Applying Penalties in Wordfast Pro
Penalties is used to draw translators' attention to subtle differences in Translation Memory such as "Case" differences, "Tag" differences, or different punctuation marks, etc.
To adjust penalties, go to Edit menu > Preferences > Penalties
Case
Case is for penalizing matches including upper-case or lower-case differences regardless of how many occurrences you have in one match. 1 means you will have 99% match instead of 100% match (or 84% instead of 85%, etc.) and 5 means you will have 95% instead of 100%, etc.
Non Literal
Non Literal means penalizing matches if they include different punctuation marks. If you uncheck it, any punctuation marks (e.g. final full-stop, quotes, etc.) will be ignored and you will even have an exact 100% match if they are only what differ. However, if you choose to penalize such punctuation differences, you will get fuzzy matches.
Tag
Tags penalty refers to the difference of "placeables" between the current source segment and the TM match. In Wordfast Pro, Tags/Placeables look like {ut1} and include format data.
Align
Align is for penalizing TUs coming from a Wordfast Aligner translation memory. Such TUs should have the user TALIGN! added to any TM exported by Wordfast Aligner, by default.
Remote TM
Private TU, Public TU, Local TM, and Remote TM should matter only if you use a Remote TM.
Multiple Translations
Multiple Translations means penalizing matches if the TM includes more than one translation for the current segment. The translator can move between multiple translations using Alt+Right and Alt+Left.
Penalties are useful especially with exact matches; if there is a 100% match including something penalized, its background will be yellow not green to draw the attention of the translator.
For example, the "Value" 0.5% (half a point) means that the penalty for each tag is half a point. But as match percentage must be an integer, the "Min" value is 1%, the least possible (actual) value. If you have one or two tags, the penalty will be 1%. So the "Value" 0.5% means that each two tags have the penalty of 1%. You can change it to 0.25 to make each four tags have the penalty of 1%.
You can uncheck a penalty to disable if you think it does not matter, or you can lower it. You can do two things to lower a penalty:
- You can change the "Value" into 0.25, and/or - You can change "Max" into 1%, if applicable.
1% is enough to change the background segment from green to yellow. So you do not need to waste more match percentage which could actually affect retrieving TUs if the Fuzzy Threshold is less than the resulted penalized match. Still, you can change the "Fuzzy Match" to even 40% if you prefer.
