Export for External Review – a detour

02***Updated 24 June 2017***
When Studio 2009 was launched one of the first applications on the new SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) was the SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office.  This was an excellent application created by Patrik Mazanek that paved the way for some of the new features you see in Studio 2014 today.
The idea back then was born out of a requirement to export the contents of an sdlxliff file to Microsoft Excel but with no re-import to update the translation.  If you were an SDLX user you’d probably recognise that this was something you could do in SDLX, and the request that this would be possible in Studio was coming from many SDLX users.
Déjà Vu, another translation tool, had this concept of “External Views” where you could export the contents of your translation into a couple of formats, one of them being an RTF document formatted as a table containing the source and target text.  But the neat thing about this was that you could reimport the RTF and update your translation with whatever edits had been made in the RTF.  This was very cool, and as far as I’m aware no other tool had this capability at the time, short of working in Microsoft Word on a Bilingual DOC in the first place.  So when Patrik produced his first build of the converter and announced that he had included a similar capability using DOCX in addition to the Excel export this was very exciting!
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A few bilingual TBX resources

01Since writing my last article on handling large TBX files I have extracted a few TBX files as language pairs only from the very large TBX provided by IATE and thought I would share them here for others to use.  If you want a specific language pair from the 25 languages within the IATE TBX then drop a note into the comments.  I can’t guarantee I’ll do it quickly, but as the process is fairly straightforward I will add them from time to time.
All of the files below are extracted from the following original: Download IATE, European Union, [2014] Continue reading “A few bilingual TBX resources”

What a whopper!

01I love this cartoon with the husband and wife fishing on a calm weekend off.
“Honey, I got a big one on!”
She’s hooked a whopper and he casually responds in the way he always does when she occasionally catches a fish on Sunday morning.
“Yes dear, uh huh…”
The equipment they’ve got, from the boat to the fishing rods, is all perfectly suitable for their usual weekend activities but hopelessly inadequate for handling something like this!  Little do they know that the whopper under the surface is going to give them a little more trouble when they try to bring him on board!
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Disappearing forum posts!

01If you’ve ever posted a question into a forum, particularly about XML, and found that when it was published the main part of your question where you showed the XML had disappeared then this short article will be interesting for you!  I see this all the time in ProZ.com, or when people ask me questions in the comments of this blog, and I can imagine the frustration they must be feeling as they post it again once or twice… all to no avail!
The reason for this is because many forums, and blogs, require that you handle reserved characters in HTML as HTML entities.  Of course everyone knows this, and the forums and blogs in question always make it really obvious and provide guidance on how to overcome it… not!
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