Adjusting the view…

01It’s funny how questions seem to appear like London buses… you don’t get any and then they all come at once!  More often than not it’s very specific questions that behave this way too.  So you don’t see them for ages and then you get the same question in a number of places for a day or two and then it goes quiet again!  One of the topics that falls into this category is changing the view in the Editor.  By this I mean the colour of the text, the font types or the background you’re working on.  All these things can be changed in Studio to make it easier if you’re dealing with documents that don’t display well and you want to work in wysiwyg mode.

Since the release of Studio 2009 the things I’ll cover here have always been available through the options, but now that we have the ribbon in Studion 2014 it’s even easier.  To make this easier to see (hopefully!) I addressed where the options are in this article and then I recorded a short video so you can see in one go how these work in practice.  This is the text I’m working with, “theview“,  which is obviously a deliberately prepared file containing some things that can make it very difficult to read and work with when working in the default view and you can download it to have a play if you like. Continue reading “Adjusting the view…”

Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!

01This article is all about out with the old and in with the new in more ways than one!  In the last week I have been asked three times about converting Wordfast translation memories and Wordfast glossaries into resources that could be used in Studio and MultiTerm.  Normally, for the TXT translation memories I get I would go the traditional route and use a copy of Wordfast to export as TMX.  Then it’s simple, but what if you don’t have Wordfast or don’t want to have to try and use it?  Wordfast glossaries are new territory for me as I’d never looked at these before.  But on a quick check it looked as though they are also TXT files so I decided to take a better look.

Before I get into the detail I’ll just add that I’m not very familiar with Wordfast so I’m basing my suggestions on the small number of files I have received, or created, and the process I used to convert them to formats more useful for a Studio user.  I’ll start with the glossaries as this is where I got the idea from,  I better explain my opening statement too… this is because after I did an initial conversion using the Glossary Converter from the SDL Openexchange I was asked to explain how this would work with MultiTerm Convert.  This of course made me think about the old versus the new… I wouldn’t compare Wordfast and Studio in this way at all 😉 Continue reading “Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!”

The ins and outs of AutoSuggest

001The AutoSuggest feature in Studio has been around since the launch of Studio 2009 and based on the questions I see from time to time I think it’s a feature that could use a little explanation on what it’s all about.  In simple terms it’s a mechanism for prompting you as you type with suggested target text that is based on the source text of the document you are translating.  So sometimes it might be a translation of some or all of the text in the source segment, and sometimes it might be providing an easy way to replicate the source text into the target.  This is done by you entering a character via the keyboard and then Studio suggests suitable text that can be applied with a single keystroke.  In terms of productivity this is a great feature and given how many other translation tools have copied this in one form or another I think it’s clear it really works too!
AutoSuggest comes from a number of different sources, some out of the box with every version of the product, and some requiring a specific license.  The ability to create resources for AutoSuggest is also controlled by license for some things, but not for all.  When you purchase Studio, any version at all, you have the ability to use the AutoSuggest resources out of the box from three places: Continue reading “The ins and outs of AutoSuggest”

Working with shared resources…

001One of the reasons SDL Trados Studio, and Trados before that, has been such a popular choice for translators and small teams is the ability to work with shared resources.  Many Translation Environments require the use of a server solution in order to share work and if you only do this occasionally, or if you work with a couple of colleagues, then whilst the server solutions can offer a lot of additional capabilities they are often over the top for simple sharing needs and may even require you signing up for things you may not be interested in.
Sharing resources at a simple level is pretty straightforward with Studio because they are mostly file based.  So you have a Translation Memory (*.sdltm), and a termbase (*.sdltb) for example, both of which can be accessed by several translators at the same time.  You may well have read that several times just to make sure this is what I actually said!  If this is possible then why do we sell server solutions at all, as we have SDL GroupShare, SDL WorldServer and SDL TMS?  The reason of course is that sharing a filebased resource like this has many limitations and it’s not a solution for serious Projects.  Limitations like these that are detailed in KB Article #5098 in the SDL Knowledgebase:
Continue reading “Working with shared resources…”

The future is bright… it's not Java!

001I’ve been talking about this image for around a year in various presentations where we talked about the plans for Studio 2014. As of today to be able to finally present it as a fait accompli feels good… in fact it feels wonderful!  Whilst this is a good headline it’s not everything you get with SP2 and there are some other things in here well worth a mention.  I’m not going to cover them all but I will pick out the headliners that I’m pretty sure people have been asking for.  But let’s start with terminology because after nearly 8-years of reading about Java problems, and that’s just my time with SDL and the Trados based software, this is a historical moment worth relishing.  Quite a nice 30-yr birthday present for Trados too!
Continue reading “The future is bright… it's not Java!”

The ATA55 in Chicago and the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore)… which apps?

