Pseudo-translation (Export Test)
Pseudo-translation fills your targets with deliberately stress-tested placeholder text so you can export the document and check that it comes out with correct formatting, layout, fonts and tags — before you invest any time in real translation. It’s a pre-flight check borrowed from desktop CAT tools.
Find it under Bulk Operations → 🧪 Pseudo-translate (Export Test)….
Why not just copy source to target?
Copying source into target and exporting tests the plumbing — does the file merge and export, do the inline tags survive — but it misses the problems that actually bite at the end of a job:
- Length stays identical, so overflowing text boxes, clipped table cells, fixed-width fields, reflow and truncation never show up. Real translations change length.
- Characters are never exercised — the source already renders fine in the document’s fonts and encoding, so copying it tells you nothing about whether the target language’s characters will.
- Dropped or merged segments stay invisible, because target text that equals the source still looks correct.
Pseudo-translation addresses all three at once.
What it does
For every segment in the chosen scope it rewrites the target so that:
- Inline tags are preserved exactly. Formatting tags (
<b>,<i>, …), Trados/SDLXLIFF numeric tags (<410>) and memoQ tags are kept verbatim and in order — only the words between them are changed. This is what makes the test trustworthy: the tag round-trip you’re checking isn’t disturbed. - The text is length-expanded by a ratio you choose, to surface overflow and layout breaks.
- Characters are optionally accented (
werkwijze→wéřkwíjžé) to test diacritics, encoding and font coverage. - Each segment is wrapped in
⟦ ⟧markers so a dropped, merged or misplaced segment is obvious in the exported file.
A segment like
De uitvinding betreft een <b>werkwijze</b> voor het sorteren.becomes something like
⟦Dé úítvíñdíñğ bétřéft ééñ lorem <b>wéřkwíjžé lorem</b> vóóř hét šóřtéřéñ. lorem⟧Options
| Option | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Apply to | All segments (default), the filtered/visible set, or just your selection. |
| Length expansion | 0% (structure only), +30% (typical), up to +200% (max stress). |
| Characters | Accented (tests encoding/fonts) or Plain words (length + markers only). |
| Boundary markers | Wrap each segment in ⟦ ⟧. On by default. |
Workflow
- Open the project and run Bulk Operations → 🧪 Pseudo-translate (Export Test)….
- Pick your options and confirm.
- Export the document the way you normally would (Project → Export → Export Translated Document, or any bilingual/CAT export) and open the result.
- Check for clipped text, broken tables, missing glyphs, reordered or missing
⟦ ⟧-marked segments, or tag errors. - Edit → Undo restores your real (usually empty) targets — the whole operation is recorded as a single reversible step.