Documentation Center

Working with comments

Comments are useful when you want to give translators or reviewers extra-information about a particular choice of words, when you need clarification or when you generally want to provide feedback. You can add file-level comments and segment-level comments.

You can perform the following commenting actions in your *.sdlxliff files in the Editor view:
  • View comments attached to source and target segments.
  • Add, edit and delete comments attached to the entire file or target segments.

There are commands for adding, editing, deleting and navigating comments on the shortcut menu, on the Review tab > Comments group and within the Comments window.

Comments in target segments

Comments can be added before sending files for translation or during translation and review. They are a good way to share information about the file with other users or to pass instructions to translators or reviewers.

You can add multiple comments for the same file or segment and you can assign a severity level to each comment. You can also edit comments or add new versions to existing comments.

  • This comment is attached to a source segment.
  • This comment is attached to a target segment.

Comments in source segments

If you have comments in the original source file, they are displayed in the source segments when you open a file for translation, by default. However these comments cannot be amended and new comments cannot be made to source segments.

You can also choose to extract comments from the original file for translation in Trados Studio. Once translated, they will appear as comments again in the final translated file. You can choose to do this in the File Types > Microsoft Word 2007-2013 file type settings.

Comment versions

If a comment has multiple versions, only the latest version is shown. Click the comment to display all earlier versions of the comment below the latest version.

Comment severity levels

Comments can be classed as information, errors or warnings. By default, all severity levels are shown in the Comments window. However, there are toggle buttons for each severity level which allow you to display or hide comments for that severity level. For example, to hide any comments with the severity level Error, click the Error button. To display the comments again, click the Error button again.

Comment colors

When you add a comment it appears in the Comments window and is also highlighted in the translation. The following highlighting is used:

  • Information comments are highlighted in pale yellow.
  • Warnings are highlighted in pale orange.
  • Errors are highlighted in pale red.