Introduction
This semester at MIIS, I had the opportunity in taking Translation Technology where I completed numerous career developing projects. The “Team CAT Project” section contains all of the deliverables for our simulation of a translation project using SDL Trados, as well as the Statement of Work for our client and a final video detailing what we learned from the process. The “Tips for Regex with Trados” section describes 6 examples of regular expressions, written with my team, that can be used to aid in QA checking in Trados and specific to gender neutrality. I had no prior knowledge of CAT tools before this course but now have the general skills to progress further as a translator and project manager. After this course and as seen through the projects below, I can effectively and comfortably create projects, TMs, and TBS within Trados, utilize both CAT tools Trados and MemoQ, create regular expressions to solve problems, as well as know how to delegate a project among multiple individuals in order to successfully deliver high-quality content to a client.
Team CAT Project
As mentioned previously, we had the honor of working on an eye-opening translation project with SDL Trados and other programs needed through the process. Our group chose to translate screenplay “Chinatown” since we were interesting in taking on the challenge with figuring out this type of format through a CAT tool. We created a statement of work to submit to our “client” that would outline our processes effectively to the specific client and explained our timeline and costs. We zipped over the final deliverables and presented a video capturing our challenges and lessons learned.
Statement of Work
Deliverables
Lessons Learned
Tips for Regex with Trados
In this assignment I worked in collaboration with Eric Soublet and Gary Soza towards a gender neutral regex project within Trados. We were all interested in gender neutral terms and its importance in language. We wanted to take the challenge of this present issue and work to find solutions with Regex for Trados in not just general punctuation or grammar fixes but figuring out how to improve changing words to be more inclusive within Spanish language.
Regex (ES<->EN) and Gender Inclusivity
Eric Soublet contributor
Grizelda Ambriz contributor
Gary Soza contributor
Regex and Inclusivity
We write about Regex English to Spanish and Regex for gender-neutrality
Quotation-checking with Regex
With this expression, we were able to check the entirety of the target text for use of the guillemets. Since Spanish doesn’t use the same type of quotation marks as in English, using this expression can be useful in checking that the translator did not mistakenly use the wrong type in the text. The regex uses the simple “and/or” function, |, to search the text for both the left and right facing guillemets. We used this expression to check for them, and then a find-and-replace function to make any necessary substitutions:
Checking for Gendered Articles with Regex
Spanish grammar makes use of gendered words and articles. Recently, there has been a movement to change the way language is used to make it more inclusive of non-binary people. In the translation of such texts from English to Spanish, it would be very useful to see all instances of gendered articles and the noun immediately following it so that the QA lead can adjust the language used as necessary.
In our regex expression, the [Ll] portion looks for all instances of a capital or lowercase “L”, as found in the articles “Los” and “Las.” At first, we only included a lowercase “l”, but we found that doing that excluded some instances within the article. The next section, [o|a], looks for either an “o” or an “a” after the [Ll]. This allows us to keep the expression short and search for both “los” and “las” at the same time. The next portion to make note of is the \w+ followed by the [o|a]s. Since these gendered words will end with either an “o” or an “a” followed by an “s,” we decided to write the expression in a way that would search for all the characters in a word up until the ending character sequence we wanted. The \w+ takes into account all the potential characters that would appear before the ending sequence, as seen above with “las fronteras,” which has 6 characters before the “-as,” and “los propietarios,” which has 10 characters before the “-os.”
Checking for Diéresis in Trados
Regex can also be used to check for grammatical errors in Trados. We used a regex expression to check for the proper use of diéresis over the “u” character in Spanish. We were able to do this because its use follows a pattern: the “ü” character is preceded by a “g” and followed by either an “e” or “i,” either with or without a diacritical marker over it. This is what our expression looked like:
If you look at our expression, you’ll notice that it uses a “u” instead of a “ü.” This is intentional; our aim is to find expressions that meet the criteria for improper use. This way, the project editor can check for any improper grammar and make adjustments as necessary. A find-and-replace function would not work as well for this simply because there are also expressions that meet the criteria but do not require the diéresis. This would be up to the editor or QA to keep an eye out for, since as of this moment there is no way to eliminate false positives from the expression criteria.
Checking for gendered words ES -> EN in Trados
When it comes to translating words Spanish to English there are instances where certain nouns are specifically masculine or feminine that are not gender inclusive. It is fair and considerate moving on to change these nouns deemed by society to be considered appropriate for only a woman or man. Certain titles also represent status to relationship with man which exclude certain groups and demean woman to be of status pertaining to marriage or not. For example, Mr. is more inclusive and does not represent marriage while Miss and Mrs. demonstrate single and married. Replacing Miss and Mrs. with Ms. would be more inclusive. The Regex imputed in Trados (man|Miss|Mrs)\-?\.? Would search for any nouns with man and titles above to replace them with more inclusive language.
The following was the regex format through Regex101. You notice that there had to be slight change in format between one in Trados and Regex101: In Regex101 we would keep the backslashes for miss and Mrs. to be matched. The group consists of finding man and titles Miss and Mrs. Therefore, they are grouped in () with the either or symbol | to represent looking for each of these instances. Added to the regex would be the search for every single character where there is a – for man and a . for title Mrs.
Find-and-Replace with Regex
Removing Commas from Numerical Figures
Unlike English, Spanish does not use commas within numerical figures. Instead, a space is used after each group of three numbers: 1,000 would be written as 1 000, 50,255 would be 50 255, and so on. This find-and-replace function allows us to easily detect improper usage of commas within numbers in the source text, and allows us to replace the commas with a blank space.
This is what our expression looked like: ([0-9]+),([0-9]+). First, we put each part of the regex into parentheses, to make each grouping of 3 digits as its own “group” in the regex. The numbers in brackets look for any integer from 0 to 9, and the “+” indicates that multiple integers could be in the expression that meets the criteria. For example, in the number “50,000,” the “50” would be included in the first part of the expression while the “000” would be included in the second part. Between these groups, we added a comma so that the function would look for numbers with commas in the target text. Next, when using the replace function, we added a space between the groupings (instead of $1,$2 we wrote $1 $2) and clicked “replace.” This gave us the end result as seen above. In order to include larger numbers, you can simply duplicate the end part of the expression above, so that it looks like this: ([0-9]+),([0-9]+),([0-9]+). The same logic would apply to that as well: $1,$2,$3 would be written as $1 $2 $3.
Ellxs
This expression searches for instances of the masculine and feminine pronouns ellos and ellas and replaces the respective vowels with an ‘x’, a popular gender-neutral alternative.
