This video explains yet another way to be more productive with OmegaT.
Centralized location concept
When you create a new project, OmegaT puts the “tm” and “glossary” subfolders in the project folder. If you have any additional TMs for this project, you copy them into the “tm” subfolder, and the same for the glossaries. With long-term projects (returning clients), you end up copying all previous project TMs and glossaries into these subfolders whenever you create a new project. This is inefficient and—like any manual process—prone to human error, such as forgetting to copy some of your files.
To avoid this problem, you can store and access TMs and glossaries for clients in a centralized manner. The setup looks like this:
Your clients’ TMs and glossaries go into the “tm” and “glossary” subfolders within this centralized location. When you set up a project, you point OmegaT to this folder for the TMs and glossaries, thus making it use the centralized location instead of the local folders.
The next time you create a project for this client, all you need to do is this:
- Copy the TM and the glossary from the last project into the centralized location. This will make sure your centralized location has all files from previous projects. This is still a manual process, but it is much easier and smarter than copying files between local project subfolders.
- Point the new project to the centralized location for TMs and glossaries.
Final tips
- If you use OmegaT on different devices, it is a good idea to put this centralized location on a network share accessible from all these devices.
- To avoid configuring paths to the centralized location manually for each new project, you can simply copy the project configuration file (omegat.project) from the last project to the new one, provided the old one has correct paths.
In conclusion
Relying on a centralized location to store TMs and glossaries is an important step to keeping your valuable translation assets under control. Not only does it bring organization to TMs and glossaries, but it also saves time and prevents you from using outdated files or losing important files.
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