A few notes on SDL Trados QA Checker 2.0

A few days ago I had to perform formal QA on a project translated from English into German. I used SDL Trados QA Checker 2.0 (SP3) for this tasks and have a few interesting findings.

First of all, I received a lot of capitalization error reports. Apparently all nouns are capitalized in German which is not true for other languages, and this result into differences in capitalization. Quite annoying though!

Then, it reports repeated words like "OCR-A OCR-B" or "Task 1, Task 2", which is also annoying.

Third, it reported untranslated segments, and the segments really were untranslated. The problem was that those segments were just untranslatable, and TagEditor didn't even open it, but QA Checker still reported it. It's a good added safety feature, but annoying again. One example of such segment:
©2009

And last but not least, report on inconsistent translation is hard to work with as it doesn't reference the other translation compared to which this one is inconsistent. You have to use search feature and keep in mind what translation was there and what is here. Needless to say, annoying.

I would like to apologize to Patrik Mazanek who developed this plug-in. It in fact is a very useful and very capable tool, it can detect a lot of errors and is quite flexible, but as long as it works good, I apparently don't notice how good it was at detecting this or that error. And as soon as it comes to annoyance, I certainly notice it. Anyway, this post is apprently not to state how bad QA Checker 2.0 is. It's really great. But the purpose of this post is to make people (including Patrik and other developers who will be able to solve the problems) aware of the existing drawbacks.