Tb-Scout v3.3 User Guide

Scope and limitations of the Translations Memories Explorer

Tb-Scout v3.3 works comfortably with Translation Memories with up to 100,000 Translation Units. However, the application can handle bigger Translation Memories, including those with more than half a million of Translation Units.

There are two main operations when opening a Translation Memory for the first time.

• First of all, it has to be downloaded and stored temporarily into the application, and
• Second, once downloaded, the search operation is relatively quick and instantaneous.

A copy of the Translation Memory is kept in a temporary space and it will only be replaced when another Translation Memory is downloaded and opened. If you close the application, and later on open it, that copy will still be available and it will be searchable in a matter of seconds.

If there is a Translation Memory stored in the application, the Quick View icon (item 4) will be available, whether you open the TM module for the first time or every time you retrieve a Translation Memory.

Another circumstance beyond the control of this application is when the Translation Memory (database) is corrupt, in which case you will see a message like the one below:

Scope and limitations of the Termbases Explorer

Tb-Scout v3.3 is an extraction tool, not a conversion tool

First of all, a reminder. Tb-Scout v3.3 only extracts and exports data in plain text, it does not export data in other formats like TBX, XML, etc. Please keep this in mind.

What type of files are exported?

All the files to be exported are basically in the Excel (.xlsx) or PDF formats. There is only one exception: the basic Termbase statistics report is exported in text (.txt) format.

How many instances can be running at a time?

• You can only run one instance of the application at a time. If you try to run another instance, you will be informed, and the application will close. This feature is intended to avoid unintended cache data corruption and/or inconsistent search results when exploring any given Termbase and/or Translation Memory.
• When the application closes unexpectedly, and therefore it is left in an unknown state, the next time you try to open the application the system will assume you are trying to run another instance and the application will have to be closed. When you open the application for the second time, it will run normally.

Application not responding

At some point, due to a number of circumstances, by due mainly to a process within a big Termbase (or Translation Memory) which causes the application to stop responding, you will see this Microsoft Windows standard message (by the way, this error message can appear for any software application running on Windows, not just Microsoft software) with three options:

The first option to consider is to "Wait for the program to respond" and in many cases that is what will happen: the program will respond.

If the application definitely will not respond, choose "Close the program" rather than "Restart the program". In this case, since the application is closed abruptly, that will leave the application marked as a running instance. The next time you start the application you will have to close it and then restart it. 

In addition, once you close the application (second menu choice, above), press [Cancel] immediately, since there is no need to send a crash report to Microsoft. That is a standard choice for any program running in the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Terms or expressions that include one or more apostrophes and/or commas

This is an issue more related to how information is displayed than to the actual content of any Termbase.

In the Search results pane (17), Translation results pane (18) or the Expanded view (19), in the Termbases Explorer interface the apostrophes may appear displayed as backquote marks, backticks, or grave accent marks (`), instead of the normal single quote or apostrophe ('), for instance, as seen here:

You may also see the ASCII Code 146 (’) in the Windows-1252 character set, also known as the right single quotation mark.

In addition, for every term or compound word or expression that may include commas, they will be replaced by the underscore character (_), also called low line or low dash. 

The issue is that, normally, text will be truncated at the apostrophe or comma location. Our solution to be able to display not truncated text was to replace apostrophes and commas with other characters, as explained above. 

Incidentally, the above issue, with apostrophes and commas, is a known (and old) limitation or design flaw of the ListBox control within the development tool Microsoft Access and other Microsoft  Office applications. However, this, our assertion, may be wrong.

At any rate, in the Bird's eye view window and in exported data, it will always show as in 2, above, or text with the original commas.