Over the last year or so I’ve been asked by quite a few translators whether SDL Trados Studio supported using Antidote as a spelling and grammar tool. To be honest I’d never even heard of them but duly looked them up and discovered that this great sounding name for a correction tool was a plugin for Word and various other applications aimed mainly at French speakers, although they do offer a “Module Anglais”. They also have an API, but it’s not made public on their website… so this is where our fun starts!
Category: CAT Tools
Computer Aided Translation Tools, sometimes referred to as the Translation Environment.
Vote now… or have no say!
This year seems to be the time our voices can be heard. There’s been some pretty big decisions on the table already this year that have produced some very surprising results. Brexit… who knew the majority of people in the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union. Who knew it would be called Brexit… guess UKexit was too hard to pronounce! Who knew Donald Trump would become the Republican Presidential nominee; who knew Bernie Sanders would not fare so well for the Democrats? If you live in these countries then these were all big decisions that you may have had a hand in even if you didn’t vote. If you’re unhappy with the result, you should have voted; if you think now they were bad decisions then perhaps more could have been done to help ensure you were better informed?
Handling PDFs… is there a best way?
We all know, I think, that translating a PDF should be the last resort. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and the reason they have this name is because they were intended for sharing with users on any platform irrespective of whether they owned the software used to create the original file or not. Used to share so they could be read. They were not intended to be editable, in fact the format is also used to make sure that the version you are reading can’t be edited. So how did we go from this original idea to so many translators having to find ways to translate them?
I think there are probably a couple or three reasons for this. First, the PDF might have been created using a piece of software that is not supported by the available translation tool technology and with no export/import capability. Secondly, some clients can be very cautious (that’s the best word I can find for this!) about sharing the original file, especially when it contains confidential information. So perhaps they mistakenly believe the translator will be able to handle the file without compromising the confidentiality, or perhaps they have been told that only the PDF can be shared and they lack the paygrade to make any other decision. A third reason is the client may not be able to get their hands on the original file used to create the PDF.
The importance of flexibility…
This time a couple of weeks ago the image on the left was me, doing something I’ve never done before… Yoga. I’ve never seen this as anything I’d ever do but agreed to a Yoga holiday in Portugal with the family (There are no photos!). Even though I was reasonably determined from day one that this would be something I would do on holiday and never again, I have to say I do feel better for it, and have even been caught activating my uddiyana bandha in the morning and enjoying a little meditation when I thought nobody was watching! But now I’m back to work… so where’s the link?
Well, it’s all about flexibility and the importance of having this if you want to weather the demands of daily life. In the weeks running up to my holiday my team, Andrea in particular, took on the challenge of updating the Number Verifier app with a couple of bug fixes and a few new bits of functionality asked for by various users. This is a brilliant little application preferred by anyone who has problems with false positives and negatives when dealing with numbers for verification. However, this task was not as easy as it should have been and every little change broke something else that worked before. The original app wasn’t developed by our team so we inherited the code, and this can be quite tricky when you have to change it as unexpected things can often happen. This app in particular has an expansive array of options and the array of possibilities in terms of number formats is even greater. So being able to be flexible with this app in particular is very important, so this is what my team (Andrea & Romulus) did… Yoga for apps!
Tackling a translators graffiti!
“Tags” are something we normally like to avoid, whether it’s graffiti or documents prepared for translation in a CAT tool, and you can find articles and forum threads all over the internet about how to avoid them. But what if you want them… the ones in a CAT tool? Let’s say you receive a project from your client in a package, and they didn’t prepare the files as well as you would have liked, leaving you to deal with strings you’d rather have protected as tags, or even tags you don’t want to have to tackle at all. In a nutshell, if you’re using Studio you’re stuffed! You can prepare the files again as you like (possibly), translate them in your own project, and then pre-translate the real project afterwards from your TM, correcting any tag differences before returning the package to your client.
Spot the difference!
I don’t know if you can recall these games from when you were a kid? I used to spend hours trying to find all the differences between the image on the left and the one on the right. I never once thought how that might become a useful skill in later life… although in some cases it’s a skill I’d rather not have to develop!
You may be wondering where I’m going with this so I’ll explain. Last weekend the SFÖ held a conference in Umeå, Sweden… I wasn’t there, but I did get an email from one of my colleagues asking how you could see what changes had been made in your bilingual files as a result of post-editing Machine Translation. The easy answer of course is to do the post-editing with your track changes switched on, then it’s easy to spot the difference. That is useful, but it’s not going to help with measurement, or give you something useful to be able to discuss with your client. It’s also not going to help if you didn’t work with tracked changes in the first place because you’d need some serious spot the difference skills to evaluate your work!
Managing your SDL Plugins…
The SDL Appstore is growing! At the time of writing this article there are 161 apps on the store and over 220 thousand downloads from our users. This is quite impressive and we are still only getting started as the number of APIs available for developers increases. At the moment, in Studio alone we have APIs that allow a developer to do these sorts of things:
InSource! Bringing in your source content
“Workflow” and “Automation“. Terms that are normally used (in our world) when talking about a TMS (Translation Management System). So when working with tools like SDL WorldServer and SDL TMS which are provide a high degree of customisation, both using the user interface and/or through the API (Application Programming Interface). For example, in SDL WorldServer you could create a workflow that automated the process for things like this:
- watch a CMS (Content Management System) or a number of folders somewhere for updated files
- as soon as new files appear kick off a project management workflow (analyse, prepare quotes, determine due dates, assign work etc.)
- Start a translate/review workflow with automated assignments of the work as each bit of the workflow completes
- send final documents off for “in country” review and support a review process if changes are required
- update Translation Memories, Termbases with final changes
- create invoices and send find details to a payment/invoicing system
Continue reading “InSource! Bringing in your source content”
Committing the cardinal sin…
Strong words… “Committing the Cardinal Sin“!
I can remember from my early days with SDL many interesting, and often frustrating conversations with the then Product Manager for MultiTerm. The almost religious use of phrases like “You can’t use spreadsheets for terminology”… “It only takes a few steps to be able to create a simple glossary with MultiTerm”… “You can’t properly export a MultiTerm termbase to Excel”… and many more discussions along these lines. Well, over the last year or so mainly thanks to the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) which removes the shackles of being tied to “the way it’s always done” we have seen one tool in particular that has proven this traditional way of thinking wrong. But not because our friendly product manager was wrong… he was mostly right. When you think about Terminology Management in the traditional sense then Excel is not really suited to managing concept oriented databases that are designed for the terminology professional. It has its place, but is definitely prone to error and difficult to manage as the database grows. But what if you only want a glossary?
Tinkering with tradition… APIs in Studio 2015 SR2
If you regularly read the articles I write you may have noticed that I like to talk about the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) a lot. I write articles about some of the cool applications that are available to users of the SDL Language Platform (Studio, MultiTerm, GroupShare, Passolo etc.) I see this platform in a similar way (albeit a smaller scale) to an I-Phone or an Android phone… the core features are already there in the products and the APIs support the ability for any developer to create more features and capabilities to do anything they like! Things that might only be useful for a small group of users, or they might be interesting for many… or they might support the breaking of long standing traditions!
Continue reading “Tinkering with tradition… APIs in Studio 2015 SR2”