one of the services finds the search term, a green light appears to the left of the corresponding list entry, and the word Go appears to the right (next to the globe icon). If a red light appears instead, then the search query returned no results for this service.
– You can display the search results for a particular service by clicking the Go button.
Transit displays the search results for the respective service in the right-hand portion of the Web search window.
You can call up the website of the search service also without carrying out a search. To do so, click on the globe icon in the corresponding list entry.
The available search engines may not support the selected search language. If no search engine can be found for a language, Transit displays the following message:
No suitable search engine could be found for the selected language.
When you select a search result, an error message may appear in the Web search window referring to a script error in the page being displayed. To prevent these error messages from being displayed, script debugging must be disabled in Internet Explorer. To do this, select the Disable Script Debugging option under Settings | Control Panel | Internet Options | Advanced.
5.7.5 Terminology search – User preferences
In the user preferences, you can define how and which folders to search for terminology. You can also determine how terms are displayed in the language pair and the Terminology window.
1 Select Transit button | User preferences.
Transit displays the User preferences window.
2 Select the Terminology search option.
Transit displays the Terminology search user preferences:
Fig. 5-43: User preferences window, Terminology search screen
3 In the Search type section, you can specify how to search for terminology:
– Morphology-based – Transit carries out a morphological search which means that during search for dictionary entries all inflected forms of a search term (i. e. declined or conjugated forms) are taken into account.
Transit supports morphology-based search for the following languages:
German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish.
– Exact matches only – Transit performs a search for terms which match the search term precisely. This option disables morphological search; the option Morphology-based is deselected.
– Match case – Ignore – Transit ignores differences in case.
– Match case – Match, but ignore for 1st character – Transit ignores a difference in the case of the first character.
– Match case – Match – Transit pays attention to differences in case.
– Regard formatted strings from the working folder – Transit searches the working folder for terms containing formatting information, for example, italic, bold or underline and displays the source-language term and its translation in the Terminology window.
To distinguish these terminology suggestions from found dictionary entries in the Terminology window, they are not marked yellow, but blue.
– Regard formatted strings from the reference material – Transit also searches the reference material for terms containing formatting information, for example, italic, bold or underline.
To distinguish these terminology suggestions from found dictionary entries in the Terminology window, they are not marked yellow, but blue.
– Source language: Regard disallowed terms – When background scanning for dictionary entries and performing the terminology check, Transit also takes into account data records that contain the term used in the source language as a disallowed term.
In case of documents using incorrect terminology we recommend to use this option. This allows you to take into account the terminology quality of the documents to be translated and optimise the terminology check.
In case of documents using correct terminology we recommend not to use this option.
4 In the section Highlight in language pair, you can specify which terms should be highlighted in colour in the language pair.
– all – All terms are highlighted.
– if target language exists – A term will be highlighted only if there is a translation for it in the currently selected language.
– if target language is missing – A term will be highlighted in the source-language segment if it has no translation in the currently selected target language.
5 In the Display in “Terminology” window section, you can specify which terms will be displayed in the Terminology window.
– all – All terms are displayed.
– if target language exists – A term will be displayed only if there is a translation for it in the currently selected language.
6 Confirm your settings:
– Click on OK to confirm the changes and close the User preferences window.
– Click on Save to confirm the settings without closing the window. This allows you to make further changes to the user preferences.
5.7.6 Transferring a translation from the dictionary
Transit automatically searches the project dictionaries for appropriate entries while you translate. By default, Transit carries out a morphological search and also finds declined or conjugated forms of existing entries. If required, you can determine that Transit displays only exact matches.
Dictionary entries which have been found in TermStar NXT are highlighted by default with a yellow background and displayed in the Terminology window. When translating a segment, there are several ways to accept a term:
- Replace a word with its translation from the project dictionary.
- Select the translation which will replace the word, if more than one translation is found.
- Insert a translation without replacing a word.
Transit can also automatically accept all terms from the dictionary. Please refer to section 5.7.8 “Accepting all terms” for more detailed information on this topic.
