“The badass is an uncommon man of supreme style. He does what he wants, when he wants, where he wants.” (Urban Dictionary by dougdougdoug). There are in fact many definitions of what a badass is, but I like this part of one of the definitions because it really reflects what this article is about and why it’s needed. No clues so far… but let’s think anonymization!
CAT Tools
Computer Aided Translation Tools, sometimes referred to as the Translation Environment.
The versatile regex based text filter in Trados Studio…
After attending the xl8cluj conference in Romania a few weeks ago, which was an excellent, and very technical conference for translators, I thought it was about time I wrote an article around the things you can do with the Regular Expression Delimited Text filter since it is so useful for solving all kinds of tasks related to text based files that don’t fit any of the out of the box formats available in the product. Files such as software string files and csv files are common examples of where understanding how to work with this customisable file type can yield many benefits. So this article is food for thought and a few things that might be helpful to you in the future. It’s also pretty long (I’m not kidding!), so maybe grab a cup of coffee before you start to go through it!
Reinvent the AV wheel?
One of the oldest jokes in the world of course… so I had a little fun this morning playing around with photoshop and reinventing the wheel for this bicycle. It looks a little funny and I’m pretty sure it won’t be as smooth a ride as it could be. When I think about Audiovisual Translation this is the picture I have in my mind when I think about adding the ability to create a source text from a video that was provided without one in a CAT tool. Why do I think this? For a couple of reasons really:
The “Old Farts Language Code Club”…
The Old Farts Language Code Club! This is a new club, inspired by a comment in the SDL Community from a prospective member. I’m not sure yet of the age at which you can qualify for membership, but in addition to the age requirements, which may have stringent rules to prevent any young whippersnappers from joining, it’s essential that prospective members have a good grasp of the language codes used in Trados Studio. I’m also not sure of the demand, so I may open a waiting list that could include anyone who already makes good use of the language codes in Trados Studio but isn’t an old fart yet!
Radical Anxiety Termination…
… Really Awful Tucker, Radically Altered Terminology, Rheumatoid Arthritis Test, Race Against Time, Recurrent Acute Tonsillitis, Real Acquisition Technology, Republicans Against Trump… the list goes on! All with the same acronym RAT. A comment on the SDL AppStore this week relating to a new plugin called the RAT inspired me to write this article this evening. Everyone is loving this plugin so far but one user had an objection to the name, the acronym, because he didn’t get it. Actually to be fair someone else on the SDL Community didn’t like it either… Rats are dirty! Continue reading
Santa’s little helper…
Santa’s little helper… and if any of you are fans of “The Simpsons” I’m not talking about a greyhound… is a xmas gift from the SDL Community and SDL AppStore teams to make it easier to get help when you’re working in SDL Trados Studio. The SDL Community has become incredibly busy in the last few years, so on the whole I’m confident people have learned how to find where to post and navigate through the myriad of forums available to them. Certainly we have some good short links and I have written about the communities before:
Information 4.0… we’re all doomed!
All doomed? What exactly does that mean and why am I writing about it? Over the last year I’ve been back at school studying for the TCLoc Masters degree at the University of Strasbourg (an excellent program if you’re wondering!). A module we’re currently working through is Information 4.0 and this… I think I can safely say this… has provoked more discussion and emotion than any of us expected. This is partially because Ray Gallon asked us at the start of the course how we felt about artificial intelligence and looked at it in the broader sense and not just within the localization arena. Now, as interesting as it is I don’t propose to make this a really wide discussion, although you should feel free to continue the discussion in the comments if you have strong feelings about it, but I would like to explore a few things I’ve been thinking about that are related and perhaps closer to the topics I usually write about.
The Story of “Studio” Colours…
Once upon a time, of course, the translation environment was just black and white with gray in between. Black and white and gray? The AppStore gods were understandably bored and angry, so they went looking for other colours to brighten the world for their users. The resulting colours emerged from the Microsoft Word palette resulting in fifteen colours to choose from. The AppStore gods were so happy with these colours they decided to paint the translation environment from the AppStore. They opened Visual Studio and flung the colours around, resulting in a brand new app. they called “Wordlight” and a new colourful feature for the “Community Advanced Display Filter”.
A translator’s paradise?
Every year I’m lucky enough to attend a few industry conferences which always provide an excellent environment for gathering feedback, spending time on a one to one basis with people working in the industry and generally getting a reality check on the things I do on a day to day basis. It’s true that I spend a lot of time working in the SDL Community where I do get exposed to the sort of problems people are trying to solve, but it’s really not the same as the exposure you get at a conference, especially if you attend with an open mind and a willingness to learn. So I always look forward to attending the few events each year that I do.
How do you eat an elephant?
How do you eat an elephant? Well, of course we don’t really want to eat an elephant, we love elephants! But if we did want to eat something that large we’d do it in bite sized chunks! This is something that is particularly relevant when working with large resources such as translation memories or terminology that is freely available from a number of places on the internet. I’ve addressed this before in various articles… these two are particularly relevant to the topic I’m addressing today: