A special character is a character that is not an alphabetic or numeric character, a character not found on a standard keyboard, or a character which has a particular syntactic meaning depending on the language. The Smartling CAT Tool provides a menu of special characters that can be easily accessed and inserted in your translations.
You can easily insert special characters into the target field by opening the Special Character Menu and selecting the one that you need.
Tip: For easy access, the Insertable Bar Settings can be customized with any of these special characters. By adding special characters that you may need to use more frequently to the Insertable Bar, you can insert them into your translations with just one click.
The Special Character Menu includes the following special characters:
Special Character | Character | Purpose | Keyboard shortcut available? |
Copyright | © | Used to indicate that somebody legally owns the rights to make and distribute copies of a particular work. | No |
Trademark | ™ | Used to donate to a registered or unregistered trademark | No |
Marque de commerce | 🅪 | French language equivalent of the trademark symbol, which may refer to a registered or unregistered trademark | No |
Marque Déposée | 🅫 | French language equivalent of the registered trademark symbol, which is only relates to goods and services covered by the registration. | No |
Opening guillemet (French, Greek, Norwegian) | « | Known as Guillemets, used as quotation marks in a number of languages. | No |
Closing guillemet (French, Greek, Norwegian) | » | Known as Guillemets, used as quotation marks in a number of languages. | No |
Left low curly quote (Czech, German, Hungarian) | „ | Known as Anführungszeichen, used as quotation marks in German. | No |
Right double curly quote (Czech, German) | “ | Known as Anführungszeichen, used as quotation marks in German. | No |
Right double curly quote (Hungarian) | ” | Used as closing quotation marks in Hungarian. | No |
Left single curly quote | ‘ | Used as closing single quotation marks in German and a number of languages. | No |
Curly Apostrophe | ’ | Used as single closing quotation mark in a number of languages, or in place of a straight apostrophe (') for stylistic preferences. | Yes (default: shortcut not set) |
Low single curly quote | ‚ | Used as opening single quotation marks in German. | No |
Zero Space Width |
| A non-printing character used in computerized typesetting to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing. Click here for more information. | No |
Soft Hyphen |
| Also known as syllable hyphen, is a code point reserved in some coded character sets for breaking words across lines by inserting visible hyphens. | No |
Ellipsis | … | Also known as "three dots", is used to indicate an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. In Smartling, the ellipsis is used as the "more" button, where you can typically find a dropdown menu of action options. | No |
Registered | ® | Used to denote registered trademarks | No |
Dollar | $ | Currency | No |
Yen | ¥ | Currency | No |
Pound | £ | Currency | No |
Euro | € | Currency | No |
Cent | ¢ | Currency | No |
BR Tag |
| The HTML <br> element produces a line break in text. | Yes (default: F5) |
WBR Tag |
| The HTML <wbr> element represents a word break opportunity—a position within text where the browser may optionally break a line. | No |
Non-breaking Space |
| A required space, hard space, or fixed space, is a space character that prevents an automatic line break at its position. | Yes (default: F6) |
En Dash | – | Used to represent a span or range of numbers, dates, or time. | Yes (default: Command + -) |
Em Dash | — | Used to replace commas, parentheses, or colons - depending on the context. | Yes (default: Command + Option + -) |
Non-breaking Hyphen | ‑ | Used when you don't want text to break a line at the hyphen. | Yes (default: F7) |
New line |
| Used when it's ok for the text to break a line at the hyphen. | Yes (default: F8) |
Word Joiner |
| Used to indicate that word separation should not occur at a position, when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing | No |
Zero-width non-joiner |
| A non-printing character used in writing systems that make use of ligatures. | No |
Left-to-right mark |
| An invisible formatting character used in computerized typesetting of bidirectional text containing a mix of left-to-right scripts (such as Latin and Cyrillic) and right-to-left scripts (such as Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew). It is used to set the way adjacent characters are grouped regarding text direction. | No |
Right-to-left mark |
| An invisible formatting character used in computerized typesetting of bidirectional text containing a mix of left-to-right scripts (such as Latin and Cyrillic) and right-to-left scripts (such as Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew). It is used to set the way adjacent characters are grouped regarding text direction. | No |
Left-to-right embedding |
| A formatting character used in computerized typesetting of bidirectional text. It explicitly marks the start of a left-to-right embedded text segment within surrounding text. | No |
Right-to-left embedding |
| A formatting character used in computerized typesetting of bidirectional text. It explicitly marks the start of a right-to-left embedded text segment within surrounding text. | No |