With Dynamic Linking, Transit can display all the segments which contain the suggestions from the dictionary. This quickly and easily provides you with an overview of where, and in what context a source-language term and its target-language equivalent are used. It also allows you to effortlessly obtain up-to-date examples at any time in the context of the current project for terminology maintenance purposes (see section 5.11 “Dynamic Linking”).
1 Place the cursor onto, or at the beginning of, the word you wish to replace.
Transit shows the dictionary entry in the Terminology window.
2 To accept this translation, press the keyboard shortcut ALT+T
Transit replaces the selected word with the translation from the project dictionaries.
If you also want to change the case of the initial letter when inserting the term, press ALT+SHIFT+T instead of the shortcut mentioned above.
1 Place the cursor onto, or at the beginning of, the word you wish to replace.
Transit shows the dictionary entries in the Terminology window.
2 To accept the translation, press the keyboard shortcut ALT+K, .
here refers to the letter which is in front of the particular translation in the Terminology window.
Transit replaces the selected word with the translation selected.
If you also want to change the case of the initial letter when inserting the term, press ALT+K, SHIFT+ instead of the keyboard shortcut mentioned above.
1 Position the cursor at the position at which you wish to insert the translation.
Transit shows the dictionary entries in the Terminology window.
2 To accept the translation, press the shortcut ALT+G, .
here refers to the letter which is in front of the particular translation in the Terminology window.
Transit inserts the translation selected at the cursor position.
If you also want to change the case of the initial letter when inserting the term, press ALT+G, SHIFT+ instead of the keyboard shortcut mentioned above.
Consider the following scenario: Transit indicates that it has found an entry in the dictionary, that you want to accept; however Transit only enters a space. This may be explained by the following:
Transit highlights a word if it finds it as a source-language entry in the dictionary. This is the case even if there is no entry in the dictionary for your current target language, (but for other languages which you are not working with at the moment). If you then want to transfer the (non-existent) translation from the dictionary, Transit inserts a space because no translation is available.
If your dictionary is incomplete and does not contain a target-language entry for every source-language entry, you have the following options:
– In the Terminology search user preferences, you can select the if target language exists option under Display in “Terminology” window. The Terminology window will then only display the entries which have a translation in the currently selected target language.
– You can create a separate dictionary containing only data records which have a term in both the source and target language.
5.7.7 Adding terminology to the dictionary
You can add terminology to the current TermStar dictionary while you are translating in Transit.
The following options are available:
- Adding selected terms to dictionary
Select a word in the source language and its translation in the target language and add it straight to the current dictionary as a new data record.
- Adding terminology to the dictionary using rapid entry mode
Select a word and use the rapid entry function to add it as a new data record or a new entry to a dictionary.
With the rapid entry function, you can add extra information to the dictionary, apart from the term (e.g. subject, context). In addition, you can also specify to which project dictionary the terminology should be added.
- Adding terminology suggestions based on markups to the dictionary
Adding selected terms to dictionary
You can select words in the source and target language and immediately add them to the dictionary as a new data record. With this function, you can only specify the source and target-language terms for this entry or data record.
If you add a selected term to the dictionary, Transit always saves it to the ‘current‘ dictionary. Which dictionary this is can be specified in the project settings (see section 3.6.13 “’Dictionaries’ project settings”).
Please ensure that you have specified the required dictionary as the current dictionary.
1 Select the term in the source language and the translation in the target language.
2 Select Terminology | Creation | Insert selected.
Transit inserts the pair of terms into the dictionary as a new data record.
– If a data record containing an identical pair of terms already exists, Transit displays the following message:
Data record "< …>" already exists.
– If the new data record has the same source-language term but a different target-language term as an existing data record, Transit displays the following message:
Entry "< …>" already exists.
Decide whether you want a new data record to be created or the existing data record to be expanded:
– New data record – The terminology is added to the current dictionary as a new data record.
– Insert – The terminology is appended as a new entry to the existing data record in the current dictionary.
– Cancel – No terminology is added to the current dictionary.
