Alchemy TECHBYTES

Segment History

The release of CATALYST 12 brings this long sought after feature to our users. A means to account for all changes made to individual segments but also to compare those changes with one another. Coupled with the updates made to the QuickFind toolbar to filter by segment history, this makes this new feature a very efficient way to track or review translation changes.

Found in the VIEW ribbon, the Segment History window enables to view the changes made for the selected segment in the workspace window (also called String list). This history is maintained as part of the current TTK but is not leveraged with the translation and metadata.
With now multiple instances for each individual string, this information is stored inside the TTK file as an additional database file of .s3db format.

Use "Show white space symbols" to toggle to display space characters as a dot symbol, as seen in the above screenshot. This makes space characters more visible, particularly when comparing differences between two history entries.

Segment histories are recorded when a change has been made to a segment and the TTK project is saved. The timestamp of changes will thus be at the time of saving the project. Those recorded segment changes are listed chronologically under the date column.

Changes are recorded in the segment history on saving the project if any or several of those occurred:

Text changed in the translation field
Translation status changed
Segment is locked
Memo added

Comparing entries

For any string with 2 entries or more, press and hold the CTRL key to select 2 segment histories you wish to compare. The Translation 1 and 2 fields will display the 2 segments highlighting any difference in red. This includes space character differences which may not be evident until you select the "Show white space symbols" option.
While 2 selected strings are identical, the window will report . Even though the text itself is the same, the status may be different and as we have seen in the list above, this counts as a history change.

In the example below, the segment history shows the edits made (in red) by user RobH after the segment was Machine Translated by user cvallin. We can also see the evolution of the segment with the various translation status changes: first machine translated then translated by a user RobH, modified by user JoshZ adding a memo and finally signed off by user SarahW.

When comparing 2 segments, Translation 1 & 2 fields are always listed in chronological order. Not in the sequence you selected the segments holding the CTRL key. This means Translations 1 is always the newer of the 2 selected entries.

Filtering by segment history

In the QuickFind toolbar, you'll now see this new button

With it, you may filter the string list like you would when entering text in the Search field to the left of it. That is that if you select to filter for segments modified by user cvallin...

... it will filter down the current string list to show only segments fulfilling this criteria. And the same can be done using a timeframe during which segments have been modified.

It is important to understand that a modification means that an actual text edit was made to a segment. If user cvallin only changed the status of the string, although it is recorded in history, it will not show in the string list when using this Filter by segment history facility.

This functionality empowers users to audit translation changes, filtering by user or by date. Particularly useful during the Review stage or while troubleshooting localisation issues. The ability to trace the history means you can find out when or how a localisation issue has been introduced and learn from it. It gives a localisation engineer the ability to see which strings have been changed since the TTK was sent for translation.

Where is the user sign-in taken from then?

When launching CATALYST for the very first time, your Window's username is assigned as your sign-in. As soon as you look into the Segment history window, the Current Translation has your sign-in displayed.

If you need to change this user name, go to FILE > Options > Application.
There, you can change the CATALYST Sign-in.