Greek capital letters falsely inserted with diacritics by NMT- How to fix?
Thread poster: Giorgos Georgiadis
Giorgos Georgiadis
Giorgos Georgiadis  Identity Verified
Greece
Local time: 14:25
English to Greek
+ ...
Feb 11, 2020

I am having an annoying and time consuming problem with Trados 2019 (other versions as well, perhaps?).
Each time when I'm translating into Greek and an NMT suggestion comes up in capital letters, they include diacritics. For instance, the word "ΠΟΙΌΤΗΤΑ" should be written as "ΠΟΙOΤΗΤΑ", yet this pesky diacritic on the middle "O" ruins my day. Diacritics (an acute for instance) is used when writing in lowercase and also when a sentence starts with a capitalized vowel. In no
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I am having an annoying and time consuming problem with Trados 2019 (other versions as well, perhaps?).
Each time when I'm translating into Greek and an NMT suggestion comes up in capital letters, they include diacritics. For instance, the word "ΠΟΙΌΤΗΤΑ" should be written as "ΠΟΙOΤΗΤΑ", yet this pesky diacritic on the middle "O" ruins my day. Diacritics (an acute for instance) is used when writing in lowercase and also when a sentence starts with a capitalized vowel. In no other case.
MS Word never had such an issue, yet Trados doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.
Does anyone know how to fix this?
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Sunjin Gu
Sunjin Gu  Identity Verified
South Korea
Member
English to Korean
+ ...
Capitalization check Feb 12, 2020

File-> Verification-> QA Checker 3.0-> Punctuation check
Hope it helps!


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 13:25
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
@Giorgos Feb 12, 2020

Giorgos Georgiadis wrote:
An NMT suggestion comes up...


Do you mean specifically Google Translate's NMT engine, or do you mean another NMT engine? Does this happen with all NMT engines or only with one of them? My initial suspicion is that this misbehaviour might be related to a deficiency in the specific machine translation system you're using.

MS Word never had such an issue...


Out of interest, which version of Word are you using, and do you happen to know which NMT engine Word uses?


 
Giorgos Georgiadis
Giorgos Georgiadis  Identity Verified
Greece
Local time: 14:25
English to Greek
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Not quite there yet Feb 12, 2020

Samuel Murray wrote:

Giorgos Georgiadis wrote:
An NMT suggestion comes up...


Do you mean specifically Google Translate's NMT engine, or do you mean another NMT engine? Does this happen with all NMT engines or only with one of them? My initial suspicion is that this misbehaviour might be related to a deficiency in the specific machine translation system you're using.

MS Word never had such an issue...


Out of interest, which version of Word are you using, and do you happen to know which NMT engine Word uses?


Thank you for your reply!

I am using the default SDL Machine Translation that is integrated in the program, I don't use an external API. As such, I don't know whether it occurs with other engines as well. As for your suspicion, I assume the same yet I do not know how to fix it.

As for Word, I am using Word 365, which MIGHT use an NMT yet I wasn't talking about that. In word, if you turn a segment of text into capital letters in Greek it removes the punctuation.

Also,

@Sunjin Gu Thank you for your response as well. Unfortunatelly, the QA menu doesn't have an option to check for this particular issue.


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 13:25
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
@Giorgos Feb 12, 2020

Giorgos Georgiadis wrote:
In Word, if you turn a segment of text into capital letters in Greek, it removes the punctuation.


I just tested this in Word 2003. ποιότητα turns into ΠΟΙΌΤΗΤΑ if the text language is not Greek, but if the text language is set to Greek, then ποιότητα turns into ΠΟΙΟΤΗΤΑ. I therefore wonder if a similar thing don't happen with the MT in Trados, i.e. that it may be a language setting issue. I tried translating "quality" and "QUALITY" from English to Greek using the Google Translate API (outside of Trados), and it went perfectly: no diacritic on the capital letter.

In Trados, selecting a word and pressing Shift+F3 a couple of times switches between lowercase and uppercase (as it does in Word). What happens to ποιότητα in Trados when you use Shift+F3 on it (and you made sure the target language is set to Greece Greek) -- does it lose the diacritic when it becomes uppercase?


 
Giorgos Georgiadis
Giorgos Georgiadis  Identity Verified
Greece
Local time: 14:25
English to Greek
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Getting there... Feb 12, 2020

Samuel Murray wrote:

Giorgos Georgiadis wrote:
In Word, if you turn a segment of text into capital letters in Greek, it removes the punctuation.


I just tested this in Word 2003. ποιότητα turns into ΠΟΙΌΤΗΤΑ if the text language is not Greek, but if the text language is set to Greek, then ποιότητα turns into ΠΟΙΟΤΗΤΑ. I therefore wonder if a similar thing don't happen with the MT in Trados, i.e. that it may be a language setting issue. I tried translating "quality" and "QUALITY" from English to Greek using the Google Translate API (outside of Trados), and it went perfectly: no diacritic on the capital letter.

In Trados, selecting a word and pressing Shift+F3 a couple of times switches between lowercase and uppercase (as it does in Word). What happens to ποιότητα in Trados when you use Shift+F3 on it (and you made sure the target language is set to Greece Greek) -- does it lose the diacritic when it becomes uppercase?


Thank you for taking the time to test my issue out, I really appreciate it.

So, I did the same test and, indeed, when pressing Shift + F3, the lowercase characters seem to lose their diacritic. HOWEVER, the problem is that they DO have a diacritic each time a suggestion from the MT comes up in capital letters. Thus when that happens I have to manually go in and change them.

What just came to me, thanks to @Sunjin Gu's suggestion, is that perhaps I could create a custom filter and make the QA function chance all capital letters into their "non-diactitified" equivalent automatically. Better to miss out on the rare case when a sentence starts with a capitalized vowel that needs a diacritic than have to change each and every one. Will test this workaround asap and report.


 


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Greek capital letters falsely inserted with diacritics by NMT- How to fix?







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