Adding terminology to the dictionary using rapid entry mode
You can add words to the current dictionary using the rapid entry mode.
Transit displays the following fields in the Rapid entry window:
- Dictionary to which the entries should be added
- Current source-language term
- Current target-language term
- Fields with input verification
You can specify these fields in the dictionary settings. Please refer to the TermStar NXT User’s Guide for more detailed information.
If one of the terms you have entered already exists in the dictionary, you can choose one of the following options:
- New data record – TermStar NXT creates a new data record with both entries.
Always create a new data record if the terms have a different meaning than the existing data record.
- Insert – TermStar NXT inserts the new term as a new entry in the data record of the existing term.
Always insert an entry into the existing data record if the term has the same meaning as the existing data record.
When making new entries, TermStar NXT only checks the dictionary to which you are adding the new entries, i.e. the dictionary that you selected in the Rapid entry window. Entries which exist in other dictionaries are not taken into consideration.
1 Select Terminology | Creation | Rapid entry.
Transit displays the Rapid entry window with the following fields:
Fig. 5-44: Rapid entry window
– Target dictionary to which the terminology is added
– Source-language term which you have selected
– Target-language term which you have selected
– Other fields, for which an input verification has been defined, may also appear
2 Select the dictionary to which Transit should add the terminology.
3 Correct the source-language or target-language term, if necessary.
4 Fill in the other fields, if necessary.
5 Confirm your entry with Save.
– If a data record containing an identical pair of terms already exists, Transit displays the following message:
Data record "< …>" already exists.
– If the new data record has the same source-language term but a different target-language term as an existing data record, Transit displays the following message:
Entry "< …>" already exists.
Decide whether you want a new data record to be created or the existing data record to be expanded:
– New data record – The terminology is added to the selected dictionary as a new data record.
– Insert – The terminology is appended as a new entry to the existing data record in the dictionary selected.
– Cancel – You return to the Rapid entry window without having added the terminology to the dictionary.
As the Rapid entry window remains open, you can create further data records.
To close the Rapid entry window, click Cancel or click Save if all the fields are empty.
Adding terminology suggestions based on markups to the dictionary
The Terminology window can also display terminology suggestions based upon already translated terms from your working folder or in the reference material that contain formatting information, for example, italic, bold or underline. Terminology suggestions based on markups are indicated in blue in the Terminology window.
For the Terminology window to display terminology suggestions based upon markups, you need to select the options Regard formatted strings from the working folder and/or Regard formatted strings from the reference material in the User preferences for Terminology search (see section 5.7.5 “Terminology search – User preferences”).
You can either immediately accept these terminology suggestions into the current dictionary as a new data record, or use the rapid entry function to add them to a dictionary as new data records or new entries.
1 Open the context menu in the Terminology window by right-clicking on a terminology suggestion (highlighted in blue).
2 From the context menu, select either Insert terminology in current dictionary or Rapid entry.
From this point, the procedure is exactly the same as that described in the sections “How do I add selected terms to the current dictionary?” and “How do I add terminology to a project dictionary using the rapid entry function?”.
5.7.8 Accepting all terms
Transit can automatically accept all terms from the dictionary for segments which are not translated. Transit then automatically inserts the translation of the source-language terms it finds in the dictionary into the target-language segment.
If Transit finds several translations in the dictionary for one source-language term, Transit always takes the first translation.
If Transit finds a source-language term in the dictionary but no target-language translation, Transit leaves the source-language term unchanged.
1 Specify via Terminology | Use | Auto-insert if you want to accept the terms just for the active segment or for the whole file.
– Select the Segment option if you want to accept the terms for the active segment,
– Select the File option if you want to accept the terms for the whole file.
Transit displays the following message:
Do you really want to accept the translation for all words found in the dictionary?
2 If you are sure you want to accept all the terms from the dictionary, click Yes.
Transit replaces all the source-language terms in segments which are not translated with the target-language terms from the dictionary.
Now Transit displays the following message:
All terms found in the dictionary have been inserted.
