As a professional translator working for demanding customers with lots of specific terminology, you may find it useful to check your past translations in order to see just how you translated something in the past, and in what context. Snowball Translation Memory tells you exactly what you typed before for a given source, but the context of your previous translation is not displayed directly in the pop-up translation window. This is where a ‘concordance’ can be useful, because it allows you to see every instance of a source term or phrase, in context, with its corresponding target or targets. Let’s take a look at how to use this feature in Snowball.
If it’s not already open, go to the Snowball main window by double-clicking on the Snowball icon in the Taskbar. Then select (highlight) your current translation database (if you have more than one) with the mouse, and click on the “View” tab in the right-hand panel. A searchable list of all your past translations will be displayed in context and sorted by segment length. Just enter any word or phrase, or just part of a word in the seearch field, and the list will update automatically as you type. The default segment length for display is 21 to 40 characters, but you can adjust this to a shorter or longer range or set it to any length. A button to the right of the search field opens a menu where you can select to search by source, by target, or by both source and target; the default setting is to search the source.
You can also use the concordance view to search for and delete one or more entries corresponding to a specific source or target word or phrase. An Edit feature is also planned for the future, but has not been implemented yet, which is why this button is grayed out.
