The Innovation Developer Experience…

001On two previous occasions I’ve been lucky enough to attend the SDL Innovate conference held at the San Francisco venue, and this year I get to go again.  But this year is particularly special!

Actually every year is great because someone like me, entrenched in the world of our Language Solutions, rarely gets a really good glimpse into what SDL is capable of providing as a leader in global customer experience.  I have a pretty good idea as I try to attend all the internal briefings we have, and I also get to work across many of our teams as I’m lucky enough to dabble a bit in the things we do for our communities and across social media.  But there really is no substitute for the value we create for our customers at an event like this. Continue reading “The Innovation Developer Experience…”

The JSON files…

01Update Sept 2016: You can find an excellent filetype plugin for JSON files on the SDL AppStore if you don’t want to tackle this yourself.

The JSON files… not really related to Jason Voorhees of course, but for some users who have received these file types for translation the problem of how to handle them and extract the appropriate text may well seem like an episode of Friday the 13th!  I’ve seen a few threads in the last couple of weeks sharing various methods for handling these files ranging from opening them in MSWord and applying a hidden style to the parts you don’t want, to asking vendors to create variations on javascript filetypes.  But I think Studio offers a much simpler mechanism for handling them out of the box.

So what are these file types and how can you handle them with Studio 2014, or even 2009/2011?  In this article I’m going to look at the regex filetype as this is very well suited to files like this, but before we get into that detail let’s take a look at what they are. Continue reading “The JSON files…”

Adjusting the view…

01It’s funny how questions seem to appear like London buses… you don’t get any and then they all come at once!  More often than not it’s very specific questions that behave this way too.  So you don’t see them for ages and then you get the same question in a number of places for a day or two and then it goes quiet again!  One of the topics that falls into this category is changing the view in the Editor.  By this I mean the colour of the text, the font types or the background you’re working on.  All these things can be changed in Studio to make it easier if you’re dealing with documents that don’t display well and you want to work in wysiwyg mode.

Since the release of Studio 2009 the things I’ll cover here have always been available through the options, but now that we have the ribbon in Studion 2014 it’s even easier.  To make this easier to see (hopefully!) I addressed where the options are in this article and then I recorded a short video so you can see in one go how these work in practice.  This is the text I’m working with, “theview“,  which is obviously a deliberately prepared file containing some things that can make it very difficult to read and work with when working in the default view and you can download it to have a play if you like. Continue reading “Adjusting the view…”

Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!

01This article is all about out with the old and in with the new in more ways than one!  In the last week I have been asked three times about converting Wordfast translation memories and Wordfast glossaries into resources that could be used in Studio and MultiTerm.  Normally, for the TXT translation memories I get I would go the traditional route and use a copy of Wordfast to export as TMX.  Then it’s simple, but what if you don’t have Wordfast or don’t want to have to try and use it?  Wordfast glossaries are new territory for me as I’d never looked at these before.  But on a quick check it looked as though they are also TXT files so I decided to take a better look.

Before I get into the detail I’ll just add that I’m not very familiar with Wordfast so I’m basing my suggestions on the small number of files I have received, or created, and the process I used to convert them to formats more useful for a Studio user.  I’ll start with the glossaries as this is where I got the idea from,  I better explain my opening statement too… this is because after I did an initial conversion using the Glossary Converter from the SDL Openexchange I was asked to explain how this would work with MultiTerm Convert.  This of course made me think about the old versus the new… I wouldn’t compare Wordfast and Studio in this way at all 😉 Continue reading “Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!”