If you were a user of SDL Trados 2007 or earlier you will probably be familiar with the concept of “Fields and Attributes”… if you are a new user to this kind of technology then you may not be. But in both cases I hope this article will provide a little bit of useful information on how they are used in Studio.
I used a picture on the left of a filing system because this is how I see them. They are simply a way to organise the translation units that are saved into a Translation Memory so that you can easily find them as your Translation Memory grows and your biological memory fails 😉
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Category: CAT Tools
Computer Aided Translation Tools, sometimes referred to as the Translation Environment.
The SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter
This application, free on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore), has been around for about a year and a half and is one of the most popular applications on there. It was written by Patrick Hartnett and is incredibly useful in more ways than one. In fact it’s so useful I have referred to it quite often and used it for working around other issues in many of the articles I have written… so why haven’t I written specifically about it here until now? The answer is I have no idea… but I should have done! What prompted me to write now is that Patrick hasn’t released many updates to this tool, mainly because it did what was needed from the start and has been a really reliable and useful application; but he has released an update this week.
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The PowerShell what?
The PowerShell Toolkit… that’s what!
None the wiser? Me neither… but it sounds like a really cool idea so I thought if I can do it then so can anyone else if I share the concept a little. So I’m writing this article as I learn how to use this toolkit!
Powershell is a task automation framework that is installed as part of Windows… the PowerShell Toolkit compiled by Patrik Mazanek of SDL uses this framework and in simple terms it’s a way of providing the tools for automating things that Studio can do without having to redevelop the computer code to do them yourself. So you already have the means to do this and like me may not have known it at all!
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One year old today!
The very nice people at WordPress sent me an anniversary note today to tell me that I launched this blog one year ago! Time certainly flies and I hope the last 12-months has been useful and interesting for everyone who reads this blog?
I thought it might be interesting to share a few statistics from this first year as they are easily obtained from WordPress which supplies lots of interesting facts and figures. I don’t know how this measures up against other bloggers getting started, but it’s an interesting target for me in keeping this up for the next year. Certainly I hope I can think of lots of interesting things to write about… and perhaps anyone reading this will give me a few suggestions for anything I didn’t cover but should have. Certainly the SDL Innovate event this month was extremely inspiring so perhaps I’ll be able to tie a little customer experience into some of the things I write about this year.
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SDL Innovate 2013
This week in San Jose SDL Innovate 2013 is starting and it looks to be a fantastic event with some 400-500 attendees. This is actually going to be the first time I have attended Innovate and I’m really looking forward it.
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Glueing your files…
Update January 2015 : Note that this is possible in Studio 2014, but now you can also merge after the project is created too!
The use of the term “glue” in describing what “Trados Glue” was used for made it very clear what it was intended to do. In fact the term “glue” for merging files together is almost a standard! I have no idea whether it was Trados that first coined the term in the context of CAT tools but it certainly stuck 😉
Today I see the question of how to “glue” files together to make it easier to manage them quite often… sometimes accompanied by the phrase “Trados Glue”. So it seems appropriate to provide a quick article on how this is achieved with today’s CAT, SDL Trados Studio. Studio has had a similar feature since it was launched back in 2009 but it is not called “Studio Glue”, although perhaps it should have been, it is simply called “Merge Files”. It is also a big improvement over the original Trados version allowing you to merge any filetypes you like and work on them as a single file.
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AutoCorrect… for everything!
Microsoft Word has a very neat, at least some users think it’s very neat, autocorrect feature that can correct your words as you type. So when you are working in Microsoft Word you can take advantage of this.
If you like this feature wouldn’t it be great if you could use it in Studio as you typed to supplement the other great features like AutoSuggest, QuickInsert etc… in fact wouldn’t it be great if you could use your autocorrect lists from Microsoft Word in any editing application you have on your computer? If you like autocorrect then of course it would be, and I see this come up in various forums quite often.
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Glossary to TM… been there, done that…
So now let’s flip the process on its head!
I’m not sure how often the need arises to create a Translation Memory from a Termbase but I can tell you that the article I wrote previously called “Creating a TM from a Termbase, or Glossary, in SDL Trados Studio” is the most popular article I have ever written… closely followed by an article on why wordcounts differ between tools called “So how many words do you think it is?“. It’s an unfair competition because the latter was written some 4-months afterwards so needs more time to catch up… but there is no denying that the process of converting a Glossary to a Translation Memory is something people are interested in.
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Duplicates and Roadshows…
A strange title, and a stranger image with a pair of zebras and a road, but in keeping with the current fascination with animals during the SDL Spring Roadshows I thought it was quite fitting. Nothing at all to do with the subject other than the Zebras may be duplicated and they are hovering a road to somewhere that looks cold!
The problem posed at the SDL Trados Roadshow in Helsinki by some very technical attendees, after the event was over, was about how to efficiently work on a Translation Memory (TM) so you could remove all the unnecessary duplicates.
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A clean editing environment?
I love to see technology being used to help provide a clean environment for us to live in and to bring up our children. This topic regularly comes up in our household as my wife and son support the ethos behind this ideal wholeheartedly… actually I may even be understating this point a little!
But this isn’t the clean environment I want to talk about today. I’m interested in a clean editing environment when you use a translation tool.
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