When working on a translation task in the CAT Tool, you may need to refer to a string within a job. It may prove difficult to refer to the exact source content when referencing the string. Furthermore, in some cases, the source content may be repeated throughout the job, which makes it difficult to be specific about the exact string you need to reference. With string numbering, you can be precise about the exact string you are referring to when working on a translation task.

CAT Tool string numbering will allow you to;

• Easily locate a string after sorting/filtering
• Easily locate a string when doing QA checks
• Determine the relative position of strings after sorting

When you access the CAT Tool from a job, you will see string numbers on the left of the source content panel in the CAT Tool. 

When you access the CAT Tool from the Strings View, you will need to filter by a specific Job Name to see string numbers on the left of the source content panel.

Filtering by Job Name is required, but not always sufficient. If you've applied additional filters or searches in the Strings View that aren't supported in the CAT Tool, the strings loaded into the CAT Tool may not match what you saw in the Strings View, and string numbering may not display as expected. For guidance on which entry point to use for your role, see Accessing the CAT Tool.

Considerations

• String numbers are only visible in the CAT Tool, and not the Strings View or within the String Details in the Dashboard.
• String numbering is on the string level, not the segment level. Multi-segment and strings with plurals will have the same number.
• You can sort by string number as well. The sort is in ascending order.
• String numbers do not appear on locked strings.
• String numbers will only appear if the CAT tool has been filtered by a job with under 2,000 strings. This limit exists because sorting, filtering, and searching by string number run in the browser and performance degrades significantly beyond 2,000 strings. For a full breakdown of how features change above this threshold, see Accessing the CAT Tool.
• In a job with multiple files, string numbers are assigned in the order strings entered the job, not sequentially by file. As a result, string numbers for a given file may appear as a non-contiguous range (for example, 340–410), followed by a different range for the next file (for example, 1550–1780), rather than running continuously from the first string to the last.
• String numbers may be "out of order". String numbers are added in sequence as the source strings are added to a job. In the CAT Tool, when there is context, the default sort order is by the order of the strings in the context - which may not be the same order of strings in a file or strings added to a job. For more information on the order of string numbering, read our documentation on String Ordering.