Creating Translation Provider Plug-ins

This section explains how to create a translation provider plug-in for Trados Studio. A plug-in lets Trados Studio connect to machine translation engines, translation memory systems, and other translation services.

Overview

A translation provider translates segments, such as sentences, from a source language into a target language. A provider can support many source and target language pairs.

Examples include RWS Translation Memory, which looks up segments in a file-based or server-based translation memory database (FileBasedTranslationMemory or ServerBasedTranslationMemory), and the RWS Automated Translation Provider, which uses RWS's automated translation engine.

Trados Studio uses translation providers in these tasks:

  • Project preparation, including the Analyze, Populate Project Translation Memory, and Pre-translate batch tasks.
  • Interactive translation, when users look up segments in a document in the Trados Studio editor.
  • Project finalization, during the TM Update task.

Trados Studio includes built-in translation provider implementations. It also provides a plug-in mechanism that lets third parties create their own translation provider plug-ins. To implement a translation provider plug-in, create these classes:

  1. Translation Provider: Represents the multilingual provider and returns a translation provider language direction for each source-target language pair. This class must implement the ITranslationProvider interface.
  2. Translation Provider Language Direction: Exposes translation functionality for a specific source-target language pair.
  3. Translation Provider Factory Extension: Creates provider instances from a URI. Trados Studio uses this class to load providers from URIs stored in translation projects. Each provider should define a URI scheme that uniquely identifies it.
  4. Translation Provider UI Extension: Supplies the user interface that lets Trados Studio browse for providers, edit provider settings, and present providers consistently. Trados Studio selects the appropriate UI extension based on the provider URI.

The following diagram shows how Trados Studio uses a translation provider plug-in:

The following topics describe the implementation steps in detail:

  1. Creating the Translation Provider
  2. Creating the Translation Provider Factory
  3. Creating the Translation Provider UI Extension