However, it can prove its value when you have translation memories that are large enough to process and when you specialize in certain fields. With a price of around $ 250 (€ 200) Trados AutoSuggest is in no way a cheap solution. That applies also when you work for different companies and you cannot/won’t use a general TM for all those companies: you need to have a multitude of (larger) projects to collect enough TM entries to make Trados AutoSuggest working.Īnother con is that AutoSuggest dictionaries are a static thing: once you create one you can use it freely in your projects, but in order to leverage content from a later date you should regenerate the AutoSuggest dictionary by following the wizard and creating a new one.ĪutoSuggest therefore can be of use, but does not work entirely flawless in terms of processes and content. If you specialize in more than one field or if you just started your translation business it is a bit more difficult to benefit from AutoSuggest.
That’s a major caveat as you simply do not create that large TMs easily. On the other hand AutoSuggest is only worth the investment when you have a TM with at least 25,000 entries: it simply doesn’t work when your TM contains less entries. So you do not have to follow difficult processes to leverage all knowledge stored in TMs. Furthermore the solution is very straightforward as it is implemented in Trados Studio directly and AutoSuggest dictionaries are created via a wizard. Trados AutoSuggest can prove very useful and really offer an advancement in project speed. In my experience AutoSuggest proved of specific value in IT documents and technical translations, but you should really have a massive TM to pick the real fruits. * Depending on the leverage of the TM, the recurrence of particular words and the specific aspects of a project.
However, in large projects Trados AutoSuggest will prove its usefullness – you can free up much more time by using it.* Sometimes AutoSuggest isn’t as intelligent as you want it to be: some words which occur many times in your TMs do not trigger the AutoSuggest feature and sometimes they are only shown partly. You are therefore not bound to a single word, but can use synonyms as well. And due to the fuzziness of AutoSuggest you sometimes get several interrelated but different terms as well. That way you do not need to type popular phrases (single words but sometimes combinations as long as 4 or 5 words) over and over.
As soon as AutoSuggest finds a source term which matches a term in the AutoSuggest dictionary and you start typing the first letter of this word, AutoSuggest opens a tiny menu with options which you can simply add to the target by selecting them (or use the arrows and Enter keys in order to work even faster). Trados AutoSuggest will launch its logic over it to extract relating source and target terms. In order to create to dictionaries (in the form of BMP-files) you need to have a translation memory with at least 25,000 (!) different entries.
And that’s exactly what it does: the piece of software, available in Trados Studio and activated by pasting a license key, creates autosuggest dictionaries which you can use in your projects. Trados AutoSuggest is officially called Trados AutoSuggest Creator. Is AutoSuggest worth its price? And how does it work?
Trados AutoSuggest is quite handy, but with a price tag of $ 250 also quite expensive. With the introduction of Trados Studio 2009 SDL launched SDL Trados AutoSuggest, a plug-in that allows you to leverage content of translation memories to speed up the translation process.