001This year at the ATA in Chicago all the tool vendors who attended the event were given the opportunity to run a little “Tool Bar” where attendees could come and ask any question they liked. This was a great initiative, and despite the first day where we were perhaps mistakenly tucked away under the arctic air conditioning in the corner where nobody could see us, I think they were very well attended. Certainly from an SDL perspective we were non-stop from the moment we started till the end of each day. It was a great experience for us as we get to meet lots of new users and many we only speak to by email, or on twitter, and I hope it was an equally great experience for anyone who attended.
Continue reading “The ATA55 in Chicago and the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore)… which apps?”

FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin

001This week I attended the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ where I got to meet many translators and technology specialists who I’ve only spoken to via email or through the community forums and twitter… that was really great!  It was my kind of event, hundreds of translators… thousands even… and lots of interesting and taxing questions about how to use Studio and MultiTerm.  In many ways it was similar to my favourite annual event which is the ATA event… the main difference between the two for me would be the lack of air conditioning which you’d never see in an American event and maybe the lack of facilities for the tools vendors as I had to resort to running my 90 minute session with my laptop balanced on my knees and displaying on a large TV screen that was really too small for this type of a workshop.  Hopefully if these sessions are repeated the preparation will be improved and perhaps the scheduling too so that more people could attend.  The ATA events are always really well attended, so I guess this was another difference between the two as the room provided wasn’t much bigger than my hotel room… in fact I’m ready to do a deal if the opportunity arises in Brisbane in 2017 😉 (Thank you Hans for correcting me about the date in the comments!)
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Export for External Review – a detour

02***Updated 24 June 2017***
When Studio 2009 was launched one of the first applications on the new SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) was the SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office.  This was an excellent application created by Patrik Mazanek that paved the way for some of the new features you see in Studio 2014 today.
The idea back then was born out of a requirement to export the contents of an sdlxliff file to Microsoft Excel but with no re-import to update the translation.  If you were an SDLX user you’d probably recognise that this was something you could do in SDLX, and the request that this would be possible in Studio was coming from many SDLX users.
Déjà Vu, another translation tool, had this concept of “External Views” where you could export the contents of your translation into a couple of formats, one of them being an RTF document formatted as a table containing the source and target text.  But the neat thing about this was that you could reimport the RTF and update your translation with whatever edits had been made in the RTF.  This was very cool, and as far as I’m aware no other tool had this capability at the time, short of working in Microsoft Word on a Bilingual DOC in the first place.  So when Patrik produced his first build of the converter and announced that he had included a similar capability using DOCX in addition to the Excel export this was very exciting!
Continue reading “Export for External Review – a detour”

Should I get certified?

A couple of weeks ago I was asked about certification by one of our Business Consultants… in fact she asked me if I was certified?  Thoughts of being carried away by men in white coats crossed my mind at the very mention of the word “certified”… but I digress!

When I joined SDL at the end of 2006 the first SDL Certification programme was just getting pulled together, and my team were responsible for the technical content, working closely with our enthusiastic marketing team.  We had pretty tight timescales to deliver it, with three levels – Getting Started, Intermediate and Advanced.  All based around two products – Translators Workbench 2007 and SDLX 2007.  I can remember now the amount of effort that it took to prepare this from all the teams involved (Jenny, Tracey, Denise, Argyro… all put in a tremendous effort to make it a reality), and then more work in ensuring all our trainers were certified and had been through our train the trainer courses so they could deliver the certification training to lots of enthusiastic translators and project managers.  Notwithstanding this we also wanted the material in other languages and this was a brilliant introduction for me into the world of a busy Language Service Provider as I was told in no uncertain terms on a number of occasions what a poor client we were!  It was indeed a good education in those early months at SDL.  I can also remember the long… long… long… telephone conversations with some of our enthusiastic customers who went through the certification and then didn’t agree with the answers!  I can see the men in white coats running through my garden towards me as I think about all of this… but I survived!

Continue reading “Should I get certified?”

Why do we need custom XML filetypes?

20_smallerMy son asked me how my day had gone and before I could answer he said in a slightly mocking tone “blah blah blah… XML… blah… XML … blah blah”.  Clearly I spend too much time outside of work talking about work, and clearly his perception of what I do is tainted towards the more technical aspects I like the most!  Aside from the note to self “stop talking about this stuff after I leave the office!” it got me thinking about why I probably think about XML as much as I apparently do and how I could help others avoid the very same compulsion!  I’ve written articles in the past about how to use regular expressions in Studio, and an article on using XPath, and I’ve probably touched on handling XML files from time to time in various articles.  But I don’t think I’ve ever explained how to create an XML filetype in the first place, or why you would want to… after all Studio has default filetypes for XML and this is just another filetype that the CAT tool should be able to handle… right?

Continue reading “Why do we need custom XML filetypes?”