ATER is an editor for TTX files oriented to work on a project consisting of several TTX files and providing handy tools for search and making corrections throughout the whole project.
Initially ATER was planned to be a tool for making quick and practical corrections in a translated project consisting of more than one TTX file. Hence there is a fundamental limitation of this application – ATER operates with already segmented TTX files only. However, nothing may prevent from performing segmentation using Translate option in Translator Workbench with Segment unknown sentences option enabled.
The second limitation (which is not so important) is having SDL Trados installed as its DLL is now used for reading/writing TTX files. For this purpose the demo version is quite enough though. Besides, it is possible to remove this limitation later.
While its development the application was tested using computer with Russian versions of OS Windows XP SP2 and Microsoft Office 2003 SP2, and SDL Trados 8.2.0.835 installed.
In the Project area of the ATER window from the contextual menu select the Settings option and in the appeared dialog box select source language and target language. Then drag and drop the segmented TTX files into this area. A dialog box demonstrating the process of import will be displayed. Project memory may be also imported as TMX files (version 1.4 is preferable). TMX file may be created by performing project memory export from Workbench. It is possible to drag and drop the whole folders, the application chooses only TTX and TMX files. Then the prepared project should be saved as <ProjectName>.ATER file. The project file tree has check boxes - initially enabled – this means that the corresponding file is used in search and export operations. While editing the source TTX files are not required.
Editing is performed in a conventional text editor, where each record consists of three strings (paragraphs): information string, source string and translation string. Only text in the translation string may be modified; it is impossible to add or remove a paragraph. Font and colour for each string may be changed – see the Options menu.
If to double-click a file, it is appeared in the Edit tab, its upper part. The lower part is used for displaying the contextual search results, but it is also possible to edit your translation there. By default the contextual search is performed using «fuzzy» algorithm every time the cursor moves to another segment. Also you may use fuzzy search by the highlighted section in the source string and search by the highlighted words – see the contextual menu in the upper part.
The Search tab is used for searching for text using several algorithms. It is divided horizontally into two parts: the upper part is used for setting the search options, the lower part displays results (which may be modified).
Search algorithms:
Select in the File menu one of the following options:
You may easily move or delete tags. You also may copy tags from the source text. While export a project to TTX file, problems with tags relating to formatting information loss may appear. But this may happen only if the source files are in .DOC or .PPT format. The developer has taken certain steps to prevent such errors, but there is no 100% guarantee, because initially the developer was not oriented to operation with such files. The above problems are absent if the source file are in XML, HTML, SVG, INX formats or in RTF as a result of using S-Tagger.
For spelling and grammar check the libraries (DLL and LEX files) of Microsoft Office usually located by the following path "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof\" are used. But there are two problems. The first one is that names of these libraries depend on the language used. For example, for Russian language files for spelling check are MSSP3Ru.DLL and MSSP3Ru.LEX, for grammar check are MSGRRU32.DLL and MSGR_RU.LEX files. The second problem is that for spelling check only DLL files of ver.2 (applied for check in Office 2003 if Russian language used) are used. The first problem may be solved with the help of Options – Spelling & Grammar settings dialog box, but the second one may be solved only by creation a code for support of ver.3 of spelling check libraries.
While importing a TTX file the following message may appear in the log window: "Failed to get the 263 segment: Unidentified error. This segment follows the segment with the following text in the original: <text of the previous segment>". It means, that while trying to get the segment content with number 263 an error occurred and this segment is not in the project. You may ignore this message and continue working. But, of course, it is better to correct the error. At first you may try to use a simple method: just open the TTX file in TagEditor and then save it and close. If this method does not help, you have to search for the problem segment. If its number is 0, this is the first segment of the file. Otherwise, you may find it by the text of the previous segment, it is specified as <text of the previous segment>. I.e. you should find a segment with the text <text of the previous segment> in the file, open a segment following it, then close the segment and save the TTX file. After that it is recommended to repeat the procedure of the project creation and make sure that the error disappeared.
Technical details: the error consists in similarity of identificators of translation and source segments:
<Tu Origin="manual" MatchPercent="100"><Tuv Lang="EN-US">The source text:</Tuv><Tuv Lang="EN-US">The target text.</Tuv></Tu>
If you want to do a real project using ATER, it is recommended to choose a TTX file with the most complicated formatting (with many tags), edit 3–5 segments, perform export of the file and open the modified TTX file in TagEditor. Then make sure, that segments modified using ATER may be opened and saved without any problem, also make sure, that saving the document in the source format (File – Save Target as) is performed without errors.
The latest version of the program can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/atersom/. Your questions, comments and suggestions send to: ater.som@gmail.com