Upgrading your legacy resources – filetypes

When you upgrade from Trados to SDL Trados Studio there are a number of things you can take with you.  Translation Memories, Termbases, AutoText lists, custom variable lists, customised segmentation rules for example.  These are all discussed quite a lot in the public forums and in blog articles, but what we don’t see a lot of information on is how to update your file types.  As a result I think many users convert files to TTX unnecessarily just so they can use the old *.INI files they’ve had for years.
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Did you know you can export Studio comments in your target Word file?

*** Please note that this feature was temporarily disabled in the update to Studio 2011 SP2.  But it is back in Studio 2014.***
If you found this ability to export comments into the target file useful I’d be very pleased to hear in the comments to this article.

Exporting Comments

Another nice addition to Studio 2011 is the ability to include comments in your target file when translating word files.
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Making use of the Studio Track Changes features

SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP2 was released last week and SDL are in the process of giving introductory webinars and sending mailers with lots of nice details about the new features provided. One of these features is being able to open word documents (DOCX only) that contain tracked changes.  This is interesting of course, but what makes this so useful?
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What's all the fuss about "edit source"?

Update: 15 January 2015
This is now possible for all file formats except for ITD, updated in Studio 2014.
SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP2 has introduced “edit source”… but only for Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint file formats at the moment.  For Freelance Translators this is a welcome addition because it has been one of the most heavily voted for ideas on the SDL Ideas site.  However, is this enough and why haven’t SDL introduced this before?  This is fast becoming a topic for much debate on the public forums and Facebook pages so I thought it warranted a little insight into the problems of introducing “edit source”.
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What can you do with the SDLXLIFF Converter?

Whilst SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP2 incorporates the ability to export and import Word documents for review the application originally developed is still available and working (in fact SP2 has an updated version).  @jaynefox wrote a very nice blog post about how to use the SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office that is available for Studio 2009 through the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) and is installed with Studio 2011 in the program group.  So I thought it would be interesting just to note what the different options are for this application.
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There's more than one way to skin a CAT

Updated: 14 January 2015
Today SDL is all about SDL Language Cloud and not BeGlobal, but I hope the article is still as relevant today.  There are more ways to look at how you use Machine Translation so if you’re interested take a look at these two more recent articles as well.
The ins and outs of AutoSuggest
Language Cloud… word-counts… best practice?
The title of this post could be quite tricky to translate in many languages because not everyone uses the expression in the same way, and certainly don’t use the same words.  I chose this especially because I thought I’d write a little about using Machine Translation in SDL Trados Studio.
I’m not going to talk about properly trained Machine Translation engines such as SDL BeGlobal, which can be configured and improved to provide remarkably good translations in a short period of time for very large numbers of words… so achieving economies of scale that would be unthinkable with human resources alone.  Instead, I’m going to talk about how a Translator can make use of the growing number of Machine Translation resources in a way that might make sense for them.
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Creating a TM from a Termbase, or Glossary, in SDL Trados Studio

Update : 21 Dec 2015
This article is pretty old now… still interesting, but pretty old.  I think if you are looking for help on how to do this then take a look at the Glossary Converter from the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) which can convert a termbase to TMX with a drag and drop!  There are a few recent articles on this tool now, like these:
Glossaries made easy…
Great news for terminology exchange
And you also have a Bilingual Excel filetype in Studio 2015 as opposed to the CSV option.
In the last week or two this question of how to create a Translation Memory from a glossary, or termbase exported to Excel has arisen a few times.  There have also been some interesting and clever responses… but notably not the easiest one.
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"Open Document"… or did you mean "Create a single file Project"

I love SDL Trados Studio, and I think it’s easy to use, but sometimes we just hide this fact a little!  I think a case in point, and one of the most confusing things for users of SDL Trados Studio is the “Open Document” command.  It sounds as though it’s a quick way to open a document to work on.  But it’s only like this when you wish to open a document to work on the first time you ever open it.
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