All I want is a simple analysis!

01If this title sounds familiar to you it’s probably because I wrote an article three years ago on the SDL blog with the very same title.  It’s such a good title (in my opinion ;-)) I decided to keep it and write the same article again, but refreshed and enhanced a little for SDL Trados Studio 2014.

Something I only occasionally hear these days is “When I used Workbench or SDLX it was simple to create a quick analysis of my files. Now I have to create a Project in Studio and it takes so long to do the same thing.”  I do think this is something you’re more likely to hear from experienced users of the older products because they initially find that getting a quick report out of Studio is a far more onerus process than it used to be.  What they might not think of is how you can use the Projects concept to make this easy for you once you become just as experienced with the new tools.

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AnyTM… or SuperTM!

02In February last year I wrote an article called “It’s all English… right?“.  It was about a Translation Provider plugin available through the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) and it resolved a common request from users.  The request was why can’t I use my en(US) Translation Memory with my new customer who wants the work as en(GB)?

It’s a valid question, and Studio does have valid reasons for wanting to retain the differences between the different flavours of English… or any other language you work with that also has different flavours, like Spanish, French or Arabic for example.  But it’s also a valid request to be able to use one Translation Memory for this because it’s perfectly simple for you, as a Translator, to maintain multiple Translation Units and handle any other differences between placeables that Studio assigns automatically based on the language flavour.

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You only need a key!

01Why is the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) called the OpenExchange?

If you weren’t familiar with SDL and the OpenExchange initiative then perhaps the name suggests it could be a platform of some kind that supports an open exchange of information or tools to help manage the open exchange of data or processes that are not supported out of the box in the core products.  Maybe you might also think that the word Open could refer to some kind of opensource facility?

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Those Project Settings!

01A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the SDL blog explaining the differences between Project Settings and Global Settings.  Things have changed a little now, although the principle is the same, and Studio 2014 has a different interface so I thought, given the number of times this still comes up, that I’d refresh the article a little and have another go at making this clear.  If you are still using Studio 2009/2011 then the original article might still be helpful – Studio… Global or Project Settings?

If you’re using Studio 2014 then here’s the update….

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X-CAT… the next generation?

01If the title and image I have used for this article reminds you a little of something you might see from Stan Lee in an episode from Marvel Comics, then you have discovered my guilty secret… beneath a “slightly” more serious exterior I have a hidden desire to be able to extend my capabilities and demonstrate super human powers!  Unfortunately I don’t think this is going to happen for me any time soon, so my dream lives on in the mind of my son and probably every imaginative child on the planet!

So I may never become a mutant superhero… but I might be able to redirect some of these latent powers in another direction.  By now, if you know me, you may have guessed it or you may simply be thinking “what is he talking about?”… so with that slightly improbable introduction I’ll elaborate!

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Solving the Post Edit puzzle

#03It would be very arrogant of me to suggest that I have the solution for measuring the effort that goes into post-editing translations, wherever they originated from, but in particular machine translation.  So let’s table that right away because there are many ways to measure, and pay for, post-editing work and I’m not going to suggest a single answer to suit everyone.

But I think I can safely say that finding a way to measure, and pay for post-editing translations in a consistent way that provided good visibility into how many changes had been made, and allowed you to build a cost model you could be happy with, is something many companies and translators are still investigating.

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The 12 QA checks of Christmas…

01On the first day of Christmas my Studio gave to me…
12 Verification SDK and API!
11 QA Checker Profiles
10 Segments to exclude
9 Punctuation checks
8 Regular Expressions
7 Terminology Verification
6 Trademark checks
5 Number checks
4 Segment Verifications
3 Length Verification checks
2 Word Lists
… and no Inconsistencies by default

The Quality Assurance features in Studio are quite extensive, and they are often loved and hated all at the same time.  Loved because when used correctly they can provide excellent assurance that you’ll have happy clients… hated because the automated recognition of numbers, dates etc. in Studio follow the settings of your computer and sometimes these are not what you need.

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Bookmarking your work…

01Studio 2014, whilst containing many significant user enhancements, also brought with it some significant additions to the technology platform available to developers.

These enhancements provide a developer with the ability to extend or customise the user interface… so change the way Studio looks and is used… and it also allows a developer to create custom functionalities that they can add into the interface as if they were part of the application itself.  Actually once added they are indeed part of the application!

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Making variables work for you

01It’s funny, but when I think of “variables” I think of something that changes… a bit like the Transformer robots my son used to play with.  So when I look at how they are used in Studio, and in Trados before that, the name doesn’t really make sense at first!

In practice, “variables” in Studio are words or phrases that don’t change at all when you translate them.  So it’s useful to be able to ensure they are handled automatically in Studio by defining lists containing these “variables”.

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Psst… wanna know a few things about file types?

01Studio has some excellent capabilities for getting more from your file types, and I’m often surprised by the reaction of Studio users when they find out what’s possible.

It seems we’ve been keeping a big secret that nobody was supposed to know… so I thought it would be worth taking a quick look at just one file type, everyones favourite, Microsoft Word.  The mechanism for finding these options in any filetype and seeing how they can benefit you will be the same as it is for Microsoft Word… and just as simple.  It’s a long post but hopefully useful.

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