LILT Translate supports the importing, exporting, and arranging of tagged text. This includes both structural tags (e.g. spacing, line breaks) and formatting tags (e.g. bold, italic, underline). Other arbitrary tags may not be displayed in LILT Translate, but they will be preserved in the document. As an example, let’s see how LILT would display a Word document containing the following sentence: This sentence has some bold text. In LILT Translate, the bolded text will be wrapped in a tag pair. Each tag pair holds information about what kind of formatting should be applied to the text within the tag pair.
Tags in the source text are fixed, but tags in the target text can be moved around to allow linguists to ensure the structure and formatting of content is carried over correctly during translation. This article covers the following topics: For information on Tags QA, see the Tags Quality Assurance article.

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Tags overview

Once a segment has been translated and confirmed, LILT will automatically project the source tags into the translated text. For this reason, tags can generally be ignored during translating. For more information on our Research Team’s work on tag projection, see this article.
If you want to move tags around before confirming a segment, you can manually project the tags at any time by opening the Tags tab and selecting the Project target tags option (shortcut Ctrl + Alt + N). Note that tags can be moved even after the segment is confirmed.
Once tags have been projected into the target text, they will always be displayed. For this reason, we recommend using the menu to Project target tags, and then move the tags if required before confirming the segment. Tags will project automatically when the segment is confirmed, and must be checked before moving onto the next segment. Each tag is part of a tag pair that marks where the tag starts and ends:
  • The opening tag:
    contains the tag number and tipple dot: ...
  • The closing tag:
    contains a backslash and the tag number
Clicking on the tipple dot ... part of an opening tag displays information about the tag.

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Display settings

Tag display settings

Show source tags - By default, LILT Translate displays source text tags. If you find this gets in the way during translation, you can hide the source tags by deselect the Show source tags option in the Tags tab.
  • Note that 100% and 101% TM matches with the same source text, but different source tags, are counted as 99% matches.
Show target tags - By default, LILT Translate displays target tags. Disabling this setting hides all tags in the target segment (even if the segment has been confirmed). QA still checks for tag errors and linguists will need to fix any tag errors before they can confirm a segment. LILT will automatically unhide tags in the target segment if segment confirmation fails because of tag errors (ignoring the setting for just that segment) so linguists don’t have to manually turn off the setting every time. Project target tags - If you want to move tags around before confirming a segment, you can manually project the tags at any time by opening the Tags tab and selecting the Project target tags option (shortcut Ctrl + Alt + N). Note that tags can be moved even after the segment is confirmed. Once tags have been projected into the target text, they will always be displayed. For this reason, we recommend using the menu to Project target tags, and then move the tags if required before confirming the segment. Tags will project automatically when the segment is confirmed, and must be checked before moving onto the next segment.

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Editing tags

Once tags have been projected into the target text, they can be manipulated with keyboard shortcuts so you don’t have to take your hands off the keyboard while processing segments in LILT Translate.
You can find the tag hotkeys listed in the Tags tab and in the Hotkeys article. If you prefer to use your mouse, tag editing can be accomplished by mousing over a tag, clicking it, dragging it to where you want, and then releasing the mouse button to place the tag.
A few notes about tag manipulation:
  • Manipulating tags will unconfirm/unaccept segments.
  • Tags are automatically saved after being placed. No additional saving is required.
  • Tags cannot be added, changed, or deleted.

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Tag color indicators

Tags are shown in different colors to indicate different states:
  • Gray: normal tag
  • Green: currently selected tag (use the keyboard shortcuts to move the currently selected tag)
  • White with green outline: the matching paired tag for the currently selected tag (you can use the keyboard shortcut to jump to the matching tag)
  • Red: invalid position (nesting does not match source)

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Tag validation

LILT has automatic checks to determine whether tags are positioned and nested correctly. When a tag is invalid, it shows as red and cannot be saved (or segment confirmed) until the tag position is resolved to be valid.
LILT also has a QA check tool that allows linguists to search for potential tag issues at any time across a single segment or all segments in a document.

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Tag auto-propagation

If forward auto-propagation or backward auto-propagation are turned on in the Settings tab, tag changes are automatically propagated across the document for segments with 100% TM matches. This means that if you change target tag positions in a segment and confirm the segment, in any other segment with the same source tags, the target tags will be propagated to match.