Working with Passolo

Recently I had a project I had to do in Passolo. I was given instructions to download version 5 Translation Editor (the stripped-down "satellite version", intended for translators), and to use that for translation of a software project.

I've never used Passolo before, so it was a bit of challenge at first - trying to get to know the program and understand how it works.
At first I was glad to see that it has some kind of Trados integration, but soon realized that it doesn't really work in "Translation Editor" - at least I couldn't get it to work.

The help file does not really help, since obviously the same version of help file is used both in "full" and "translation editor" versions, so most of the functions described in the Help file don't actually work in the "satellite" Translation edition.

After some e-mails with my PM on this project, it was determined that Trados integration doesn't actually work. :(
I re-checked several times, and even tried to change the Trados integration macro, but to no avail - the macro cannot be edited in "satellite" edition of Passolo.
BTW, I realized what kind of hack it was when I saw that the reference to Trados Workbench file was hard-coded in the macro! :o

Another thing I couldn't exactly get the hang of was its fuzzy matching. I've properly populated the glossaries I was to use (a kind of workaround in order to be able to use existing translations, at least for terminology and shorter segments/sentences), but the fuzzy matches were rather surprising. Sometimes I'd get the expected match, and sometimes not. Strange.

Not to mention that once your glossary exceeds about 2.000 lines/terms, it tends to get rather slow... I had several glossaries, ranging from about 1.000 terms, up to 10.000 terms. I had to "switch on" (enable) those larger ones only when absolutely necessary, as it slowed the program almost to a crawl - I'd wait 10 seconds or more for the program to populate the window with matches for each new segment...

In short, not an easy job. What bothered me the most is the fact that the Help file that comes with this "satellite" edition actually refers to the full version, so you have to find out yourself what actually works in this "bare-bones" version :(

It's not all bad, though. The "live dialog" preview works fine, and is helpful when you need to shorten the translated string to make it fit on the dialog.

However, you should not rely completely on Passolo and its fuzzy-matching function to ensure consistency...