The AutoSuggest feature in Studio has been around since the launch of Studio 2009 and based on the questions I see from time to time I think it’s a feature that could use a little explanation on what it’s all about. In simple terms it’s a mechanism for prompting you as you type with suggested target text that is based on the source text of the document you are translating. So sometimes it might be a translation of some or all of the text in the source segment, and sometimes it might be providing an easy way to replicate the source text into the target. This is done by you entering a character via the keyboard and then Studio suggests suitable text that can be applied with a single keystroke. In terms of productivity this is a great feature and given how many other translation tools have copied this in one form or another I think it’s clear it really works too!
AutoSuggest comes from a number of different sources, some out of the box with every version of the product, and some requiring a specific license. The ability to create resources for AutoSuggest is also controlled by license for some things, but not for all. When you purchase Studio, any version at all, you have the ability to use the AutoSuggest resources out of the box from three places: Continue reading “The ins and outs of AutoSuggest”
Author: Paul Filkin
2014 in review
Happy New Year to everyone reading my blog. It’s been fun writing it, and I hope it’s been just as enjoyable and useful for you all as well.
Before we hit 2015 the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for multifarious.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report and thanks again for reading it! Maybe 2015 will be the year I finally get a view from Greenland!
Working with shared resources…
One of the reasons SDL Trados Studio, and Trados before that, has been such a popular choice for translators and small teams is the ability to work with shared resources. Many Translation Environments require the use of a server solution in order to share work and if you only do this occasionally, or if you work with a couple of colleagues, then whilst the server solutions can offer a lot of additional capabilities they are often over the top for simple sharing needs and may even require you signing up for things you may not be interested in.
Sharing resources at a simple level is pretty straightforward with Studio because they are mostly file based. So you have a Translation Memory (*.sdltm), and a termbase (*.sdltb) for example, both of which can be accessed by several translators at the same time. You may well have read that several times just to make sure this is what I actually said! If this is possible then why do we sell server solutions at all, as we have SDL GroupShare, SDL WorldServer and SDL TMS? The reason of course is that sharing a filebased resource like this has many limitations and it’s not a solution for serious Projects. Limitations like these that are detailed in KB Article #5098 in the SDL Knowledgebase:
Continue reading “Working with shared resources…”
The future is bright… it's not Java!
I’ve been talking about this image for around a year in various presentations where we talked about the plans for Studio 2014. As of today to be able to finally present it as a fait accompli feels good… in fact it feels wonderful! Whilst this is a good headline it’s not everything you get with SP2 and there are some other things in here well worth a mention. I’m not going to cover them all but I will pick out the headliners that I’m pretty sure people have been asking for. But let’s start with terminology because after nearly 8-years of reading about Java problems, and that’s just my time with SDL and the Trados based software, this is a historical moment worth relishing. Quite a nice 30-yr birthday present for Trados too!
Continue reading “The future is bright… it's not Java!”
The ATA55 in Chicago and the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore)… which apps?
This year at the ATA in Chicago all the tool vendors who attended the event were given the opportunity to run a little “Tool Bar” where attendees could come and ask any question they liked. This was a great initiative, and despite the first day where we were perhaps mistakenly tucked away under the arctic air conditioning in the corner where nobody could see us, I think they were very well attended. Certainly from an SDL perspective we were non-stop from the moment we started till the end of each day. It was a great experience for us as we get to meet lots of new users and many we only speak to by email, or on twitter, and I hope it was an equally great experience for anyone who attended.
Continue reading “The ATA55 in Chicago and the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore)… which apps?”
Language Cloud… word-counts… best practice?
Best practice! This is a phrase I’ve had a love/hate relationship with over the course of my entire career… or maybe it’s just a love to hate! The phrase is something that should perhaps be called “Best Suggestions” and not “Best Practice” because all too often I think it’s used to describe the way someone wants you to work as opposed to anything that represents the views of a majority of users over a long period of time, or anything that takes account the way different people want to work. In fact with new technology how can it be “Best Practice” when it hasn’t been around long enough in the first place? I think for a clearly defined and well established process then “Best Practice” has it’s place… but otherwise it’s often the easy answer to a more complex problem, or just a problem that is considered too hard to address.
Continue reading “Language Cloud… word-counts… best practice?”
IATE, the last word… maybe!
By now I think we’ve discussed the import of an IATE TBX into CAT tools as much as we can without going over old ground again. But if you’re reading this and don’t know what I’m talking about then perhaps review these two articles first:
What a whopper! – which is all about the difficulties of handling a TBX the size of the one that is available from the IATE download site.
A few bilingual TBX resources – which is a short article sharing a few of the TBX files I extracted for a few users who were having problems dealing with the 2.2Gb, 8 million term whopper we started with.
So why am I bringing this up again? Well I do like to have the last word… don’t we all… but this time I wanted to share the work of Henk Sanderson who has put a lot of time and effort into breaking the IATE TBX into bite sized chunks and at the same time cleaning them up so they can be more useful to a translator. I also wanted to share the successful import of the complete original TBX from IATE directly into MultiTerm Server:
Continue reading “IATE, the last word… maybe!”
Talk to the hand…
… because the head is listening!
In my last article I wrote about the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ, and the idea they had of attempting to elicit questions prior to the event through their Conference Bulletin Board. This was a really great idea because it gives the tool vendors the opportunity to focus their presentations and workshops on the things users really want to know about.
There can be nothing worse, for an experienced user, than turning up to an hours presentation and listening to the same presentation on how to do the basics with a translation tool that you hear every time you make the effort to improve your knowledge.
So the idea of raising questions from people who wish to attend prior to the event is a really good one because not only does it mean the content should be more relevant to the things users really want to know, but it also gives the vendor time to prepare for any really tricky questions that might otherwise have to be taken off line. So I thought I’d use this article to do two things.
- Shamelessly promote a couple of conferences I’m attending this year where there are opportunities to ask questions
- Get some questions!!
FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin
This week I attended the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ where I got to meet many translators and technology specialists who I’ve only spoken to via email or through the community forums and twitter… that was really great! It was my kind of event, hundreds of translators… thousands even… and lots of interesting and taxing questions about how to use Studio and MultiTerm. In many ways it was similar to my favourite annual event which is the ATA event… the main difference between the two for me would be the lack of air conditioning which you’d never see in an American event and maybe the lack of facilities for the tools vendors as I had to resort to running my 90 minute session with my laptop balanced on my knees and displaying on a large TV screen that was really too small for this type of a workshop. Hopefully if these sessions are repeated the preparation will be improved and perhaps the scheduling too so that more people could attend. The ATA events are always really well attended, so I guess this was another difference between the two as the room provided wasn’t much bigger than my hotel room… in fact I’m ready to do a deal if the opportunity arises in Brisbane in 2017 😉 (Thank you Hans for correcting me about the date in the comments!)
Continue reading “FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin”
Export for External Review – a detour
***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!
Continue reading “Export for External Review – a detour”