Felix tip: Concordance searching

A concordance search in TM lingo is a kind of context search: it finds occurrences of words or phrases in translation units (TUs) in your TM, so you can see how you’ve translated the word/phrase in the past, in varying contexts.

You can do a concordance search right from the Felix memory or glossary window. Here’s an example: I’ve made some changes to the text on the English Felix website, and now it’s time to reflect those changes on the Japanese site. Looking up the sentence “The Felix automatic glossary search feature is another way to boost your productivity and consistency” in the memory, I find a partial match.

The original sentence in the TM didn’t have the “and consistency” phrase. For consistency (nyuk nyuk), the translator would like to see how the term “consistency” has been translated in the past. To do this, simply select the word “consistency” in the memory window, and press Alt + C. A list of all translations in the TM with the word “consistency” will then appear:

I’ve made the window a little bigger so you can see the results better. Here I see that the translator has translated the word “consistency” as 訳語の一貫性, 訳文の整合性, and 文中の訳語を統一して (for “ensure consistency”). Not very consistent. 🙂 Then again, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds — and the Felix J2E translator obviously has a big mind.

Incidentally, you can also do a search for translation concordance from the memory or glossary window: simply select some text, and press Ctrl + Alt + C (instead of Alt + C).

You can also get concordance from the various Felix interfaces. From Word, you would select the text in question, and either press Alt + M, C (Alt + M, then C), or from the Felix menu, select “Find Concordance.”

In Review mode, this command automatically switches to translation concordance.

There are also concordance commands from the PowerPoint and Tag Assist interfaces. There’s no concordance command in the Excel interface (yet!), because you can only select a cell or text box at a time, but you can still use concordance from the Felix memory/glossary window.

The Search Feature

Of course, the concordance feature is really just a shortcut to performing a search on the memory.

The search dialog gives you a lot more power, including regular expressions, as well as searching for the source and translation simultaneously. For example, you could use the search dialog to find all the times you translated “consistency” as 訳語の一貫性.

Nevertheless, the concordance feature is a handy way to quickly check how you’ve translated a given word/phrase in the past.