Regex… and "economy of accuracy" (Regular Expressions – Part 2)

In Regular Expressions – Part 1 I wrote a summary of where regular expressions could be used in SDL Trados Studio, and I covered a couple of examples.  I also referred to RegexBuddy quite a lot as this is a really useful tool in helping you write and understand regular expressions.  But in case learning another application is something you don’t want to do I thought it would be handy to go through what I think are the most useful applications of regular expressions for every day use in SDL Trados Studio, and also share a few tips on how to use Studio to verify the expressions are finding what you need as well as introduce a little “economy of accuracy“.
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Regular Expressions – Part 1

Regular Expressions, often referred to as Regex, are something that come up again and again in forums, roadshows and the occasional questions.  So I thought it might be useful to take a better look at them and how they can be useful for translators.  To begin with I’m republishing a blog article I wrote a year or so ago on a different site so I can build on this theme in one location.
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Making the most of your resources… and some free extras

Updated 15 January 2015 : Only 10,000 TUs are required for the generation of an AutoSuggest dictionary with Studio 2014.
I’ve been talking to a Freelance Translator in Canada over the last few weeks who purchased Studio 2011.  She has a great set of resources from many years of translating, all split up in different sublanguages to cater for en(US), en(GB) and fr(FR), fr(CA) variations.  What she didn’t have was consolidated Translation Memories so she could maximise her leverage from all of these variations, or Autosuggest dictionaries, or termbases and didn’t use the AutoText lists.
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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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