About Setting Preferences and Defaults

Preferences are settings that enable you to configure how you want SDL Trados Studio to look and to function. For example, when you open SDL Trados Studio, any documents that were open when you closed the application are automatically reopened by default. However, if you do not want documents to be opened automatically you can change the setting that controls this.

You can also create new settings that help you to work more efficiently. For example, if you generally work with a single language pair you can define default language pair settings (translation memory selections for example) that are automatically applied when you start a new translation.

There are preference settings for each of the views.

User Profile

Preferences are stored in your user profile. You can export your user profile to a file for sharing with other users or for you to take with you when you use SDL Trados Studio on a different computer. You could also create profiles for use with different customers.

Options Dialog Box

Preference settings and default settings for a language pair are located in the Options dialog box. This dialog box contains all of the default system settings that you can change and is also where you create new settings of your own. These default settings are used when you create a project or start a new translation using the Translate Single Document command.

To display the Options dialog box, select File > Options from the Ribbon. To see the available settings, select an item from the navigation tree on the left; the settings available for the item are displayed on the right.

Project Settings Dialog Box

Settings for a language pair in the active project and active document are located in the Project Settings dialog box.

To display the Project Settings dialog box, select Project Settings from the Home tab in any view. To see the available settings, select an item from the navigation tree on the left; the settings available for the item are displayed on the right.