Tuesday, February 26, 2008

When are two names 67% the same?

Would you prefer:
  • To have "afxc04z5.htm" suggested as a translation when the html file in the string you are translating is actually "afxc04z5_10.htm"?
Or
  • Would you rather copy manually the file name from the source segment to the target one, avoiding the risk of accepting a wrong file name while typing rapidly?
I would always opt for the second option - it's just too easy accepting a fuzzy match "as is", when you are typing fast, and this type of error is serious (it would break a web site), and remarkably difficult to spot (file names looks similar, and re-reading the translation there is no logical clue to indicate that something is amiss).

The brillant programming team that gave us useless fuzzy matches like this or this one, once again chooses the wrong answer:

4 comments:

  1. So you want Trados to recognize such segments and copy source instead of suggesting any fuzzy matches? When translating such places I simply press Alt+Ins without looking at suggestion at all and don't see any matching algorithm problems here.

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  2. I would prefer that things such as filenames not be matched at all (save for 100% matches, of course), then copy them manually with Alt+Ins. Probably I was not clear in my post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Use a regular expression in QA Check plugin to locate all xxx.html (or whatever). Check all the segments listed in the message pane...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Still, that one "word" contains both letters and numbers - it is clearly no part of speech. No fuzzies should be presented for non-words. There's no excuse... especially when these are the kind of segments many agencies expect to have at a rebate. Admit it, 100% matches require only half as much work as this one - and that's a hell of a lot of mouse clicks for a 30K-word project!

    ReplyDelete

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