Talk to the hand…

~ Paul Filkin ~ 3 Comments

… because the head is listening!

In my last article I wrote about the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ, and the idea they had of attempting to elicit questions prior to the event through their Conference Bulletin Board.  This was a really great idea because it gives the tool vendors the opportunity to focus their presentations and workshops on the things users really want to know about.
There can be nothing worse, for an experienced user, than turning up to an hours presentation and listening to the same presentation on how to do the basics with a translation tool that you hear every time you make the effort to improve your knowledge.
So the idea of raising questions from people who wish to attend prior to the event is a really good one because not only does it mean the content should be more relevant to the things users really want to know, but it also gives the vendor time to prepare for any really tricky questions that might otherwise have to be taken off line.  So I thought I’d use this article to do two things.

  1. Shamelessly promote a couple of conferences I’m attending this year where there are opportunities to ask questions
  2. Get some questions!!

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FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin

~ Paul Filkin ~ 5 Comments

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

~ Paul Filkin ~ 31 Comments

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!
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A few bilingual TBX resources

~ Paul Filkin ~ 66 Comments

01Since writing my last article on handling large TBX files I have extracted a few TBX files as language pairs only from the very large TBX provided by IATE and thought I would share them here for others to use.  If you want a specific language pair from the 25 languages within the IATE TBX then drop a note into the comments.  I can’t guarantee I’ll do it quickly, but as the process is fairly straightforward I will add them from time to time.
All of the files below are extracted from the following original: Download IATE, European Union, [2014] Continue reading “A few bilingual TBX resources” →

What a whopper!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 28 Comments

01I love this cartoon with the husband and wife fishing on a calm weekend off.
“Honey, I got a big one on!”
She’s hooked a whopper and he casually responds in the way he always does when she occasionally catches a fish on Sunday morning.
“Yes dear, uh huh…”
The equipment they’ve got, from the boat to the fishing rods, is all perfectly suitable for their usual weekend activities but hopelessly inadequate for handling something like this!  Little do they know that the whopper under the surface is going to give them a little more trouble when they try to bring him on board!
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Disappearing forum posts!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 4 Comments

01If you’ve ever posted a question into a forum, particularly about XML, and found that when it was published the main part of your question where you showed the XML had disappeared then this short article will be interesting for you!  I see this all the time in ProZ.com, or when people ask me questions in the comments of this blog, and I can imagine the frustration they must be feeling as they post it again once or twice… all to no avail!
The reason for this is because many forums, and blogs, require that you handle reserved characters in HTML as HTML entities.  Of course everyone knows this, and the forums and blogs in question always make it really obvious and provide guidance on how to overcome it… not!
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“I am strong to the finich…Cause I eats me spinach”

~ Paul Filkin ~ 5 Comments

“Cus01_thinnertomer Experience”.  If you use twitter, if you follow the activities of SDL through their website, or if you read the mailers we occasionally send out then you’ll probably have come across this expression quite a lot because SDL has completely restructured its business to focus on “Customer Experience”.  So now we only have two divisions; Customer Experience Solutions and Language Solutions.  These names reflect the operational focus of each division, but this doesn’t mean they are completely separate.  In fact the opposite is true, and the crossover between the divisions reflects both the nature of our business because we increasingly use all of our own technology, and the customer journey which we can support for any organisation looking to deliver smooth, data-driven experiences to their own customers at every point of the buying journey, and across all channels, devices and languages.

Phew!

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Should I get certified?

~ Paul Filkin ~ 2 Comments

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!

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Great ideas!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 17 Comments

001This week SDL launched an OpenExchange Developers competition.  Actually it was launched a month or so ago but the number of downloads for new applications started counting at of the beginning of this week.  The key dates are these:

19 March to 31 July          Apps can be submitted
1 June to 31 July               Downloads counted
Early August                       Winners announced (Actual results are here)

Over the last month or so I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the things the developers are creating and there are really some fantastic ideas and apps in progress.  Most of the apps for this competition will be free for Studio users, but you will have to be using Studio 2014 to take advantage of them.  This is because the competition is all about using the integration API in Studio 2014, so developers can create new ribbons, new views, new ribbon groups etc.  This allows for anything from a simple feature to a full blown application, and I’m seeing some fantastic examples of both.

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Why do we need custom XML filetypes?

~ Paul Filkin ~ 96 Comments

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?

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