Removing out-of-segment double quotes from TagEditor file

This article deals with the problem occurring in TagEditor files. Sometimes, opening double quotes remain out of edited segment. As this out-of-segment text cannot be manipulated with (deleted or modified) and results in corrupted double quote formatting in the resulting clean file. This is how to remove these unwanted characters.

Pre-requisites:

  1. Trados TagEditor
  2. Unicode text editor, such as Windows Notepad, Notepad2, or PsPad. In this article, I will use Notepad2.

For better understanding, take a look at the following screenshot.

outseg

As you can see, the leading double quote stays out of edited segment. In this example, Czech language is used, which uses ? as opening double quote rather than as is the case of English. If this issue is left untreated, the clean document will show a sequence two double quotes, i.e. “?.

Let’s fix this problem.

1. Start Notepad2 text editor and open the TTX file you intend to fix.

2. Usually, unwanted double quotes are located between formatting tags marking an end of a translation unit and a start of the next translation unit. Thus, we are looking for something like this: </ut>?<Tu. Possible tag combinations are: </ut>?<Tu and </ut>?<ut.

3. In Notepad2, select Edit –> Find (or press Ctrl+F) and enter </ut>?<Tu into the Search String field. Press Find Next button. If Notepad2 finds a segment, close the search window and check, whether the string found is located in the segment, you want to clean up. If so, delete the double quote. If this is not the right segment, continue searching for other instances of the search string.

4. If you cannot find the appropriate segment with double quotes to be removed, try to use </ut>?<ut as a search string. When found, proceed as described in point 3 above.

Theoretically, you could use Replace All option in text editor for replacing all instances of </ut>?<Tu and </ut>?<ut with </ut><Tu or </ut><ut respectively (thus reaching a certain level of automation), but in this case, it is not possible to guarantee that required double quotes are not removed too.

5. Save the file in text editor.

6. Open the modified file in TagEditor and check, whether double quotes disappeared. You should see the following result:

outseg1

When you save the clean file, double quotes will be in order.

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