Whether you are a translator, a reviewer, or a project manager, you might need to run some automatic quality assurance (QA) checks on the translation after it is completed. Transit NXT performs three kinds of QA: spelling check, terminology check and various format checks. Even if the translation has been carried out very carefully it is advisable to run the QA checks, just to be sure that no errors have slipped through. For that, first of all, we must go to the Review menu.

In this post, let's have a look at the spelling checker only. Starting from Service Pack 6, HunSpell compatible, freely available spellcheck dictionaries for over 80 languages and language varieties are installed to the "spell" folder of the Transit NXT installation folder during initial or update installation. For a complete list of all supported languages and the files installed, please refer to chapter 10 "Spellcheck dictionaries" in the Transit/TermStar NXT installation manual. The spellcheck can be run in the background, while the translation is done, so that any typo is flagged right after typing the word and can be corrected straight away. For that, the option Auto must be checked:

It can also be run in the foreground, once the translation is finished, or at any point in time. In any case, at least the default dictionary option must be selected, so that Transit NXT uses the language files:

If so desired, especially if the project contains many specialized terms that will not be included in the repository of common language words that is used for the ordinary check, the terms contained in the project terminology dictionaries and all the lexical items from the reference material can also be used as a basis for the spell check. However, if you use these resources, you must be certain that they have been scrupulously revised and they do not contain any spelling mistakes. Finally, to run the spell checker, you need to press the Start button.

By default, the check will be run from the beginning of the project (or more precisely, of the files open in the active window), namely from the first segment, but you can also choose to run it only from a specific segment onwards or just on one specific segment. Once you have finished, you can assign the Spell-checked status to the whole file or a subset of segments with the option File status | Spell-checked in the Proofreading section of the Review menu. Remember, the segment status can be helpful later on, because you can use it to filter segments or for quality assurance at the pretranslation stage. Let's leave it here for now. In next posts we'll discuss terminology consistency and format checks, so stay tuned. Thanks for reading, and please do not hesitate to send your comments or questions or to ask for specific tooltips. Special thanks to Karen Ellis for reviewing this post.