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Overview: Concordance Searching

Use Concordance Search to look up a particular word, word sequence or phrase in the translation memory (TM). Concordance searching tries to match parts of the selected text or segment even if the words appear in a different context or order in the TM segment.

Translation units containing the word or phrase are found by the search and displayed in the Concordance Search window where you can see how they have been translated previously. You can search both source language segments and target language segments. The part of the segment that corresponds to your search value is highlighted in yellow.

Concordance Search settings

When you perform a concordance search, you can set it up to find exact matches only, or exact matches and partial (fuzzy) matches. In the Options dialog box under Editor > Concordance Search Window are settings that control the way search results are displayed. For example, you can choose a different color for highlighting matching text in search results.

You can also specify here if you want SDL Trados Studio to automatically run the concordance search when the translation memory search does not generate any results for a segment by enabling the Perform search if the TM lookup returns no results option. By default, this option is disabled.

Other concordance search settings control which translation memory matches are used for concordance searching. For example, you can choose the minimum match value required for the translation memory text to be displayed. The Translation Memory > Search settings are located in the:

IfThen

you want to change your project settings for the ,

select Home tab > Project Settings to display the Project Settings dialog box.

you want to change settings for the active document,

select Home tab > Project Settings to display the Project Settings dialog box.

you want to change your default settings,

select File > Options from the Ribbon to display the Options dialog box.

Character-based Concordance searching

If the Enable character-based concordance search option is selected, then, as well as indexing words in a translation memory, Studio indexes groupings of characters within a word. This can result in more partial (fuzzy) matches and bigger indexes. For example, if you enable this option and you search the translation memory for the word Resource , your search results may include Resource , Resources and Sources . The search results include all three words because they each contain groupings of characters that are the same.

Should I enable or disable character-based concordance searching?

  • If you have a large translation memory, enabling this option can increase the size of your translation memory and also increase the response time for concordance searching. For this reason, you may want to disable this option.
  • If you have a small to medium size translation memory, enabling this option can help in finding truncated or misspelled words in your translation memory without a large increase in the response time for concordance searching.

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