Every language writes quotation marks its own way: “Brazilian Portuguese”, „German“, «French». Your keyboard only types the straight " and ', so the wrong marks easily end up in the translation. wxrks fixes this in two places: the wxrks Editor turns the straight quotes you type into the marks of the target language, and a QA check flags any marks that don't match. This article shows how to set up the marks for your account and how they work while you translate.
💡 Who is this for?
Account Admins set the marks of each language and the default of the typing option in Settings > Translation > Quotation marks. Only Account Admins can open this page.
Vendors (linguists) and Project Managers who type translations in the Editor. No permission is needed: each user turns the option on or off for themselves in the Editor settings.
How wxrks picks the marks of a language
Each language has four marks:
Outer opening and closing marks, for a quotation: “like this”.
Inner opening and closing marks, for a quotation inside another quotation: “she said ‘like this’ to me”.
wxrks keeps one table of marks for the whole account. To keep it short, the table has a Default row and a row only for the languages whose marks differ from it. To find the marks of a target language, wxrks looks for, in this order:
A row for the exact language and region, for example pt-PT (European Portuguese).
A row for its base language, for example de (German) for de-DE, de-AT or de-CH.
The Default row.
Worked example
With the platform defaults, four target languages get these marks:
Target language | Row used | Outer | Inner | Typed |
Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR) | Default (there is no pt-BR or pt row) | “ ” | ‘ ’ | “Hello ‘world’” |
European Portuguese (pt-PT) | pt-PT | « » | “ ” | «Hello “world”» |
German (de-DE) | de (base language) | „ “ | ‚ ‘ | „Hello ‚world‘“ |
French (fr-FR) | fr (base language) | « » | “ ” | «Hello “world”» |
Brazilian and European Portuguese end up with different marks only because pt-PT has its own row. If you added a pt row, it would change pt-BR too, because pt-BR would then find its base language before reaching Default.
Set up the quotation marks of your account (Account Admins)
Go to Settings > Translation > Quotation marks.
Smart quotation marks while typing is on by default. It sets whether the Editor converts quotes for users who haven't chosen for themselves. It never locks the option: as the page says, "Each linguist can turn it on or off in the editor settings."
Under Marks by language, review the table. Each row shows its four marks in Outer opening, Outer closing, Inner opening and Inner closing, and a Sample sentence that shows the marks in use. A Changed badge marks rows that differ from the platform defaults.
Change the marks of a language
To change a row, click one of its marks and type the new one. Each field takes exactly one character.
To add a language, click Add language, choose the language, and adjust the four marks, which start as the marks the language uses today. The sample sentence updates as you type. Click Add.
To remove a language, click the trash icon at the end of its row. The language then uses its base language, or Default. The Default row can't be removed.
Then click Save changes, or click Discard to drop your edits. The QA check uses the new marks on its next run. In the Editor, they apply when a task is opened, so a linguist who already has the task open gets them after opening it again.
To go back to the marks wxrks ships with, click Reset to platform defaults at the bottom of the table, then save. This also turns Smart quotation marks while typing back on. The button is unavailable while the page already matches the platform defaults.
ℹ️ Note: The table and the typing option belong to the account. You can't set different marks for an Organizational Unit (a group of clients or teams inside your account) or for a single project.
Common misconfigurations
Editing the Default row to fix one language. The Default row is used by every language without its own row, for example Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Simplified Chinese. To change one language, add a row for it instead.
Adding the base language when you meant one region. A de row changes German for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. If only Swiss German should use « », add de-CH.
Turning the typing option off to stop it for everyone. Turning Smart quotation marks while typing off only changes the default. Linguists who switched the option on in the Editor keep it on.
Forgetting that QA uses the same table. The QA check compares the target with this table. A wrong row makes the check flag correct marks, and miss wrong ones.
Type quotation marks in the Editor (Vendors and Project Managers)
With the option on, type the straight " or ' as usual. wxrks replaces it right away with the mark of the target language:
"becomes the outer mark: opening at the start of a word, closing after a word.'becomes the inner mark in the same way.'between two letters, as in "don't", or right after a word, as in "Hans'", becomes the apostrophe ’. If an inner quotation is open, it closes it instead.
Some details:
Undo the change. Press Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) right after the mark changes to get the straight quote back, for example for inches, as in
12". For the other keys you can use while translating, see How to use the wxrks Editor Shortcuts.Pasted text isn't changed. Only the quotes you type are converted. Text you paste, and text already in the segment, keep their marks.
Accents with dead keys work. On keyboard layouts that type accents with a dead key, where
'followed byegives é, wxrks waits for the key combination to finish. You get the accent, not a quotation mark.French spacing. If your style guide puts a space inside French quotation marks, type it yourself:
" Bonjour "becomes « Bonjour ». wxrks doesn't insert spaces. To use a non-breaking space, see How to show and insert invisible formatting characters in the Editor.Chinese and Japanese. These languages run text without spaces, so a quote typed right after a character or after punctuation such as 。 or ， opens a quotation, unless one of the same level is already open in the segment, in which case it closes it. For example, in Japanese
彼は"こんにちは"と言った。becomes 彼は「こんにちは」と言った。 After an opening bracket such as （ or 《, a quote always opens.
Turn the option on or off
Open the task in the Editor. Only the way in differs by role:
Vendors: on Home, open My work, click Show the files next to the project, then click the file name.
Project Managers: open the project, go to Tasks and click the file name of the task.
In the Editor's side panel, click the Settings tab (gear icon).
Under Editing, switch Smart quotation marks on or off. Its hint reads "Turns typed quotation marks into the ones of the target language".
Your choice is saved with your user preferences and applies to every task you open in the Editor. Until you choose, the switch follows the account's Smart quotation marks while typing setting.
Find the wrong marks with QA
The QA check Quotation marks don't match the target language finds the marks that typing didn't fix, such as marks in pasted text or in matches from a Translation Memory. It is on by default. Account Admins find it in Settings > Translation > Quality & Review, under Whitespace & characters; Organizational Units and projects inherit the account's choice. It flags:
Straight quotes (
"and') in the target.Marks of another language, and tells you which marks it expected.
A mark opened but not closed, closed but never opened, or closed with the wrong mark.
It doesn't flag apostrophes or anything inside tags, and it doesn't run on CSV and TSV files.
ℹ️ Note: The check doesn't yet catch a language's own marks typed the wrong way round, such as ”text“ instead of “text” in Brazilian Portuguese. Watch for these when you review.
To run QA and work through its issues, see How to use the wxrks QA Check Tool.
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