How To Use Olifant

The purpose of Olifant is to help you maintaining translation memories (TM). For this it offers the following interface:

Table and Fields

The translation memories you load or import are stored in a table. By default, the following fields are displayed:

• Key: an internal unique value. Note that Key values are not line numbers.
• Flag: a checkbox that is used to flag the corresponding translation unit (TU).
• Text_XX (where XX is the source language code): the text of the source language.
• Text_YY (where YY is the target language code): the translation of the source text in the target language.

Most translation memories have more fields. A field can be in either visible or hidden in the main table grid. You can select which of the fields are to be displayed, their width in the grid, whether or not they should be protected, etc. For this, use the Fields Properties command in the View menu (or press Ctrl+K).

Filter

There is two "views" of the table: without the filter (default) or with the filter. You can see whether the filter is set or not by looking at the indicator in the status bar. It shows Filter is OFF when the filter is disabled, or Filter = N (where N is the number of entries displayed with the filter) when the filter is enabled. Note that you can see no entries at all, while your TM may still have many TUs. They simply do not correspond to whatever criteria the filter is using.

You can toggle the filter ON and OFF with the Use Filter command in the View menu (or with F5).

To define the criteria you want to apply in the filter, select the command Filter Settings in the View menu (or press Ctrl+F5). This will open the Filter Settings dialog box where you can make your choices.

Important: The filter is dynamic. So if you make any change to an entry that makes the entry to not correspond to the filter criteria any more, the entry will be hidden as soon as the change is validated.

Because it is often handy to use the flags to mark up specific entries, the command Set Filter For Flagged Entries in the View menu allows you to quickly display only the flagged entries. (It removes any other criteria you might have for the filter and set a unique one: "Flag = true").

TMX Internal Format

Because Olifant works with several files formats it needs to use a unified way of representing inline codes in segments, when the file is loaded. Because TMX has the most inclusive support, Olifant uses the TMX format for its inline codes. This means all segments of the TM, once loaded in Olifant are converted to TMX, regardless from which format they are coming from.

This has some implications when you enter any modification, perform searches, set filter options, etc. You must use the TMX syntax for any source or target text. For example:

• All literal characters '&' should be escaped as '&'.
• All literal characters '<' should be escaped as '<'.
• Inline codes are enclosed inside TMX inline elements (e.g. <ph>, <bpt>, <ept>, <it>, etc.).

If you make any correct or change to an entry, make sure to enter the correct syntax for the special characters, or you may get errors when saving/exporting the file later on. For example, if you want to change the following text:

The R and D department

To replace the "and" with an ampersand (&), you should enter:

The R&D department

But not:

The R&D department

When exported to formats other than TMX, Olifant will make the necessary conversions for the output format. Each format has its own syntax.