I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Farrell, the developer of IntelliWebSearch, at the BP15 Conference in Zagreb this week and was able to have an interesting chat about the IntelliWebSearch application and the similarities to the new Web Lookup! application that was released onto the OpenExchange last week. IntelliWebSearch allows you to do your lookups from any application and in any browser, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own. The Web Lookup! application for Studio 2014 allows you to do your lookups inside a window within Studio as you work, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own. Sounds similar doesn’t it?
Actually it’s very similar and after discussing with Michael a little I came to the conclusion the tools do a similar job. The one big difference I can see is that the Web Lookup! plugin is language sensitive. So if the search site is multilingual in the first place then the Studio app takes the languages from your bilingual file and automatically searches in the appropriate language… useful for a translator I think. Continue reading “Intelligent web search?”
On two previous occasions I’ve been lucky enough to attend the 
It’s funny how questions seem to appear like London buses… you don’t get any and then they all come at once! More often than not it’s very specific questions that behave this way too. So you don’t see them for ages and then you get the same question in a number of places for a day or two and then it goes quiet again! One of the topics that falls into this category is changing the view in the Editor. By this I mean the colour of the text, the font types or the background you’re working on. All these things can be changed in Studio to make it easier if you’re dealing with documents that don’t display well and you want to work in wysiwyg mode.
This article is all about out with the old and in with the new in more ways than one! In the last week I have been asked three times about converting Wordfast translation memories and Wordfast glossaries into resources that could be used in Studio and MultiTerm. Normally, for the TXT translation memories I get I would go the traditional route and use a copy of Wordfast to export as TMX. Then it’s simple, but what if you don’t have Wordfast or don’t want to have to try and use it? Wordfast glossaries are new territory for me as I’d never looked at these before. But on a quick check it looked as though they are also TXT files so I decided to take a better look.
When we want to purchase software what’s the first thing we do? I know what I do… I look around on the internet for websites where I can learn more about the tools I’m interested in and only purchase if I can try them myself, and I imagine you’re no different. If I want to compare TEnTs (Translation Environment Tools) it’s a small and very competitive field and you don’t see the sort of widely published comparisons you might for Office products, or desktop publishing tools for example. So one place to start might be reviews from real users… but can you trust them? They are often written by fans of a particular product who like to rate the comparisons based on their own personal choice, and often the comments they make about other tools are based on not knowing other tools well enough. Certainly when you read the comments from users of the tools that came off worse you can see it’s also quite an emotive area… although it’s good to see users so passionate about their translation tools. Even articles that are written in a well meaning and honest way, such as the one that Emma Goldsmith co-authored with David Turner 
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!
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.