Manage repetitions in Smartcat projects

Discover how Smartcat handles repeated segments and learn about the options available for managing repetitions in your translation projects.

During the project word count analysis, Smartcat identifies segments that are repeated both inside individual documents but also across all the documents in a project. Smartcat offers multiple options to deal with these repetitions. These options can be selected by the project manager in which case they will apply to all project participants. If no option is selected by the PM, the translation team will be free to choose how to deal with the repetitions individually. That last option might not be ideal as it might lead to uneven workloads since some users might choose not to share repetitions with the rest of the team.

The project manager can choose the repetition options in the Settings tab of the project page:

This will bring up the following dialog box:

Allow auto-propagation: this main option will tell Smartcat that repeated segments are to be propagated automatically throughout the project when checked.

Propogate to segments with different case: indicates how to deal with repetitions are using a different case (lower or upper):

Use the original case - When inserting the repetition, Smartcat will match the case of the new segment. For example if the previous segment was "continued" but the new segment is "Continued", the text will be replaced automatically because it's a text repetition, but the translation will start with an upper case letter to match the new segment.

Use the match case - Smartcat will ignore the capitalization of the new segment and use what was used in the segment that was previously translated. In our last example, the translation would now start with a lower case letter.

Propogate to confirmed segments: instructs Smartcat to propagate translation to segments even if they have been confirmed already. This is helpful if for example the translators goes back to a repeated segments and makes a change.

Confirm auto-propogated segments: instructs Smartcat to apply the status of the current segment to all the other repeated segments. So once the translator marks the segment confirmed for one stage, all other repetitions will be confirmed as well for that stage.

In the editor, the translation team can change the auto-propagation options if the PM has not selected any.

Inside the editor, there is also an option to exclude segments from repetitions. Repetitions are indicated by a down arrow under the segment number.

By clicking on the arrow, we can mark the segment as being excluded from repetitions.

This can be useful when dealing with titles or picture caption where sentence can be cut in half and we don't want these segments to be repeated.