Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Studio 2015: AutoSuggest Gets Even Better

Studio 2015 comes with significant updates to the AutoSuggest feature, which will be a welcome productivity enhancement for users.

Translation Memory and Automated Translation Suggestions in Studio 2015

In addition to Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries and AutoText, Studio 2015 includes a new AutoSuggest provider: Translation Memory and Automated Translation.*

* For Automated Translation suggestions to be provided, an automated translation provider, such as Google Translate, must be added to the list of Translation Memories.


Depending on the settings we choose, we can get suggestions that are 100% matches, fuzzy matches and concordance matches that come from our very own TMs.

To access the new settings, we will find a new node under Options - AutoSuggest, where we can set our preferences.


Above, I have chosen a value of 1 under "Minimum number of characters typed before displaying suggestions" to get the most matches. A setting of 1 under "Minimum suggestion length in words" will result in many more matches than a setting of 3, for example, as it's a less restrictive criterion.

The best settings for these thresholds will depend on personal preferences and the extent of our resources. With a well-populated termbase and TM, for example, low thresholds in these settings (1 character typed, 1-word suggestions) may result in many duplicates in our suggestion list, as, for example, one-word terms that already exist in the termbase and in the AutoSuggest dictionary will also be offered as Translation Memory autosuggestions, as shown in the (extreme) example below. As a disclaimer, please note that the AutoText entry would only appear after the first four letters have been typed, so, in fact, after typing the first letter, only the first three suggestions would be offered.


With this new AutoSuggest provider, even a user who has no termbases, no AutoSuggest dictionaries and no Auto Text entries will benefit from AutoSuggest, as suggestions are offered from existing and newly added translation units, and are updated on-the-fly, as translation units are confirmed.

For the examples below, I have disabled Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries and AutoText from the list of AutoSuggest providers to simulate a scenario where the only resource available to the user is the TM.


For segment 1 there are fuzzy matches in the TM, so AutoSuggest offers a fuzzy match in the list of suggestions when I type the letter "v".



Since segment 5 has no exact or fuzzy matches in the TM, AutoSuggest offers concordance matches* and automated translation suggestions as soon as I type the first letter for the segment.


*The setting that determines this behavior can be found under Options - Editor - Concordance Search Window. If this option is not checked, auto concordance is disabled and therefore AutoSuggest will not offer any concordance suggestions.


AutoSuggest in Action

The 'magic' of AutoSuggest is best appreciated in action, so below you'll find a video showing how it works.



This is definitely one of my favorite features in Studio 2015!



5 comments:

  1. Thanks for these comprehensive instructions. I have one question: do you still have to have a rather big TM to get this AutoSuggest dictionary?

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    Replies
    1. Yes, in order to create an AutoSuggest dictionary you still need to have a TM with at least 10 thousand translation units. However, there is no minimum size requirement to get autosuggestions from active TMs, which is really good news for projects where there are no extensive existing TMs.

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  2. Thank you for showing how Autosuggest operates and interacts with TM's/termbases/concordance. Very useful and crystal clear. Thank you Nora!

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  3. At present most of the students like to seethe translation on online.So i think you are take right decision to provide translation service for the educators.

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  4. This was actually what I was looking for and I am glad to came here! Thanks for sharing the such information with us

    ReplyDelete