When a TU is closed, there are three possibilities regarding what you see:
· If there is no translation, you will see the source segment without any segment delimiters.
· If there is a translation, there are two possibilities, depending on whether the Show hidden text checkbox in the Options menu of Microsoft Word® is checked:
▪ If the hidden text is not shown, you will see the translation only, and no segment delimiters.
▪ If the hidden text is shown, you will see the whole translation unit, including source segment and translation. The TU will appear bracketed by red segment delimiters, and there will be a third delimiter between the source segment and the translation, as shown below:
The three delimiters have the following meaning:
· "{" marks the start of a translation unit.
· "}" marks the end of a translation unit.
· "|" is the delimiter which separates the source segment and the target segment (translation) of a TU.
Unlike some other CAT tools (e.g. TRADOS® and Wordfast®), the segment delimiters in MetaTexis have no internal function. Their only function is to help you to identify segments. MetaTexis uses an advanced technique to track segments, source text, and translation. This information is hidden from the user, and the user cannot do any harm by simply deleting the delimiters. Nevertheless, these delimiters are protected from deleting when the input control is active (see Input Control).
However, when the hidden text is not shown, parts of the source text may be accidentally deleted. For this reason, in MetaTexis you can unhide the third segment delimiter (the one which separates source text and its translation) so that the delimiter will remain visible even when hidden text is not visible.
In some other CAT tools (e.g. TRADOS® and Wordfast®), some information is stored in the segment delimiters, namely the information about the matching value if a segment was retrieved from a translation memory. In MetaTexis this information is stored in a different place and it can be obtained in the Segment info dialog box (History and Miscellaneous tabs) (see Segment Info).
Therefore, in MetaTexis there is no point in having the hidden text displayed to gain information, because there is no information to be seen. (All information about the segments and translators is stored in hidden places. Even if it were possible to display them directly in the text (it is not), it would make no sense because the information is encoded and compressed. You can access this information only through the segment statistics.