This year at the Spring Trados Roadshows the emphasis was firmly placed upon education. Almost all the presentations were based on providing translators, project managers, localization engineers etc. with great material to help them as they work with the Trados toolsets.
I had a few presentations at this event and decided it might be useful to post a few of them here, especially the ones that might help with some of the common filetype questions we see in the communities from time to time.
So I’m starting with this one… which is intended to be an introduction to XML for anyone working with Trados Studio who might be a bit of a beginner when it comes to handling files of this nature. It’s a very short blog post… for me… but I hope the 40 minute video will make up for it 😉 The structure of the video is based around what you need to understand to be able to use the XML filetype in Trados Studio and covers these topics:
- What is XML?
- An explanation of elements, attributes and CDATA
- What makes an XML file invalid and how to troubleshoot it
- And lastly a demo of how to create your XML filetype in Trados Studio
So don’t forget… this isn’t intended to be for experienced users, and I hope it’ll be helpful for anyone venturing into the realm of XML translation.
Length: 41.23 minutes
And last but not least… if you have never attended the Trados Roadshows before, or if you just missed the notifications, you can register for the Autumn Trados Roadshow already… they’ll take place in October but there’s nothing like being prepared!
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
I started thinking about “A room with a view” by E. M Forster when I contemplated how to start this article. But as you can see from the images on the left my mind wandered from this idea and was focused more on the “view”. This is quite possibly because our R&D team started a “Working from home” distance challenge to cover as much distance as you can every day for a month by physically getting out of your office/home and taking some fresh air. A great initiative in these days of working from home where it’s all too easy to never leave your desk! Walking, running, cycling and even swimming were acceptable activities and you get the distance converted into points based on the type of exercise you are doing. You do have to track the activity and you have to take a few pictures as evidence of your efforts… but that brings me back around to my topic for the article… the pictures, or more specifically the views. Yes, this is a very tenuous link indeed with the actual topic which is studioViews!
“Not only is my short-term memory horrible, but so is my short-term memory.” I have no idea who this quote can be attributed to, and its certainly not original, but it is quite appropriate when I start to think about the evolution of Trados. Ever since Trados Studio was launched you can be sure to find many “experts” in places like ProZ and even the SDL Community recommending you don’t upgrade because there is no difference compared to the last version. To be fair, if you only use a fraction of the features despite having used the software for a decade, then it probably is like this. The alternative being these “experts” have very short-term memories.
I wrote 
When we released the new Trados 2021 last week I fully intended to make my first article, after the 
Time seems to be going faster as I’m getting older as it doesn’t seem that long ago since we saw the release of the 2019 version of SDL Trados Studio. But here we are, it is that time again and many users will already have noticed they have a shiny new version in their account… SDL Trados Studio 2021. Fast as it is, we don’t want to do these product launches too often because I can tell you it’s a major undertaking requiring no small amount of coordination between the product management teams, core development teams, AppStore team, support teams, customer success teams, marketing teams, sales teams, back office teams, IT teams, 3rd party developers who provide plugins and more. In addition to this we often have other projects on the go and many of the teams worked on the new 
The last few years have seen some chatter around the topic of “lights-out project management” which is an idea referring to the automation of tasks, particularly through the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence), so that human intervention is not required. Ideally, of course, allowing project managers to concentrate their efforts on other, more productive and value-added activities. The goal of reducing the time spent on administrative tasks is nothing new and some attempts to achieve this can be more of a false economy because of the “hidden” technical restrictions under the hood of the tools used.
“The badass is an uncommon man of supreme style. He does what he wants, when he wants, where he wants.” (