Quicker Inserts!

01

If you work with special symbols when you are translating in SDL Trados Studio, and don’t have the appropriate keyboard then you are faced with a number of options.  You can add the symbols you want as Quick Inserts; this is fairly straightforward and I’ve discussed this a number of times in the past.  You can use AutoHotkey or some other tool that makes it easy to add special characters based on a keyboard shortcut.  You can install a different keyboard layout and then learn where the various keys are.  You can use windows alt codes… so to add the letter a with an umlaut ( ä ) I would use Alt+0228.  Actually on my laptop I’d have to use Alt+Fn+0228 as I don’t have a numeric keyboard, so the combinations can be tricky, and you have to remember them all or leave post-its all over your screen 😉  You could also use the windows character map, where you can select the symbol you want and then copy and paste it into your target segment.  And lastly (I think… although I’m open to more suggestions) you could keep MSWord running in the background and copy and paste as needed from a page containing the symbols you normally use.

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All I want is a simple analysis!

01If this title sounds familiar to you it’s probably because I wrote an article three years ago on the SDL blog with the very same title.  It’s such a good title (in my opinion ;-)) I decided to keep it and write the same article again, but refreshed and enhanced a little for SDL Trados Studio 2014.

Something I only occasionally hear these days is “When I used Workbench or SDLX it was simple to create a quick analysis of my files. Now I have to create a Project in Studio and it takes so long to do the same thing.”  I do think this is something you’re more likely to hear from experienced users of the older products because they initially find that getting a quick report out of Studio is a far more onerus process than it used to be.  What they might not think of is how you can use the Projects concept to make this easy for you once you become just as experienced with the new tools.

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AnyTM… or SuperTM!

02In February last year I wrote an article called “It’s all English… right?“.  It was about a Translation Provider plugin available through the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) and it resolved a common request from users.  The request was why can’t I use my en(US) Translation Memory with my new customer who wants the work as en(GB)?

It’s a valid question, and Studio does have valid reasons for wanting to retain the differences between the different flavours of English… or any other language you work with that also has different flavours, like Spanish, French or Arabic for example.  But it’s also a valid request to be able to use one Translation Memory for this because it’s perfectly simple for you, as a Translator, to maintain multiple Translation Units and handle any other differences between placeables that Studio assigns automatically based on the language flavour.

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