Shortcuts in SDL Trados Studio

Shortcuts in SDL Trados Studio

Shortcuts in Trados Studio speed up the translation process by keeping your hands on the keyboard, so you only resort to your mouse when it’s unavoidable. If you’re a new Studio user you’ll want to become familiar with certain shortcuts as soon as possible, but in no time you’ll discover there are scores of them. So which ones are essential?

1. Shift+F12 – This brings up the “Save target as” dialog to save your translation in its native format. In addition to using it to produce the finished translation, I always click Shift+F12 as soon as I open a document to translate, just to check that the file is going to save OK.
2. Ctrl+Enter – When you’ve finished translating a segment, confirm it by clicking Ctrl+Enter. This will add the translation unit to your translation memory (TM) and move the cursor to the next unconfirmed segment.
3. Ctrl+Comma – This produces a drop-down list of placeables (numbers, abbreviations, etc.) and tags from the source segment, which you can insert by selecting the right one with the arrow keys and clicking enter.
4. Alt+number – You can apply TM look-up results from the translation results window using Alt+1, Alt+2, etc.
5. F3 – Concordance shortcut. Highlight the term (in source or target) that you want to search for in your TM, click F3 and the concordance results window will appear with the term highlighted.

When you’ve got those under your belt, here are the next five that I think you’ll need to learn very soon:

1. Ctrl+Shift+G – When tags are paired (to mark the start and end of formatting) the closing tag looks like a ghost if the first one has been added individually. To bring it back to life (and make sure your translated file saves OK), select the ghost tag and click Ctrl+Shift+G.
2. Ctrl+L – Locking a segment is a quick, infallible way of making sure it won’t be touched by autopropagation or sent to your TM. You can also use it so that other translators or reviewers can’t change the segment. You can filter by locked segments too.
3. Ctrl+G – In a long document, use Ctrl+G to go to a particular segment number, status or category.
4. Ctrl+Ins – Copy the source segment into the target segment. Particularly useful if the segment is full of tags, to make sure you don’t miss any.
5. F4 – If you’ve been using the Find dialog box and you’ve closed it or it’s no longer visible, simply click F4 to find the next instance of the word. (This works the same as shift+F4 in MS Word)

And talking of MS Word, don’t forget that many shortcuts you’re already familiar with also work in Studio:

• Ctrl+S (save) – this saves the bilingual xliff file in Studio, not the target file.
• Ctrl+C/V/X (copy/paste/cut)
• Ctrl+B/U/I (bold/underline/italics)
• Ctrl+F/H (find/replace)
• Ctrl+A (select all)
• Shift+F3 (toggle lowercase, uppercase and initial capitals in selected words)
• Ctrl+Shift+8 (show whitespaces)
• Ctrl+Start/End (go to start/end of file)
• Ctrl+arrows (move one word left/right)
• Ctrl+Z/Y (undo/redo last action)
• F7 (spellcheck)
• F1 (help)

"Translation is one of the few human activities in which the impossible occurs by principle.” Mariano Antolín Rato