One of the easiest, and often little known tricks in all Studio versions since the product was released as Studio 2009, is the ability to move the windows around so that you can work in the way you want.
You can do this if you work with a single monitor or double monitors… or more! The basic idea is that you detach the windows in Studio and then just move them to where you like, either somewhere on your single monitor so that you can see the views that are more important to you on one screen, or by placing them onto a separate monitor altogether thereby maximising the screen real estate for your edting activity.
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Category: CAT Tools
Computer Aided Translation Tools, sometimes referred to as the Translation Environment.
Those dumb smart quotes…
Since Studio 2014 was launched it’s been interesting to see what some users were waiting for. Did they want the Quickmerge, Alignment, AutoSave, improved navigation, blistering speed, automatic concordance search, improved filters, enhanced locking functionality, custom TM user ID, improvements to the term recognition threshold, more options in the display filter, auto-substitution for acronyms and a host of other improvements? No… and I genuinely don’t mean this in a mean way… it seems for some users an easier way to handle typographical quotes is the order of the day and this hasn’t radically changed since TagEditor.
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Life without Trados!
The launch of SDL Trados Studio 2014 this month brings with it the news that SDL Trados 2007 Suite will no longer be supported from the end of this year. I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone as SDL had already ceased to support SDL Trados 2007 since the end of 2012, and with the releases of the 2009, 2011 and now 2014 versions of SDL Trados Studio it’s inevitable that the 2007 Suite version will follow suit.
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The SDLXLIFF Toolkit
The release of Studio 2014 will bring a number of new OpenExchange applications to the App Store. One of these is already becoming well known based on the name alone… the SDLXLIFF Toolkit! The name suggests this is a tool for working with an SDLXLIFF and being able to take it to pieces and interact with all of it’s components… and this is probably a good explanation of what it actually does.
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Pimp my Studio 2014…
A strange title I know, but I thought I could indulge two of my favourite pastimes at the same time… first the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore), and the second customising stuff.
I may have mentioned the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) from time to time in my articles… I do like the OpenExchange… because this is a unique feature of the SDL Language Technologies Platform that is probably underestimated by many users who think it’s only a few little apps that you can download to perform the odd useful function here and there.
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Advanced Renamer… and QuickMerge
Today I decided to share a Freeware Application I came across whilst trying to find a neat resolution to a problem posed by a Translator using Studio. I know many of you don’t like to use Freeware so I’m not saying anything about this tool other than I think it’s great, and if you’re happy to install it then I’m pleased to have passed on awareness of this tool to you. I am not endorsing it in any way other than that! If you have a policy not to install Freeware tools and still like the idea then I’m sure there are plenty of paid for applications that do a similar job. This tool is called Advanced Renamer and is developed, and supported, by Kim Jenson.
The problem I wanted to solve is that the user receives several hundred files that make up a technical manual. These files are not in alphabetical order, and they are not numbered, but they do come with a PDF that explains what the order is. So the task for the translator, in order to tackle the manual in the most sensible way, is being able to merge the files together for translation in the appropriate order.
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Sometimes it's the little things that matter!
In the unlikely event you’ve been visiting another planet over the last few weeks, you may not have noticed SDL are releasing Studio 2014 soon… how soon?… very soon, but no firm date to share yet before you ask!
This release has some long awaited “big” features such as a new alignment module to replace the WinAlign module developed in the olden days that you can review in a blog article from Daniel Brockmann. It has some new functionality altogether for the regulated industry workflows around reviewing fully formatted Word documents, making changes and being able to update the translation in Studio automatically… a unique feature that will be useful for many users translating and reviewing with Word in this environment. And of course we have some customer driven features such as being able to merge files in Studio at any time, and in any Project… rather than only at the Project creation stage.
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Handling taggy Excel files in Studio…
By taggy files I mean “embedded xml or html content” that is written into an Excel file alongside translatable text. In the last article I wrote I documented a method sometimes used by people to handle tagged content in a Word file… funnily enough I came across a Word file containing the XML components of an IDML file today and I guess it must have been prepared in a very similar way judging by the enormous number of tags using the tw4win style to hide them when opened by any SDL Trados version! Proof for me that this practice is sadly alive and well. But I digress… because this time I want to cover how to handle a similar problem when you find HTML or XML tagged content in an Excel file. This crops up quite a bit on ProZ so I thought it might be better to document it once and for all so I have something else to refer to in addition to the Studio help.
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Regex for Microsoft Word… is there no end?
Unfortunately the practice of being asked to translate a Microsoft Word file that contains HTML code doesn’t look as though it will go away any time soon for some translators. But it’s not the end of the world and it’s often all in the preparation of the Word file before you translate it. Continue reading “Regex for Microsoft Word… is there no end?”
More Regex? No, it's time for something completely different.
Now that we’ve learned enough about regular expressions, and because I get so many requests for custom filetypes I thought it might be useful to take a dip into the world of XPath. So what exactly is XPath?
Well as far as most CAT tools go it probably is something completely different… certainly it was not used in the old Trados days. But as a tool it’s nothing new and is simply a language used to find parts of an XML document and what’s more it’s a language that is recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium W3C. So there is nothing proprietary here.
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