Bookmarks Wordfast Classic

See the glossary of terms if you are not sure what a bookmark is.

Handling bookmarks, or not handling bookmarks, is a question to be discussed with the client. In many projects, the author or the client may not need bookmarks to be positioned in the translated text. This is simply due to the fact that in many cases, bookmarks are part of a complex, carefully engineered scenario, and the document's owner may rather wish an engineer, or a technician, to re-position bookmarks on the translated document, then test the entire document again. In this situation (the translator not being required to position bookmarks in the translated document), simply click "No" when Wordfast prompts you to have bookmarks prepared for translation.

Your client should inform you of the presence of bookmarks and give you instructions (transfer them or ignore them), since it is the client, or the author, who has introduced the bookmarks in the first place. However, your client may not be the author of the document(s), and the client may not even know what a bookmark is. In this last case, use tact and wisdom to make sure what should be done. The bottom line is: do not transfer bookmarks - a complex task at times - unless your client asks you to do so; but if you have to handle bookmarks, carefully weigh and estimate the extra workload. A bookmark, at the very least, should be billed as two words, although it usually takes longer to correctly position the two ends of a bookmark than to translate two words.

Normally, bookmarks found in the source text should be transferred into the target text, over the corresponding span of translated text.

One important point is, since two bookmarks cannot have the same name in the same document, bookmarks must be transferred (moved), not copied, into the target text. In other words, you cannot duplicate or copy bookmarks as you would, for example, duplicate or copy fields.

Before starting a translation session over a document that contains bookmarks, Wordfast will warn of the presence of bookmarks and propose to mark them using conspicuous red markers positioned at the beginning and end of the bookmark, like this: [ and ]. If a bookmark has a null length, you would see []. Answer "Yes" to have bookmarks thus marked.

Wordfast will prompt you only once (per document) for marking bookmarks. If you answer "No", then Wordfast will not prompt you anymore for marking bookmarks on the current dcoument unless you open a translation session with the cursor at the very top of the document. If you answered "No" by mistake, or if you want to mark bookmarks at a later stage, use the Wordfast menu, select the Miscellaneous submenu and run "Unlink". Once the document has been "unlinked", Wordfast will prompt you again for marking bookmarks if you start a translation session.

During translation, if a source segment contains red markers, all you need to do is use the Next/Previous/Copy Placeable icons or shortcuts (Ctrl+Alt+Left/right/down) to select or box the red bookmark markers (they always come in pairs, opening and closing), then transfer the red marker(s) at the appropriate location in the target segment using Ctrl+Alt+down.

When cleaning up a document, Wordfast will remove the source segments as usual then replace the red markers in the target segments with the appropriate bookmarks.

Wordfast's Quick-clean function will propose an option for processing (restoring) bookmarks without cleaning up the document. This is useful for translators who are required by the client to send back "uncleaned" or "bilingual" documents (for example, because the client wants to clean up the documents with a different tool, not with Wordfast). In this case, the document is not cleaned up, but all bookmark markers are removed, bookmarks are correctly assigned to the target text.

Pay attention to the bookmark question before beginning a project, because handling bookmarks takes time; if the problem is overlooked, reconstructing bookmarks manually on a translated document can take a long time.

The Wordfast Translate tool's default behaviour is to mark bookmarks. If you want to prevent this, add "TranslateIgnoreBookmarks" in Pandora's box.

The Wordfast Clean up tool's default behaviour is to clean up documents and process bookmark markers (remove bookmark markers and move actual bookmarks to the target segments). If you just want to have bookmarks processed without cleaning up documents, add "CleanUpOnlyBookmarks" in Pandora's box.

Bookmarks can be found in many different types of documents, and they are put to many different uses. Documents that contain hyperlinks, indexes, or Tables of Contents usually make considerable use of bookmarks.

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