Segacious segmentation…

Using segmentation rules on your Translation Memory is something most users struggle with from time to time; but not just the creation of the rules which are often just a question of a few regular expressions and well covered in posts like this from Nora Diaz and others.  Rather how to ensure they apply when you want them, particularly when using the alignment module or retrofit in SDL Trados Studio where custom segmentation rules are being used.  Now I’m not going to take the credit for this article as I would not have even considered writing it if Evzen Polenka had not pointed out how Studio could be used to handle the segmentation of the target language text… something I wasn’t aware was even possible until yesterday.  So all credit to Evzen here for seeing the practical use of this feature and sharing his knowledge.  This is exactly what I love about the community, everyone can learn something and in practical terms many of SDLs customers certainly know how to use the software better than some of us in SDL do!

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Cloud murmurings… part 1.

It’s true… I’m a die hard desktop user.  I love the benefits I get from my mobile phone, using dropbox, the benefits of machine translation, Netflix and all the cool things that come with being able to use online features in the cloud.  But I’ve still been reticent to wholeheartedly embrace online technology and talk about it in this blog.  When I ask myself why that is, the first thing that crosses my mind is the unreliability of online connectivity.  Some people have a view of me as being a calm and patient person, and I do try hard to be that person, but when it comes to a lack of connectivity I turn into Mister Angry and Frustrated very quickly!  So the very idea of working with solutions that only offer an online capability for everything leaves me cold.  It’s one thing being unable to watch a film, share files, pick up my email or use my phone, but not being able to work at all is another thing altogether.  If I was working as an independant translator with all the benefits that can bring of being able to work anywhere, then having a good offline capability would be essential.  Studio of course offers me the offline capability, but today (and in a few more articles as there’s a lot to cover) I want to talk about the cloud and in particular SDL GroupShare.  Many of you may wonder if this has any relevance for you, but hopefully you’ll see it does because the solutions SDL offer in this space give you the flexibility you need when working with the cloud and even as a freelance translator you may get asked to work in that environment.  I’m going to tackle a few scenarios to explain, starting with creating projects. Continue reading “Cloud murmurings… part 1.”

Looking cool…

Using stylesheets to enhance the translators experience when working with XML files can be very helpful and sometimes essential.  It allows you to pull details from the XML and display them in a preview pane so that the translator has more context around the translatable text.  It can also provide a mechanism for displaying text that you don’t want extracted from the XML for translation at all.  This is nothing new of course and localisation engineers and experienced translators have been doing this for years.  In fact I’ve even written about this in the past providing a simple example of how it’s done and some reading resources for anyone who would like to learn how.  So why am I bringing this up again?

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