This article, intended for Translators, Editors, and Reviewers, outlines the necessary features and steps required to get your work done in Smartling. To understand some key concepts, consult the Smartling overview article, otherwise, continue reading the information below.
Log In and Access the Projects and Jobs Dashboards
If it's your first time accessing Smartling, you should have received an email notification when your Account Owner or Agency Account Owner set up your account. Click the link from within the email, and you'll be prompted to fill out your details.
Once you've completed the initial registration, you'll be able to access the Smartling Projects and Jobs dashboards where you'll find all of the work to which you've been assigned. (You can always access them by logging in to dashboard.smartling.com.) This is where you'll be able to view your assigned projects and associated jobs. Each job has its own due date, and within each job, each language may have its own due date.
Consult the Jobs Dashboard article for a more comprehensive look at how to filter and access your work.
Update Account Settings
To modify your profile settings (contact info, photo, change password), see Update Profile.
To receive email notifications related to your work, see Change Notification Settings.
Navigate through the Jobs Dashboard
Once you have updated your account settings, it is important to spend some time understanding how to navigate through the Jobs Dashboard, as this is where you will access translation tasks to complete in the CAT Tool.
Access the CAT Tool
The Jobs feature allows you to group and prioritize content for translation by due date, as well as monitor the progress throughout completion. Each job contains strings, consisting of words or phrases. When using the CAT tool, those strings are broken down into segments.
To launch the CAT tool, filter for your job, then click Actions > Open for any work that's been assigned to you, or work that you've claimed.
Below are some commonly used features found within the CAT tool. For a more in-depth look at all of the features in the CAT tool, consult the CAT Tool Overview and Customize CAT Tool Behavior articles.
- Draft mode: The CAT tool automatically backs up your translations in your local browser as you type. In other words, your work will be saved even if you lose internet connectivity or close your browser.
- Filters: You can perform a general search within source strings and translations, or simply use the different filters.
- Save, submit, reject, publish, and edit published translations: Translators can save and submit strings. Editors and Reviews can also reject strings. Reviewers can also publish translations, and edit published translations when the need arises.
- Working with strings and segments: A string consists of an entire paragraph, a phrase (or a word), and can be parsed or broken down further, into segments.
- Search translation memory (concordance search): You can search all of the available translation memory to see past translations for any string, in any target language.
- Keyboard shortcuts: Keyboard shortcuts are instrumental in getting the work done fast. You can modify the keyboard profile and any keyboard shortcut listed.
- Preferences: In addition to keyboard shortcuts, you can customize a range of translation presences, including display options and font type.
- Personal dictionary: Create your own personal dictionary, only visible to you.
- Plurals: Smartling supports plural sensitive translations of strings. For more information, consult the Plurals article.
- Working with tags: You can toggle between HTML code view or a simplified view denoted by numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.). For more detail on inserting tags, see Insert, Remove, or Move Tags and Placeholders.
- Panels: Within the Panels section of the CAT tool is where you'll find the following features:
- Additional details
- Language resources
- Quality checks
- Issues
- History
- Glossary Terms: Within the CAT tool, glossary terms are underlined with a dotted black line.
- Style guide: The style guide, a collection of preferences for content formatting, writing tone, style, etc. will be shown as a pop up window upon accessing the CAT tool for the first time. Subsequently, it can be found within the Additional Details panel.
- Quality checks: The Quality Checks feature checks for translation consistency, spacing consistency, proper spelling, etc.
- Issues: The Issues feature allows you to direct any questions or comments you may have to other Translators, Editors, or Reviewers who are working on the same content.
- History: If necessary, you can view the history of previously translated strings. This will show you when certain actions were applied to the strings along with the name of the user who made them.
Download Translated Files
Should you need to preview translations in their completed state, Agency Account Owner, Translations Resource Mangers, and Translation Resource users can download translated files via the List View. Current downloadable file formats are:
- docx
- pptx
- xlsx
- idml
To download translated files from the Jobs Dashboard:
- Click the Project name (opens a new tab)
- Translations = List View
- Downward arrow beside timestamp
Reporting
To view a breakdown of your completed work during a specified time, you can run the Word Count Report.
For more on how to use Smartling, see here.