Category: Studio Tips

Quick tips on how to do things in Studio

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

I’m quoting Alexander Pope in 1709, rightly or wrongly, for hitting the nail on the head when it comes to the truly intoxicating mix of language and technology.  A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing and it’s something I know I’ve been guilty of all my life… I learn a little something new and now I’m an expert.  That is of course until I learn a bit more, and then a little more after that, and before I know it I realise I know nothing at all!  Translation technology is great for dropping us all into this trap… Trados user since Trados 5, translator for over 20-years… can handle any type of file.  Falling into this trap is pretty easy in fact, especially when the tools available for translation today take a lot of the effort out of the tasks at hand.  But not everything is what it seems and sometimes it takes a mistake or three to sober us up again!  There’s a reason why well organised and successful translation companies, dealing in all kinds of content, have Project Managers, Translators and Localization Engineers within their midst.

Continue reading “A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;” →

ATA56 – SDL Trados Studio Advanced

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01I ran a beginners and an advanced workshop at the ATA56 pre-conference day in Miami this year.  A really fun day for me as we start the day with no specific agenda or pre-defined course and then try to shape the session to suit the needs of the attendees.  The beginner tends to be a little more prescribed, to start off with at least, and the intention is to try and cover the basics of how Studio and MultiTerm work.

The advanced is a lot different… after all, what is advanced?

Continue reading “ATA56 – SDL Trados Studio Advanced” →

Cutting through the Studio Analysis…

~ Paul Filkin ~ 4 Comments

01

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Studio provides a variety of reports ranging from content to help you analyse how much work you have to do, through data designed to help you prepare quotes and invoices to reports that record the amount of corrections you had to go through when reviewing the work you did, or that of others.  In fact it’s quite interesting to look at the many different reports available:

  • Wordcount : Counts the number of words occurring in the files
  • Translation count : Counts the number of words translated in the files
  • Analysis report : Analyses files against the translation memory, producing statistics on the leverage to be expected during translation
  • Update TM report : Provides statistics on what was updated to the Translation Memory with the contents of translated bilingual files
  • Verification report : Verify the contents of translatable files. Reports errors based on your verification settings
  • Translation Quality Assessment : Presents the translations quality assessments occurring in the files (Studio 2015 onwards)

Continue reading “Cutting through the Studio Analysis…” →

Bilingual Excel… and stuff!

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

Copyright Rudall30 | Dreamstime.comI’ve written about how to handle bilingual excel files, csv files and tab delimited files in the past.  In fact one of the most popular articles I have ever written was this one “Creating a TM from a Termbase, or Glossary, in SDL Trados Studio” in July 2012, over three years ago.  Despite writing it I’m still struggling a little with why this would be useful other than if you have been given a glossary to translate or proofread perhaps… but nonetheless it doesn’t really matter what I think because clearly it was useful!

So, why am I bringing this up three years later?  Well, the recent launch of Studio 2015 introduced a new filetype that seems worthy of some discussion.  It’s a Bilingual Excel filetype that allows you to handle excel files with bilingual content in a similar fashion to the way it used to be possible in the previous article.  There are some interesting differences though, and notably the first would be that you won’t lose any formatting in the excel file which is something that happened if you had to handle files like these as CSV or Tab Delimited Text.  That in itself mught be interesting for some users because this was the first thing I’d hear when suggesting the CSV filetype as a solution for handling files of this nature.  Most of the time I don’t think this is really an issue but for those occasions where it is this is a good point.

Continue reading “Bilingual Excel… and stuff!” →

Studio 2015, first things first!

