Friday 1 March 2013

ForeignDesk Terminology enhancement autohotkey script


I had to use ForeignDesk for a major project.

ForeignDesk is an integrated Windows translation environment developed by Lionbridge who opensourced it in 2002. Terminology is managed by the TermBase module.

But there was some functionality that was lacking. I wanted to:

1. Start translating a translation unit which was already populated by source text, and then, when I have completed the translation of the translation unit, with a shortcut, to delete all the text up to the end of the translation unit and move to the next translation unit.

In effect, this is a combination of the Trados functions (i.e. in TagEditor) of Ctrl+D (delete text to end of segment) and Alt+Num+.

2. Insert terminology matches with a shortcut. For this, I created three different shortcuts.

3. Delete current segment and copy source. This was helpful in case of unsatisfactory fuzzy matches.

4. Copy source without deleting current segment.

To this end I created a set of autohotkey macros. You simply download the attached file and run it. It is a compiled executable which includes these macros. This will be enough to enable the described functionality. Of course, you need to have ForeignDesk and TermBase running.

In detail:

Alt+L = Delete to end of segment and move to next segment
Alt+S = Copy source (adds source segment to insertion point without deleting existing text)
Alt+D = Delete existing segment and copy source
Alt+K = Copy first match from terminology window
Alt+J = Copy second match from terminology window
Alt+H = Copy third match from terminology window

Here you can see a video of the insert terms functionality and delete to end of segment and move to next segment as well as download the macros.

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