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How to… Work with formatting |
Documents to be translated are usually formatted in some way – they have a specific layout complete with headings and subheadings, tabs, paragraphs, fonts, highlights, etc. When the document is imported into memoQ, formatting information is separated from the actual text, and the text is devided into segments. More often than not, the translator is required to submit the translation in the format of the source document, so text and formatting should be together again at the end of the project. How can you ensure this kind of integrity? It depends on the type of formatting.
There are three types of formatting that may occur in a document
| · | basic formatting (bold, italics and underlined) |
| · | other formatting (whitespace, different font, different font size or color, inline images, line breaks, tabulators, etc.) |
| · | formatting in XML-type documents |
Basic formatting
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When words are formatted as bold, italics or underlined, your task is very simple. memoQ displays these styles in the target segments, so you can see them and format your translation accordingly. |
Structural formatting
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When formatting is more complicated – not bold, italics, or underline – memoQ does not display it in the source text. Instead, it identifies parts of the original document that are formatted in the same way, and every time this uniform formatting changes it puts a placeholder, a tag, into the text. You will see the tags {1}, {2}, {3} etc. in the translation grid, and you will have to insert the same tags into the translated text where you think the change of formatting is appropriate. You do not have to worry about the actual formatting; just insert the tag at the same position in the target text where it was in the source text. You can do it by placing your cursor to the appropriate position in the target cell, and pressing F8. You can also press F8 while typing the translation. Please note that you cannot change the order of the tags: pressing F8 will always insert the next tag. If you move the insertion point backwards and press F8, memoQ renumbers the tags in the target cell. The actual meaning of the tags is retrieved only when the document is exported. To make sure that you inserted all source document tags into the target document before exporting it, the segments containing formatting tags are marked by a red circle with a white exclamation marks. The notification will remain there until all formatting tags are inserted in the target cell. You will not see translation tags for every change in formatting. If a segment is formatted in a uniform way but differently from the previous or the next segment, the segment boundary itself is an invisible tag. If you decide to join two segments with different formatting into one, you will see that a tag appears – the invisible tag becomes visible. See also: Concepts and explanations: Uninterpreted formatting tags |
Formatting in XML-type documents
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These file types are special because by their very nature their content is structured through the use of tags. To import them, memoQ makes a distinction between two types of tags: structural and inline. Structural tags determine which areas of an XML document contain translatable content, while represent actual changes in formatting. memoQ uses XML-style inline tags when importing and displaying XML, HTML, INX, MIF, XLIFF and TTX documents. They can be opening, closing, and empty tags, and they appear differently from the purple formatting tags you are already familiar with. You can see their types, names and attributes, and you are free to rearrange, add or drop them. The Format menu enables you to define level of details you want to see in an inline tag, and you can even filter for certain attributes you want to be displayed. A set of menu commands and shortcuts is provided to copy the inline tags from the source text into the target one, or insert a new tag to the target text. You can use menu commands, shortcut keys, or context menu commands for editing the tags. As in every XML document, make sure there is a closing tag in the text for each opening one that you use. A useful feature of memoQ is that it automatically converts special character sequences into tags, allowing you to freely type them. Because inline tags can be freely manipulated, translators can accidentally produce invalid documents. memoQ can perform a number of checks that produce warnings if there is a chance that the resulting document will be invalid. Just as in the case of uninterpreted tags, the warning is indicated by an exclamation mark in the translation documents. To view a collected list of all warnings and errors and each of them, you can use the Resolve errors and warnings tool in the Operations menu. See also: |