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01In my world you’d have to be on another planet not to know that Studio 2015 was released this week.  The release is very good and contains lot’s of new features, many of them translators and project managers have wanted for a long time.  In fact even if you did know it was released you might be one of the users who’s still wondering what’s in it, how do you get it and install it, how it affects previous versions, how you migrate your data, how you use your Studio 2014 OpenExchange Apps. etc.  Lot’s of practical questions that you might not be able to readily find the answer to.  So, first things first! Continue reading “Studio 2015, first things first!” →

Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 16 Comments

01Projects, packages, segmented SDLXLIFF files, unsegmented SDLXLIFF files, source files, target files, Translation Memories, Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries… are they buried deep in your computer by Studio without you knowing?  Are you really subjected to a message like the one on the left?  Sometimes the posts in the technical forums make it seem that way, but I think it might not really be like this, so in this post I want to take a look and see how all these things work.  I have discused many of these things in the past here and there, but now seems a good time to consolidate all this into one article and try to explain the workings of Studio with regards to file locations.  Let’s start with Projects. Continue reading “Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!” →

It’s not all head in the clouds!!

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01

When the developer of the Word Cloud plugin for SDL Trados Studio first showed me the application he developed I was pretty impressed… mainly because it just looked so cool, but also because I could think of a couple of useful applications for it.

  1. You could see at a glance what the content of the project was and how interesting it might be for you
  2. It looks cool… or did I say that already?

Continue reading “It’s not all head in the clouds!!” →

Intelligent web search?

~ Paul Filkin ~ 22 Comments

01I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Farrell, the developer of IntelliWebSearch, at the BP15 Conference in Zagreb this week and was able to have an interesting chat about the IntelliWebSearch application and the similarities to the new Web Lookup! application that was released onto the OpenExchange last week.  IntelliWebSearch allows you to do your lookups from any application and in any browser, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own.  The Web Lookup! application for Studio 2014 allows you to do your lookups inside a window within Studio as you work, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own.  Sounds similar doesn’t it?

Actually it’s very similar and after discussing with Michael a little I came to the conclusion the tools do a similar job.  The one big difference I can see is that the Web Lookup! plugin is language sensitive.  So if the search site is multilingual in the first place then the Studio app takes the languages from your bilingual file and automatically searches in the appropriate language… useful for a translator I think. Continue reading “Intelligent web search?” →

Comments… chapter and verse!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 16 Comments

The ability to work with comments in a managed localisation process is an important part of communication between translator, reviewer, project manager and the end client… and not necessarily in that order!  Comments are used to clarify misunderstandings in the source text, questioning completed translations you’ve been told to ignore that just don’t look right, suggesting improved terminology, explaining why you translated something in a particular way, clarifying why you changed a translation in review, providing additional context from the client, adding notes to the target file for an in country review, they could even be comments that are just there to be translated, or ignored… the list of reasons could be pretty long and so could the comments.  So it’s very important to be able to keep them linked to the context so it’s easy to deal with the referred text, and also to be able to get to the comments quickly when they might only relate to a couple of segments in three files that are part of a five hundred file project nested within a complex folder structure.

So this post is going to deal with two things… first of all the places where comments can be used in Studio out of the box and secondly a very neat OpenExchange plugin that I reckon many project managers, and translators, have wished for and didn’t know it was there already! Continue reading “Comments… chapter and verse!” →

The JSON files…

~ Paul Filkin ~ 52 Comments

01Update Sept 2016: You can find an excellent filetype plugin for JSON files on the SDL AppStore if you don’t want to tackle this yourself.

The JSON files… not really related to Jason Voorhees of course, but for some users who have received these file types for translation the problem of how to handle them and extract the appropriate text may well seem like an episode of Friday the 13th!  I’ve seen a few threads in the last couple of weeks sharing various methods for handling these files ranging from opening them in MSWord and applying a hidden style to the parts you don’t want, to asking vendors to create variations on javascript filetypes.  But I think Studio offers a much simpler mechanism for handling them out of the box.

So what are these file types and how can you handle them with Studio 2014, or even 2009/2011?  In this article I’m going to look at the regex filetype as this is very well suited to files like this, but before we get into that detail let’s take a look at what they are. Continue reading “The JSON files…” →