I’m pretty sure that when we started to build the new Customer Experience Team in Cluj last year that there was nothing in the job description about being competitive… but wow, they are!!! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t competitive, because I know I am, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had these kinds of feelings that keep me up at night.
To some extent I think the training requirements at SDL are the perfect fuel for this type of environment and I haven’t made up my mind yet whether it’s healthy or not. But in their roles the team speak with customers through the online chat, in the community, via email… basically anywhere anyone comes in with a question because they don’t have a support contract or an account manager to ask and they didn’t know about the SDL Community which is of course the best place to go for help. To be able to answer the variety of technical questions we see, all the team have either completed or are working through the various SDL Certifications available at a rate of knots and are learning more about the sort of problems faced by translators and project managers just by having to help people every day. They are doing a fantastic job!
In the years that the SDL AppStore has been around I get asked one question on a fairly regular basis… “How can I find out about new apps or updates to existing apps?”. A very reasonable question of course and one that has not been addressed particularly well, albeit there have been ways to keep yourself informed. The ultimate solution we all want to see is the AppStore embedded into SDL Trados Studio, but as that isn’t going to happen for a while here’s a couple of ways you can still keep yourself aware of the updates. The first is via twitter and this has been around for a while; the second is using an RSS feed which is brand new as of today!
It’s true… I’m a die hard desktop user. I love the benefits I get from my mobile phone, using dropbox, the benefits of machine translation, Netflix and all the cool things that come with being able to use online features in the cloud. But I’ve still been reticent to wholeheartedly embrace online technology and talk about it in this blog. When I ask myself why that is, the first thing that crosses my mind is the unreliability of online connectivity. Some people have a view of me as being a calm and patient person, and I do try hard to be that person, but when it comes to a lack of connectivity I turn into Mister Angry and Frustrated very quickly! So the very idea of working with solutions that only offer an online capability for everything leaves me cold. It’s one thing being unable to watch a film, share files, pick up my email or use my phone, but not being able to work at all is another thing altogether. If I was working as an independant translator with all the benefits that can bring of being able to work anywhere, then having a good offline capability would be essential. Studio of course offers me the offline capability, but today (and in a few more articles as there’s a lot to cover) I want to talk about the cloud and in particular SDL GroupShare. Many of you may wonder if this has any relevance for you, but hopefully you’ll see it does because the solutions SDL offer in this space give you the flexibility you need when working with the cloud and even as a freelance translator you may get asked to work in that environment. I’m going to tackle a few scenarios to explain, starting with creating projects. 
Using stylesheets to enhance the translators experience when working with XML files can be very helpful and sometimes essential. It allows you to pull details from the XML and display them in a preview pane so that the translator has more context around the translatable text. It can also provide a mechanism for displaying text that you don’t want extracted from the XML for translation at all. This is nothing new of course and localisation engineers and experienced translators have been doing this for years. In fact I’ve even 
AdaptiveMT was released with Studio 2017 introducing the ability for users to adapt the SDL Language Cloud machine translation with their own preferred style on the fly. Potentially this is a really powerful feature since it means that over time you should be able to improve the results you see from your SDL Language Cloud machine translation and reduce the amount of post editing you have to do. But in order to be able to release this potential you need to know a few things about getting started. Once you get started you may also wonder what the analysis results are referring to when you see values appearing against the AdaptiveMT rows in your Studio analysis report. So in this article I want to try and walk through the things you need to know from start to finish… quite a long article but I tried to cover the things I see people asking about so I hope it’s useful.
At the beginning of each year we probably all review our priorities for the New Year ahead so we have a well balanced start… use that gym membership properly, study for a new language, get accredited in some new skill, stop eating chocolate… although that may be going just a bit too far, everything is fine with a little moderation! I have to admit that moderating chocolate isn’t, and may never be, one of my strong points even though it’s on my list again this year! But the idea of looking at our priorities and setting them up appropriately is a good one so I thought I’d start off 2018 with a short article explaining why this is even important when using SDL Trados Studio, particularly because I see new users struggling with, or just not being aware of, the concepts around the prioritisation of filetypes. If you don’t understand them then you can find code doesn’t get tagged correctly despite you setting it up, or non-translatable text is always getting extracted for translation even though you’re sure you excluded it, or even files being completely mishandled. 
