The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2022 - 33

RESOURCE REVIEW By Nora Díaz
Enhanced Productivity
with Text Expansion
Note: The following was originally published in Deep Focus, the newsletter of ATA's Audiovisual Division:
www.ata-divisions.org/AVD.
I haven't typed my full name or email address in years. Instead, I type
abbreviations that get expanded after I type a punctuation mark or press
a trigger key, such as the spacebar or Enter key. I also use text expansion
for standard email replies, such as my reply when I receive a job that I can
or can't accept, for the email body that accompanies my invoices, and for
phrases and long words in general. I use text expansion when translating,
transcribing, and subtitling. I have abbreviations and expansions that I
have used for years, but I also add new ones all the time, even when they
will just be used for a short period, such as a company name that appears
in a corporate video subtitling job.
ext expansion can be
a great productivity
boost, and, given
that it's so easy to set
up and start using, I
believe every language
professional can benefit
from it. There are many
text expansion solutions
available, but I'll focus on
two here: PhraseExpress and
TextExpander.
T
PhraseExpress
www.phraseexpress.com
Not only is PhraseExpress
easy to set up and use,
it's also free for personal
use. The user can set up
keyboard shortcuts and
abbreviations as triggers
to input specific words and
phrases. For example, for
transcription work, it's easy
to create an expansion with
" i1 " as the abbreviation
that, when triggered, inputs
" Interviewee 1: " , including
the space after the colon, and
www.ata-chronicle.online
American Translators Association 33
even with any formatting
required. (See Figure 1.)
Abbreviations and
expansions are set up in
seconds, are immediately
available in every program,
and can be set up to use
plain or formatted text.
PhraseExpress runs in the
background and can easily
be opened to make changes
to the existing list of
abbreviations by clicking on
its icon in the taskbar.
But PhraseExpress is
much more than a simple
text expander. It includes
templates that can help the
user get started, and there's
a great smart search feature
that will launch a search
in a number of websites
right from wherever you're
editing text. The built-in
autocorrect feature will fix
any typos and spelling errors
very smoothly, and there
are boilerplate templates to
easily insert dates and times.
The latter is a very handy
feature that I have combined
with an abbreviation so that
whenever I type " td " , today's
date is automatically inserted
wherever my cursor is. I use
this all the time to quickly
append the current date to
the end of file names before
sending them to clients.
Another favorite feature of
mine in PhraseExpress is text
Figure 1: PhraseExpress allows you to set up keyboard shortcuts and
abbreviations as triggers

http://www.ata-divisions.org/AVD http://www.phraseexpress.com http://www.ata-chronicle.online

The ATA Chronicle - March/April 2022

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