Trados Studio tips

Let’s start the year with introducing another feature aimed at improving productivity mostly during translation, which is available to all users with access to Trados Online Editor – let’s speak about dictation. 

Dictation has been discussed for a long time within different translator’s forums and up until recently was only available in Trados via 3rd party tools. RWS has implemented this functionality into Trados Online Editor, the function now supports following nine languages: Chinese (Simplified), Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Romanian and Spanish with more languages to come. 

This functionality enables you to speed up your translation process by dictating instead of typing and presents a welcome alternative. This works best for processes that do not include inputs from any machine translation or artificial intelligence including input for the auto-suggest feature.

Start by setting up your microphone properly. You can do some test recordings of microphone/voice quality to achieve the best configuration to avoid any interference and background noise. The built-in laptop microphone might not give the best results, but a standard headset should work perfectly well.

Once your hardware configuration is set, open Trados Online Editor in a web browser that supports dictation functionality (we recommend Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge; Firefox is not supported) and enable microphone access. Open your translation and activate dictation by clicking on the microphone icon in the Voice section of the Home tab. Now you can input your translation by dictating and speed up the process of ‘typing’. Apart from text dictation, the editor supports a number of commands – you will find the full list of commands for the supported target languages in the documentation under relevant dictation commands for link. These commands also include inserting special characters, etc. 

We hope you will find some good use for this functionality and gain some productivity.