Chapter 6. Project properties

1. Generalities
2. Languages
3. Options
4. File locations

1. Generalities

The ProjectProperties... (Ctrl+E) dialog is used to define and modify the project folders and languages.

It is possible to modify the project properties during a translation session. Note that changes to the project setup may have some consequences, especially, when the project has already been started. Until you have some experience with OmegaT, it is safest to consider all settings final once the translation has started – unless of course you realize a major mistake has been made. See the section Preventing data loss for ways and means of protecting your work.

2. Languages

You can either enter the source and target languages by hand or use the drop down menus. Bear in mind that changing the languages may render the currently used translation memories useless since their language pair may not longer match the new languages.

Tokenizers corresponding to the selected languages are displayed. See Tokenizers Appendix for details.

3. Options

Enable Sentence-level segmentation

The segmentation settings only address the way the source files are handled by OmegaT. The predominant way of segmenting the sources is the sentence-level segmenting, so this check box should in a normal case be left checked.

In some seldom cases the alternative, i.e. segmenting by paragraphs, may be preferred. Changing this flag does not modify the segmentation of already existing translation memories. If you decide mid-translation to switch from sentence to paragraph translation, the internal translation memory of the project will not be changed (OmegaT may upgrade old translation memories that did not use sentence segmentation, but not vice versa), but OmegaT will attempt to create paragraph fuzzy matches by glueing together existing sentence translations.

Changing segmentation settings may cause some already translated segments to be split or merged. This will effectively return them to the "untranslated" status, as they will no longer match segments recorded in the project memory, even though their original translation is still there.

Segmentation...

The segmentation rules are generally valid across all the projects. The user, however, may need to generate a set of rules, specific to the project in question. Use this button to open a dialog, activate the check box Project specific segmentation rules, then proceed to adjust the segmentation rules as desired. The new set of rules will be stored together with the project and will not interfere with the general set of segmentation rules. To delete project specific segmentation rules, uncheck the check box. See chapter Source Segmentation for more information on segmentation rules.

Hint: the set of segmentation rules for a given project is stored as project/omegat/segmentation.conf.

File Filters...

In a similar fashion as above the user can create project-specific File filters, which will be stored together with the project and will be valid for the current project only. To create a project-specific set of file filters, click on the File filter ... button, then activate Enable project specific filters check box in the window that opens. A copy of the changed filters configuration will be stored with the project. To delete project specific file filters, uncheck the check box. Note that in the menu Options->File Filters, the global user filters are changed, not the project filters. See chapter File filtersfor more on the subject.

Hint: the set of file filters for a given project is stored as project/omegat/filters.xml.

Auto-propagation of Translations

In case there are non-unique segments in source documents, the Auto-propagation check box offers the user the following two possibilities as regards automatic translation: if checked, the first translated segment will be assumed as the default translation and its target text will be automatically used for later hits during the translation process. Mistranslated segments can of course be corrected later manually using Create Alternative Translation. If the Auto-propagation check box is not checked, the segments with alternative translations are left untranslated until the user has decided which translation is to be used.

Remove Tags

When enabled, all the formatting tags are removed from source segments. This is especially useful when dealing with texts where inline formatting is not really useful (e.g., OCRed PDF, bad converted .odt or .docx, etc.) In a normal case it should always be possible to open the target documents, as only inline tags are removed. Non-visible formatting (i.e., which doesn't appear as tags in the OmegaT editor) is retained in target documents.

External Post-processing Command

This area allows entering an external post-processing command (for instance, a script to rename files) that will be applied each time Create Translated Documents is used. This external command cannot include "pipes", etc., which is why calling a script is recommended.

4. File locations

Here you can select different subfolders, for instance the subfolder with source files, subfolder for target files etc. If you enter names of folders that do not exist yet, OmegaT creates them for you. In case you decide to modify project folders, keep in mind that this will not move existing files from old folders to the new location.

Clic on Exclusions... to define the files or folders that will be ignored by OmegaT. An ignored file or folder:

  • is not displayed in the Editor pane,

  • is not taken into account in statistics,

  • is not copied in /target folder during the translated files creation process.

In the Exclusion patterns dialog, it is possible to Add or Remove a pattern, or edit one by selecting a line and pressing F2. It is possible to use wildcards, using the ant syntax.