Just a random collection of things I thought it might be useful to know, mostly about translation technology….
Why is the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) called the OpenExchange?
If you weren’t familiar with SDL and the OpenExchange initiative then perhaps the name suggests it could be a platform of some kind that supports an open exchange of information or tools to help manage the open exchange of data or processes that are not supported out of the box in the core products. Maybe you might also think that the word Open could refer to some kind of opensource facility?
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the SDL blog explaining the differences between Project Settings and Global Settings. Things have changed a little now, although the principle is the same, and Studio 2014 has a different interface so I thought, given the number of times this still comes up, that I’d refresh the article a little and have another go at making this clear. If you are still using Studio 2009/2011 then the original article might still be helpful – Studio… Global or Project Settings?
If you’re using Studio 2014 then here’s the update….
If the title and image I have used for this article reminds you a little of something you might see from Stan Lee in an episode from Marvel Comics, then you have discovered my guilty secret… beneath a “slightly” more serious exterior I have a hidden desire to be able to extend my capabilities and demonstrate super human powers! Unfortunately I don’t think this is going to happen for me any time soon, so my dream lives on in the mind of my son and probably every imaginative child on the planet!
So I may never become a mutant superhero… but I might be able to redirect some of these latent powers in another direction. By now, if you know me, you may have guessed it or you may simply be thinking “what is he talking about?”… so with that slightly improbable introduction I’ll elaborate!
Every now and then I see someone ask how they can be sure that the applications available on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) are safe to use? This is a very valid question and I read in a whitepaper from Adobe, where they quoted a PwC survey carried out in 2013, that nearly 30% of respondents from 123 countries claimed financial losses due to a software related security incident.
Controlling the security of our own applications, and ensuring we have proper controls in place is one thing… but how do we make sure that applications that have been developed by others, for installation and use with our products via the OpenExchange, are similarly controlled?
Continue reading “SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) Application Security”
It would be very arrogant of me to suggest that I have the solution for measuring the effort that goes into post-editing translations, wherever they originated from, but in particular machine translation. So let’s table that right away because there are many ways to measure, and pay for, post-editing work and I’m not going to suggest a single answer to suit everyone.
But I think I can safely say that finding a way to measure, and pay for post-editing translations in a consistent way that provided good visibility into how many changes had been made, and allowed you to build a cost model you could be happy with, is something many companies and translators are still investigating.
On the first day of Christmas my Studio gave to me…
12 Verification SDK and API!
11 QA Checker Profiles
10 Segments to exclude
9 Punctuation checks
8 Regular Expressions
7 Terminology Verification
6 Trademark checks
5 Number checks
4 Segment Verifications
3 Length Verification checks
2 Word Lists
… and no Inconsistencies by default
The Quality Assurance features in Studio are quite extensive, and they are often loved and hated all at the same time. Loved because when used correctly they can provide excellent assurance that you’ll have happy clients… hated because the automated recognition of numbers, dates etc. in Studio follow the settings of your computer and sometimes these are not what you need.
Studio 2014, whilst containing many significant user enhancements, also brought with it some significant additions to the technology platform available to developers.
These enhancements provide a developer with the ability to extend or customise the user interface… so change the way Studio looks and is used… and it also allows a developer to create custom functionalities that they can add into the interface as if they were part of the application itself. Actually once added they are indeed part of the application!
It’s funny, but when I think of “variables” I think of something that changes… a bit like the Transformer robots my son used to play with. So when I look at how they are used in Studio, and in Trados before that, the name doesn’t really make sense at first!
In practice, “variables” in Studio are words or phrases that don’t change at all when you translate them. So it’s useful to be able to ensure they are handled automatically in Studio by defining lists containing these “variables”.
Studio has some excellent capabilities for getting more from your file types, and I’m often surprised by the reaction of Studio users when they find out what’s possible.
It seems we’ve been keeping a big secret that nobody was supposed to know… so I thought it would be worth taking a quick look at just one file type, everyones favourite, Microsoft Word. The mechanism for finding these options in any filetype and seeing how they can benefit you will be the same as it is for Microsoft Word… and just as simple. It’s a long post but hopefully useful.
Continue reading “Psst… wanna know a few things about file types?”
One of the easiest, and often little known tricks in all Studio versions since the product was released as Studio 2009, is the ability to move the windows around so that you can work in the way you want.
You can do this if you work with a single monitor or double monitors… or more! The basic idea is that you detach the windows in Studio and then just move them to where you like, either somewhere on your single monitor so that you can see the views that are more important to you on one screen, or by placing them onto a separate monitor altogether thereby maximising the screen real estate for your edting activity.
Continue reading “Moving windows…”
Since Studio 2014 was launched it’s been interesting to see what some users were waiting for. Did they want the Quickmerge, Alignment, AutoSave, improved navigation, blistering speed, automatic concordance search, improved filters, enhanced locking functionality, custom TM user ID, improvements to the term recognition threshold, more options in the display filter, auto-substitution for acronyms and a host of other improvements? No… and I genuinely don’t mean this in a mean way… it seems for some users an easier way to handle typographical quotes is the order of the day and this hasn’t radically changed since TagEditor.
Continue reading “Those dumb smart quotes…”
The launch of SDL Trados Studio 2014 this month brings with it the news that SDL Trados 2007 Suite will no longer be supported from the end of this year. I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone as SDL had already ceased to support SDL Trados 2007 since the end of 2012, and with the releases of the 2009, 2011 and now 2014 versions of SDL Trados Studio it’s inevitable that the 2007 Suite version will follow suit.
Continue reading “Life without Trados!”
The release of Studio 2014 will bring a number of new OpenExchange applications to the App Store. One of these is already becoming well known based on the name alone… the SDLXLIFF Toolkit! The name suggests this is a tool for working with an SDLXLIFF and being able to take it to pieces and interact with all of it’s components… and this is probably a good explanation of what it actually does.
Continue reading “The SDLXLIFF Toolkit”