In this post, we will explain how to use one of the most important new features of Transit NXT Service Pack 9. The new update of Transit NXT adds more quality assurance techniques that will help to optimize your pretranslations for future projects. You can now check for variants in the source as well as target language easily and quickly, which will increase the quality and consistency of your translations. 

Let's start by understanding what variants are. Translation variants or target language variants are different translations of identical source language segments, whereas source variants or source language variants are different source language segments that have been translated identically. The variant check is particularly useful for files with a high number of identical segments.

So let's look at how to perform the variant check.

Step 1: Specify how the variants should be checked under Review > Variants as shown in the following image:

Select the Translation variants option if you want Transit NXT to search for different translations of identical source language segments. The image below shows an example of translation variants:

Select the Source variants option if you want Transit NXT to search for different source language segments that have been translated identically. The image below shows an example of source variants: 

In Options, you can specify which differences Transit NXT should ignore during the variant check. For example, differences in case, blanks/whitespaces, markups, numbers, pseudo-numbers or punctuation marks. This is very useful because Transit can format files in different ways and segments may contain different markups, which can easily be ignored during the variant check. The image below shows the different options you can select:

Step 2: Select the options that suit your requirements (as specified in the above step) and click on Review > Variants > Start. Transit NXT will prompt you if variants are found and will also let you know if no variants are found, as shown in the image below:

Transit NXT searches all project files and displays any variants found in the File Navigation window. Just hover your mouse on File Navigation to view the variants window, as shown in the image below:

Step 3: Double click on the top level to show or hide variants of a source or target language segment. Double click the variant itself or right click on it to see the Go to segment option, as shown in the image below:

This new feature of Transit NXT helps you achieve increased quality assurance in your current and future translations.

To repeat the variant check, click the Start button and select Update variant display in the "File Navigation" window, as shown in the image below, and hover over File navigation on the side in order to see the updated variants.

I hope you find this new quality assurance feature in the new Service Pack of Transit NXT useful. Do try it out and let us know how you like it. Stay tuned for our upcoming posts to learn about everything you can do with Transit NXT.