Psst… wanna know a few things about file types?

01Studio 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.

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Sometimes it's the little things that matter!

#01In the unlikely event you’ve been visiting another planet over the last few weeks, you may not have noticed SDL are releasing Studio 2014 soon… how soon?… very soon, but no firm date to share yet before you ask!
This release has some long awaited “big” features such as a new alignment module to replace the WinAlign module developed in the olden days that you can review in a blog article from Daniel Brockmann.  It has some new functionality altogether for the regulated industry workflows around reviewing fully formatted Word documents, making changes and being able to update the translation in Studio automatically… a unique feature that will be useful for many users translating and reviewing with Word in this environment.  And of course we have some customer driven features such as being able to merge files in Studio at any time, and in any Project… rather than only at the Project creation stage.
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Duplicates and Roadshows…

#1A strange title, and a stranger image with a pair of zebras and a road, but in keeping with the current fascination with animals during the SDL Spring Roadshows I thought it was quite fitting.  Nothing at all to do with the subject other than the Zebras may be duplicated and they are hovering a road to somewhere that looks cold!
The problem posed at the SDL Trados Roadshow in Helsinki by some very technical attendees, after the event was over, was about how to efficiently work on a Translation Memory (TM) so you could remove all the unnecessary duplicates.
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My favourite OpenExchange apps in 2012…

When I started writing this blog the first article I wrote was about the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore).  I thought I’d start this year off by sharing my favorite applications … my favourite FREE applications.  We had a fair few of these over the course of the year but I’ll pick out six that I think are well worth a look.  In no particular order (well… alphabetical order) these six are:

  • Glossary Converter
  • Package Reader
  • SDLTmReverseLangs
  • SDLXLIFF Compare
  • SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter
  • Terminjector

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Identifying numbers in your analysis

Handling number only segments is a question that comes up a fair bit, and for a number of reasons.  Mostly it’s the more simple question of how to handle them at all; sometimes they are recognised and Studio can auto-localize them; sometimes they aren’t recognised and you need to work around this a little.  This question I’ve addressed a few times, so here’s a few links as a reminder.

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So how many words do you think it is?

Last Update 14 Feb 2015: Analysis based on SDL Trados Studio 2014 SP2 CU8 (11.2.4364.8)
It’s not unusual for people to see the word-count in a translation tool, compare it to the word-count in their authoring tool (usually MSWord..!) and then wonder why there are so many differences.  Quite often I get sent documents and am asked to explain the differences which I often put down to a simple explanation; ultimately I think you need to be fair with this and Word is a simple word count, whereas a translation tool is designed to try and reflect the effort of the Translator.  Studio even separates out the placeables and numbers so that the real effort becomes apparent and a fair way of measuring and charging for the work is achieved.  How successful this is often depends on who’s asking and exactly what the source material is..!
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