So how many words do you think it is?

Last Update 14 Feb 2015: Analysis based on SDL Trados Studio 2014 SP2 CU8 (11.2.4364.8)
It’s not unusual for people to see the word-count in a translation tool, compare it to the word-count in their authoring tool (usually MSWord..!) and then wonder why there are so many differences.  Quite often I get sent documents and am asked to explain the differences which I often put down to a simple explanation; ultimately I think you need to be fair with this and Word is a simple word count, whereas a translation tool is designed to try and reflect the effort of the Translator.  Studio even separates out the placeables and numbers so that the real effort becomes apparent and a fair way of measuring and charging for the work is achieved.  How successful this is often depends on who’s asking and exactly what the source material is..!
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The ATA53 Studio presentation in San Diego…


As a follow on to the presentation I gave at the ATA this year, which was very well attended (photo courtesy of Wesley Budd) I thought it might be useful if I highlighted some of the things covered on the day.
The session itself was a little ad-hoc, deliberately so, because I wanted to make sure the content was relevant to the attendees, and because it wasn’t a getting started session.  So I covered quite a lot of material, that judging by the number of people furiously scribbling down in their notebooks could use a little follow up!
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More useful resources… and multilingual TMs

In October 2012 the European Union (EU) agency ‘European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’ (ECDC) released a translation memory into the public domain containing 25 languages… the 23 official European languages plus Icelandic and Norwegian.  This comes in a similar format to the DGT Multilingual Translation Memory of the Acquis Communautaire that I described here in this article but this time it’s much smaller… so we can look at how to handle a single TMX file that contains all of these languages in one file using Studio.
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Working with Variable Lists

Updated January 2015 : Also possible, and easier, to use the Variable Manager from the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) for this.
I mentioned in a previous post that it wasn’t possible to import long variable lists into a Studio Translation Memory using the desktop version of Studio. You can do this with GroupShare, but the ability to do this in the desktop version is a work in progress.
Well that wasn’t quite true and as I’ve been preparing for some roadshows and events that are coming up this month I figured out a simple workaround using SDL Trados 2007 Suite.
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Search and replace with Regex in Studio – Regular Expressions Part 3

The final article (in this introductory series anyway) on regular expressions in Studio is looking at how to use search and replace in Studio.  This capability, to use regex to replace as well as search, will only be possible with the update release of SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP2 and later and it’s a very welcome addition to the toolset provided within Studio.
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