Ah, broken segmentation. The universal CAT tool curse. Nothing says “fun day at work” like opening a file and seeing a sentence carved into pieces like it owed someone money. Your CAT tool, bless its soul, then decides to send Segment 1 off into the wild to be translated in complete isolation, like a contestant on a dating show with no bio and no context. The engine, having no clue what came before or after, squints at the fragment and gives you something that might technically be English, but sounds like it was written by someone hallucinating a sentence in real time. “This is a sentence that”… what? Dances? Explodes? Goes on a spiritual journey? Who knows. And the machine sure doesn’t.
So what did we all do? We patched it manually. You’d select two or three segments, smush them together, run them through translation, get a passable result, then painstakingly split it all back to fit your grid. Congratulations, you’ve just wasted five minutes saving a machine from its own lack of awareness. And no, you’re not getting those five minutes back. Multiply that by a few hundred segments and you’re halfway to a minor existential crisis.
Now, some tools have tried to be helpful here, and by helpful I mean “actively destructive.” They let you merge segments permanently. Genius, right? Until your TM ends up saving Frankenstein segments that don’t match anything ever again because your client sent you a slightly updated file next time—now with different splits. Congratulations, you’ve just trained your TM to be useless. It’s like teaching a parrot to recite your shopping list and then changing all the ingredients.
Segmentation Glue That Doesn’t Ruin Dinner
At Cattitude, we thought, “What if we didn’t break the rules of segmentation just to fix segmentation?” Revolutionary, we know. So we did what any sensible CAT tool should do: we let you glue segments together just long enough for the machine translation engine and the translation memory to actually have a fighting chance at producing something decent. And then, poof—everything is unlinked like it never happened. No scars. No regrets. No awkward flashbacks.
Yes, Cattitude feeds the full, temporarily reconstructed sentence not just to MT, but also to TM. Both engines get access to the full picture. That means better predictions, better suggestions, and smarter matches. If TM has a fuzzy match for Segment 1–3 as a sentence unit, you’ll get it. If MT can produce a better full-sentence translation, you’ll get that too. The result list isn’t a monologue—it’s a blend of sources, served hot and relevant.
And the second the job is done, the segments are pulled back apart like nothing ever happened. You’re left with the original structure, the original segmentation, and absolutely no memory pollution. The only thing that sticks is the better quality translation.
No Monsters in the Memory, No Visual Crimes
We don’t store your experimental sentence mashups in the TM. We don’t pollute your matches with bizarre segment blends that future-you will look at and say, “What the hell was I thinking?” No visual hacks. No trickery in the editor. Everything is done cleanly behind the scenes: toggle on, toggle off, and walk away like a segment ninja.
The best part? It’s fully automatic. When a project includes our special splitsymbol flag—our polite internal way of saying “this file is a mess”—Cattitude quietly activates the feature. But if you’re working on a pristine, human-segmented file where everything is where it should be, it stays out of the way. You can enable it per project, flip the switch, and trust that it will only intervene when it makes sense.
This means no manual linking, no praying to the MT gods, and no duct-taping segments together every time a PDF-to-XLIFF converter has a nervous breakdown mid-sentence.
Fixing One Thing Without Breaking Three Others
This isn’t just a fix. It’s an act of restraint. We didn’t just make segment linking smarter—we made it disappear when it’s done. It doesn’t mess with your TM. It doesn’t change your segment structure. It doesn’t create a new problem to fix the old one. Which, let’s be honest, is more than we can say for most CAT tool “features.”
It makes MT smarter. It makes TM more relevant. It makes your results better. And it doesn’t demand that you become a part-time engineer just to get one decent translation.
At Cattitude, we believe translation tools should be like great editors: invisible when things are smooth, brilliant when things get messy. Temporary segment linking is just that. It’s not loud. It doesn’t require a ceremony. But it quietly turns garbage input into something actually worth working with—without ever leaving a trace.
Cattitude: For Translators Who’ve Had Enough of the Stupid Stuff
This is not just a feature. It’s a philosophy. A little piece of engineering empathy, designed by people who understand that the real problem isn’t the translation—it’s the ridiculous hoops you usually have to jump through to make the tools behave.
Temporary segment linking doesn’t just help. It refuses to make things worse. It’s your silent co-pilot, your behind-the-scenes fixer, and your new favorite reason not to scream into a pillow when you open a badly segmented file.
Because let’s be honest: context shouldn’t be a luxury. And neither should sanity.