It's all English… right?

7 June 2018 update: note that the application referred to in this article is actually part of the product in Studio 2015 onwards.  So no need to download it!
#1English spoken in Australia, Belize, Canada, Caribbean, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Malaysia, New Zealand, Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States and Zimbabwe.  Also known as en-AU, en-BZ, en-CA, en-029, en-IN, en-IE, en-JM, en-MY, en-NZ, en-PH, en-SG, en-ZA, en-TT, en-GB, en-US and en-ZW.  These are the language codes used by Microsoft in their National Language Support (NLS) API Reference for the different flavours of English supported and this is what Studio bases its language support for English on… then it’s further complicated as it can also vary depending on the operating system of your computer (Win XP, Vista, Win7 etc.)
Of course this is English, or flavours of it.  But there are differences and Studio always insists on knowing which flavour of any language is being used.  So 16 variants… and it’s even more with Spanish for example where we have 20 variants.
So does it really matter that 23/08/2005 in the United Kingdom is written as 8/23/2005 in the United States, or that 1,234,567,890,123.45 in the United States is written in Spain (Spanish (Spain)) as 1.234.567.890.123,45?
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Translate with style…

#1Quite often people ask me how to handle XML files where the author has written guidance notes as a tag in the XML.  These guidance notes should not be translated so you don’t really want to see them presented as a translatable segment as you work, but you would like them to be clearly visible as a reference for the translator to help clarify meaning or give guidance on the maximum number of characters allowed for each segment when this could vary throughout the file for example.
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Understanding a 100% match

When I used to study maths as a boy my Father, who was an engineer and very straightforward in his views, always used to say 100% was the best you could give. It meant everything, so there was no more.  Any talk of giving 101% for example wouldn’t be entertained for a second because you clearly hadn’t given 100% in the first place.  It wasn’t possible and anyone who said otherwise was probably in marketing or sales!
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I thought Studio could handle a PDF?

#1Update: Studio 2015 does have a built in OCR facility for PDF, so whilst this article is still useful, keep that in mind!  Also worth reviewing the solution from InFix using XLIFF.
Studio has a PDF filetype, and it can do a great job of translating PDF files… BUT… not all PDF files!
So what exactly do I mean by this, surely a PDF is a PDF?  Well this is true, but not all PDF files have been created in the same way and this is an important point.  PDF stands for Portable Document Format and was originally developed by Adobe some 20-years ago.  Today it’s even a recognised standard and for anyone interested you can find them here… at least the ones I could find:
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