Who it is for

Clean source text for your CAT tool

Source text pasted from a web page brings navigation with it, and every menu item becomes a segment you have to skip, count and eventually explain on an invoice. Clean Clipper removes it before the file gets anywhere near your tool.

Segments that are not text

You import a page and the project opens with sixty segments before the first sentence of the actual copy: “Skip to content”, “Log in”, nine product categories, a cookie notice and a language switcher listing thirty languages. None of it is translatable content, but all of it is in the file, in the word count, and has to be locked or deleted one segment at a time.

Then there is the repetition. The same menu block appears again in every section and again in the footer, so a memory fed from that file starts proposing “Read next” as a match for real sentences. Cleaning the source before import takes seconds. Cleaning a translation memory afterwards does not.

Trouble starts before the job does. You are asked to quote for “this page”, and the number you give depends entirely on what you counted – a count taken from the raw page includes the menu, and a count taken after cleaning does not, which is a conversation nobody enjoys having twice. Then the client edits the page while you are working on it. A file clipped on the day you quoted, with the address and the page’s own date in its header, settles both questions without anyone having to remember what the page looked like.

What reaches the segment list

• Menus, paginators, consent bars and “read next” feeds are cut before the file exists.
• Duplicated navigation reduced roughly fourfold against the engines compared: 102 repeated lines against 282, 478 and 491.
• Not one leftover HTML tag across 512 measured pages, so no stray markup turns into an inline tag.
• Inline formatting maps to Markdown – bold, italic, links, code and lists – which every major CAT tool imports.
• The source URL travels in the frontmatter, so the context of a segment is one click away.
• Measured on 403 pages from the top fifty sites of twelve European countries, each captured in its own language: zero failures.
• Headings, lists and blockquotes keep their level, so the structure the delivery has to mirror is visible in the source file rather than inferred from the segments.
• title and date come from the page’s own metadata, so the job folder records which version of the source you quoted against.

---
title: "Register a trade mark: step by step"
source: "https://www.gov.uk/how-to-register-a-trade-mark"
extraction: "dom"
---

## Check whether your trade mark can be registered

Your trade mark must be unique. It can include words, sounds, logos, colours
or a combination of these.

You cannot register a trade mark that is offensive, describes the goods it
relates to, or is misleading.

Preparing a source file

The aim is a file that opens in your tool with the first segment being the first sentence of the copy. Two settings do most of that, and one of them is easy to get wrong.

1. Open Options from the extension icon and point the destination at the folder where the job lives – jobs/client/source. The source file belongs with the job, not in a general clippings folder.
2. Set what the icon click does to “download the .md file” or “save to folder”, whichever suits your file handling. Either way you end up with a file to import rather than a clipboard you have to paste somewhere first.
3. Set the filename template to {date}-{domain}-{title}. The capture date is what you point at when the client’s page has changed since you quoted for it.
4. Switch the frontmatter fields off if you import the file directly. A YAML header is text, and a tool that does not recognise it will happily offer extraction: "dom" as a segment to translate.
5. Set images to skip. An image link in the Markdown becomes either a segment or an inline tag you have to carry through the whole file, for a picture that is not part of the copy.
6. When only one section is in scope, select it on the page and clip the selection. Quoting for a section and delivering the page is a misunderstanding that starts at the moment of capture.
7. Clip the page on the day you quote, and keep the file. It is the only record of the source as it stood when the price was agreed.

Settings for a source file

The frontmatter row is the one that catches people. Everything else is about keeping the segment list to actual copy.

The **starter plan** includes *up to five* seats. Additional seats are
billed monthly; see the [pricing page](https://example.com/pricing) or set
`SEATS` in your configuration file.

- Seats can be reassigned once per billing period.
- Unused seats are not carried over.

Four inline tags in one sentence: bold, italic, a link and code. Each maps
to a Markdown equivalent that a CAT tool imports as an inline tag.

Three jobs

A quote based on the copy, not the chrome

The client sends a URL and asks for a price. You clip the page – the menu, the language switcher listing thirty languages, the consent notice and the footer are gone before the file exists, so the count you quote is the count of the text that has to be translated.

The measured version of this is the duplicated navigation: 102 repeated lines across a 109-page corpus, against 282, 478 and 491 for the engines compared. On a page whose menu repeats in every section, that is most of the difference between two quotes for the same job.

The page that changed mid-job

Three days in, the client mentions that marketing “tweaked a couple of things”. You clip the page again; the second file takes a numeric suffix, and a diff against the file you quoted from shows two new paragraphs and a changed heading.

That is a scope conversation with a document in it rather than an argument about recollection. The capture date in each filename says which is which, and the date field says what the page claimed about itself on each occasion.

Building a bilingual reference from a live site

The client’s site already exists in German. You clip the English page and the German page, one after the other, into the same job folder. Extraction does not depend on the language of the text, so both come out as the same clean structure with the same headings in the same order.

That was measured deliberately: 403 pages from the top fifty sites of twelve European countries, each captured with the browser set to that country’s language, with zero failures and no leftover HTML in any of them. Aligning two clean files is a job; aligning two files full of menus is a different and worse job.

Against the usual preparation

Preparation always happens; the question is where. These are the places translators currently do it, and what each one costs.

When the import is not clean

My tool offered the YAML header as segments

The frontmatter is text at the top of the file, and a tool that does not recognise a YAML block treats it as content. Switch the frontmatter fields off in the settings before clipping a file you intend to import directly, or delete the header after clipping. Keeping a second copy with the header is worth it – that copy is where the source URL and the date live.

Sixty segments of navigation still made it through

That happens when the page has no article body at all – a category listing, a shop front, a search result. The extension reports “no article” in that case rather than returning the links, so check what the clip window said before importing. If it did return an article and the menu came with it, the site marked its navigation up as article content, which is the one case the density heuristic cannot see through.

The inline formatting looks wrong after import

Markdown marks emphasis with characters rather than tags, so a tool that imports the file as plain text shows bold literally instead of as an inline tag. Import it as Markdown rather than as text; most tools have both filters, and they behave completely differently on the same file.

Half the copy is missing from a marketing page

Marketing pages are often built from design blocks that render as you scroll, or from tabs and accordions that insert their text only when opened. What the browser has not rendered is not in the DOM and cannot be captured. Scroll the page to the end, open the sections, and clip again – or ask the client for the copy deck, which for a page like that is the better source anyway.

What it is not

It is not a CAT tool: no XLIFF, no TMX, no segmentation and no word count. It does not preserve the page’s HTML for round-tripping. The output is Markdown, meant to be read and translated rather than merged back into the site. Text inside images is not extracted. And the fourteen interface languages are a separate thing from the language of the page – extraction itself does not depend on the language of the text.

Questions