Data Protection…

There’s always been the occasional question appearing on the forums about data protection, particularly in relation to the use of machine translation, but as of the 25th May 2018 this topic has a more serious implication for anyone dealing with data in Europe.  I’ve no intention of making this post about the GDPR regulations which come into force in May 2016 and now apply, you’ll have plenty of informed resources for this and probably plenty of opinion in less informed places too, but just in case you don’t know where to find reliable information on this here’s a few places to get you started:

With the exception of working under specific requirements from your client, Europe has (as far as I’m aware) set out the only legal requirements for dealing with personal data.  They are comprehensive however and deciphering what this means for you as a translator, project manager or client in the translation supply chain is going to lead to many discussions around what you do, and don’t have to do, in order to ensure compliance.  I do have faith in an excellent publication from SDL on this subject since I’m aware of the work that gone into it, so you can do worse than to look at this for a good understanding of what the new regulations mean for you.

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A competitive edge…

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!

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App Notifications…

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!

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Segacious segmentation…

Using segmentation rules on your Translation Memory is something most users struggle with from time to time; but not just the creation of the rules which are often just a question of a few regular expressions and well covered in posts like this from Nora Diaz and others.  Rather how to ensure they apply when you want them, particularly when using the alignment module or retrofit in SDL Trados Studio where custom segmentation rules are being used.  Now I’m not going to take the credit for this article as I would not have even considered writing it if Evzen Polenka had not pointed out how Studio could be used to handle the segmentation of the target language text… something I wasn’t aware was even possible until yesterday.  So all credit to Evzen here for seeing the practical use of this feature and sharing his knowledge.  This is exactly what I love about the community, everyone can learn something and in practical terms many of SDLs customers certainly know how to use the software better than some of us in SDL do!

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Cloud murmurings… part 1.

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. Continue reading “Cloud murmurings… part 1.”

Looking cool…

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 written about this in the past providing a simple example of how it’s done and some reading resources for anyone who would like to learn how.  So why am I bringing this up again?

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AdaptiveMT… what’s the score?

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.

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Priorities… paths… filetypes….

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. Continue reading “Priorities… paths… filetypes….”

Advancing the Advanced…

Some time ago the SDL AppStore team created an opensource site where they make the source code available for virtually all the apps they create for the SDL AppStore.  You can find the site here, https://sdl.github.io/Sdl-Community/, along with links to the apps themselves and also the sourcecode which can be pulled by any developer so they can make their own enhancements and improvements based on a good headstart.  I love this concept, but have to say I’m a little disappointed by the lack of active participation from other developers in pushing their own work back into the apps to share the improvements.  At least I’m disappointed in general, but there are exceptions even if they have been carried out by the AppStore team themselves!  The best exception and example of what can be achieved is around the Advanced Display Filter that can be found in Studio 2017.

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Double vision!!

There are well over 200 applications in the SDL AppStore and the vast majority are free.  I think many users only look at the free apps, and I couldn’t blame them for that as I sometimes do the same thing when it comes to mobile apps.  But every now and again I find something that I would have to pay for but it just looks too useful to ignore.  The same logic applies to the SDL AppStore and there are some developers creating some marvellous solutions that are not free.  So this is the first of a number of articles I’m planning to write about the paid applications, some of them costing only a few euros and others a little more. Are they worth the money?  I think the developers deserve to be paid for the effort they’ve gone to but I’ll let you be the judge of that and I’ll begin by explaining why this article is called double vision!!

From time to time I see translators asking how they can get target documents (the translated version) that are fully formatted but contain the source and the target text… so doubling up on the text that’s required.  I’ve seen all kinds of workarounds ranging from copy and paste to using an auto hotkey script that grabs the text from the source segment and pastes it into the target every time you confirm a translation. It’s a bit of an odd requirement but since we do see it, it’s good to know there is a way to handle it. But perhaps a better way to handle it now would be to use the “RyS Enhanced Target Document Generator” app from the SDL AppStore? Continue reading “Double vision!!”