Last week I spent a few days in Amsterdam talking community with a group of SDL people. We were there to see how we can shape the community and make it a place where anyone using our products, or just thinking about using them, will be able to find what they need, talk about them or just share experiences in a safe friendly environment. Actually it’s a lot more than a safe friendly environment… it’s the only place where you can say what you think and guarantee it’ll be seen by the right people in SDL. This could be product managers, developers, support engineers, sales guys, marketing teams, the CEO of the company… and even I have a part to play! It’s also full of real product experts… so your peers who have years of experience and know how the products behave. Things don’t always work the way it says in the book, and the book definitely doesn’t cover everything that’s possible! But if you have a question, more than likely it’ll be something your fellow community members have come across before, and if they haven’t there’s a good chance they’ll have something interesting to say about it! Continue reading “Using the SDL Community”
Category: Useful tools
Recording Translation Memory metadata
Back in July 2013 I wrote an article called “Fields and Attributes in Studio” which was all about adding different types of metadata to your Translation Units every time you confirmed a segment to make it easier, or more complex depending on what you’ve done, to manage your Translation Memories. If you’re not sure what I mean by this take a look at the article as I won’t repeat a lot of that here… at least I’ll try not to! This capability in Studio is probably quite familiar to most users of the old SDL Trados 2007 and earlier, and was even essential to some extent because you could only use a single Translation Memory at a time.
Paying it forward with MS Publisher files
If you’ve never come across Microsoft Publisher before then here’s a neat explanation from wikipedia.
“Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and design rather than text composition and proofing.”
It’s actually quite a neat application for newbies to desktop publishing like me, but it’s a difficult tool to handle if you receive *.pub files (the format used by MS Publisher) and are asked to translate them. And I do see requests from translators from time to time asking how they can handle them. The file itself is a binary format and even with Office 2016 (which includes Publisher if you have the Professional version) the only export formats of PDF, XPS and HTML are not importable. So very tricky indeed if you need to be able to provide your client with a translated version of the pub format.
Continue reading “Paying it forward with MS Publisher files”
Feature rich… it’s overflowing!
I first wrote about the Glossary Converter on September 17, 2012… over three years ago. Not only is it a surprisingly long time ago, but I still meet people at every conference I attend who have never heard of this marvelous little tool, and in some cases never heard of the OpenExchange either. So when I toyed with the idea of writing an article about Xmas coming early and talking about the OpenExchange and all the goodies inside, part of me couldn’t resist writing about this tool again. In the three years since it was first released it’s morphed beyond all recognition and today it’s awash with features that belie it’s appearance.
I like to take a little credit for the emergence of this tool because back in 2012 I asked around trying to get someone to create one so that it was straightforward for anyone to create a MultiTerm Glossary from a simple two column spreadsheet… the sort of glossary that most translators use for their day to day needs. I was over the moon when Gerhard (the developer) was interested and created the tool I wrote about back then. But I can take no credit whatsoever for what the tool has become today and it’s well worth revisiting!
Read this and I may have to shoot you!
Chapter One
“Gabriela descended from the train, cautiously looking around for signs that she may have been followed. Earlier in the week she’d left arrangements to meet László at the Hannover end of Platform 7, and after three hours travelling in a crowded train to get there was in no mood to find he hadn’t got her message. She walked up the platform and as she got closer could recognise his silhouette even though he was facing the opposite direction. It looked safe, so she continued to make her way towards him, close enough to slip a document into the open bag by his side. She whispered ‘Read this and I may have to shoot you!’ László left without even a glance in her direction, only a quick look down to make sure there was no BOM.”
X Files… ATA56
My favourite conference by far is the ATA… and not just because the location changes every year and it’s always somewhere fantastic! This year was in Miami and the location was no exception… a great choice and huge numbers of translators interested in translation technology and how they can get more from it. My own involvement at these conferences is always very satisfying because I get to spend the full conference speaking to people, from the moment the doors open until they close, about technology. This year kept me particularly busy with two pre-conference sessions, mostly on Studio and MultiTerm; the “Toolbar” which is open all conference and is an area manned by technical representatives from all the tools vendors present; and a conference presentation I’ve wanted to deliver for a long time. This article is about that presentation, “XML, XPath, XSLT… the ‘X’ Files?”
MT or not MT?
Machine Translation or not Machine Translation… is this the question? It’s a good question and one that gets discussed at length in many places, but it’s not the question I want to consider today. Machine Translation has its place and it’s a well established part of the translation workflow for many professionals today. The question I want to consider today is whether you should hide the fact you are using Machine Translation or not?
This is a question that comes up from time to time and it has consumed my thoughts this evening quite a bit, particularly after a discussion in a ProZ forum this afternoon, that’s still running after three years, so I decided to take a step back and think about my position on this question and whether I’m being unreasonable or not. My position at the start of this article is that you should not hide the fact you are using Machine Translation. Continue reading “MT or not MT?”
Cutting through the Studio Analysis…
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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)
With a little help from my friends…
Updated to support Studio 2017, also it’s now an sdlplugin rather than a standalone tool, September 2016
… is a theme I’ve used before to describe how easy it is to share resources in the desktop version of Studio because of the open and friendly technology platform used. It’s easy because Studio allows you to take good advantage of the sort of things (maybe even more than a 100 😉) you may already use on a daily basis, like dropbox, or google drive for example. I was talking about what users could do before, so this time I’m really excited to see how we can perhaps extend this idea of sharing and pool the expertise that only a developer can bring to the table so that developers can gain from each others work, and users of the software see what this can achieve as well. Romulus Crisan started this off when he began moving many of the OpenExchange applications he had developed, and some of the older ones as well, into Github as OpenSource projects.
This is a new concept for SDL Language Technologies that was started earlier this year, and whilst we have only seen a few contributions from developers adding their own improvements and paying them back for others to use, I do know that this idea of sharing examples of real applications is starting to pay off, and many developers have been able to progress their own ideas after getting a little inspiration from the work of others. Continue reading “With a little help from my friends…”
Studio 2015, first things first!
In 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!”