TIP: Switching status from “In Review” to “Translated” in Trados Studio 2011/2014

I just managed to sort out a rather complex issue with Trados, and I would feel guilty not to share it with people having the same problem – the trick probably saved me a couple of days of work!

After I finished translating files for a massive project, I found out that many of them had the “In Review” status, rather than the “Translated” one. Because of this status, it was simply impossible to generate the target translations properly.

The problem is caused by segments that are translated (perfect matches) and locked automatically during project creation. I had more than 7,000 locked segments with Approved status, and I couldn’t see myself unlocking and applying the right status to them one by one.

Fortunately, after examining the .sdlxliff files in a text editor, I found a way to do this much faster.

(Before trying this solution, make sure you have a backup of your files! Trados just happens to crash every time it finds something not 100% the way it would like it to be)

1 – Close your project in Trados

2 – Open a text editor that has a “Find in files” feature. I have personally been using Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/)

3 – If you are using Notepad++, go to Search > Find in Files, select the folder containing your translated .sdlxliff files (Something like My documents\Trados 2011\Your_Project\Target_Language_Code), make sure “Search in all sub-folders” is checked, search for the string conf=”ApprovedSignOff” and replace it with conf=”Translated”. Note that you can also replace conf=”Draft” (or anything like conf=”value”) with conf=”Translated” if there are segments you forgot to validate.

4 – Reopen your project in Trados and use the batch Translation Count function to fix file statistics. Now you should be done!

It might not be the most “elegant” way to do it, and I would recommend solving the problem in Trados rather than editing files manually whenever possible, but it worked well for me as a solution of last resort.