What's new in Trados Q4 2024
8 mins read
Looking back at the past months, we're excited to share a host of advancements in Trados. Notably, we've continued to significantly refine our workflow and vendor capabilities, enhanced user collaboration, and introduced a brand-new Neural Fragment Recall feature. To learn more about these features and see them in action, watch our quarterly round-up webinar.
Improved automation and flexibility with new translation management functionality
Workflow improvements: Our workflow capabilities are designed to deliver high levels of automation, helping you streamline management tasks that once required numerous manual steps. Recent updates to the workflow interface have made it more intuitive and aligned with the modernized ‘Stages’ view. This redesign improves navigation, enables quick actions from a single screen, and optimizes the UI for widescreen monitors.
Additional enhancements to workflow capabilities include:
- Enhanced ‘Phases’ view: This allows you to copy and paste assignment and configuration settings effortlessly, as well as toggle the expanded details view for task tiles to focus on the information most relevant to you.
- New language planning task: Tailored for larger teams, this task enables project managers to take charge of language-specific planning responsibilities with greater efficiency.
Screenshot showing the modernized ’Workflow’ UI
Vendor enhancements: Trados offers a centralized vendor database for managing third-party translation partners and their individual users, simplifying vendor communication and workflow. Our ‘Order templates’ capability allows you to agree on a pricing model with each vendor – so that when you offer them a project - you can automatically generate a vendor quote for them to accept or adjust. Recently, we’ve enhanced this functionality with:
- New ‘Allow quote editing at all times’ setting: This option, available in Vendor Order Templates, lets vendor project managers modify order costs even after the Vendor Quote Review task is complete. This provides greater flexibility and control over cost adjustments.
- Separate display of customer and vendor quotes: Quotes are now clearly distinguished in the Project > Costs area, making it easier to locate and manage the relevant quote, saving users valuable time.
Screenshot showing the ‘Allow quote editing at all times’ setting
Streamline communication and project creation with better translation collaboration
Rich text support for Project Conversations: Effective teamwork begins with clear communication, and the right tools make all the difference. Our Project Conversations feature helps interactions between project managers and content requestors in the Trados platform, allowing users to exchange messages within the context of specific projects. Now enhanced with rich text support, this capability greatly improves clarity, precision, and flexibility, ensuring smoother communication and workflows.
With rich text support, users can:
- Engage specific team members by mentioning users in comments, ensuring the right people are notified and can take appropriate action.
- Style comments to highlight key points using bold, underlined or italic text.
- Organize ideas with bulleted or numbered lists for improved readability.
- Provide additional context by including direct links to websites, documents, or other resources.
Screenshot showing rich text support for Project Conversations in the online editor
Speed up translation processes with new translation productivity features
Neural Fragment Recall: Trados is committed to boosting user productivity, which is why we are excited to introduce our new Neural Fragment Recall feature, the next generation of upLIFT Fragment Recall. Powered by AI-based neural alignment, this new capability elevates translation efficiency by delivering more accurate and consistent fragment suggestions in real-time.
Neural Fragment Recall improves on the original approach by leveraging a multilingual model pretrained on vast amounts of text. By analyzing text at the subword level, it can process new documents even if they contain unfamiliar words. Unlike its predecessor, it doesn’t depend on a specific number of translation units to begin working. As translation units are added to a TM, Neural Fragment Recall automatically aligns source and target words or phrases, storing data for fast, consistent fragment retrieval
Benefits include:
- Real-time neural alignment: It automatically aligns words and phrases saved to your translation memory, ensuring that newly added fragments are quickly available for recall.
- No minimum TM size required: Unlike its predecessor, this feature doesn’t depend on translation memories having a specific number of translation units to get started. Users can get up and running with Neural Fragment recall immediately, unlocking the full potential of their TMs from the very first segment they translate.
- Improved consistency: By relying on neural alignment instead of traditional statistical matching, it delivers more accurate and consistent results every time.
- Ideal for less-repetitive content: Particularly useful for legal and public sector content, where segment-level repetition is often low.
With fragment matches delivered via AutoSuggest in both the desktop and online editor, translators can quickly leverage results as they work, boosting efficiency and reducing project turnaround times.
Screenshot of Neural Fragment Recall in the online editor. The TM attached to the project contains two saved translation units (segments 6 and 7). Previously, upLIFT Fragment Recall would provide no suggestions due to an insufficient number of TUs available. With Neural Fragment Recall, only one TU is needed to start aligning fragments and generating suggestions.
Translation Technology Insights Survey: We are excited to launch our fourth Translation Technology Insights (TTI) survey – a comprehensive global study that gathers input from translation professionals across the entire supply chain. This research aims to uncover the industry’s evolving needs, challenges, and work patterns. Have your say and help shape the future of translation technology by taking the survey here.
Finally, we are delighted to announce the return of ELEVATE, our highly anticipated annual online conference for translation professionals, taking place from May 6 - 8, 2025. This flagship event will feature thought-provoking discussions, expert insights, and exclusive previews of the latest advancements in translation technology – secure your place today.
For more in-depth details on all the improvements made to Trados, please visit the RWS Community. If your organization is not using Trados, please get in touch to find out more about the solutions we offer.