compatibility

Spaces and Units…

~ paulfilkin ~ 14 Comments

The handling of numbers and units in Studio is always something that raises questions and over the years I’ve tackled it in various articles.  But one thing I don’t believe I have specifically addressed, and I do see this rear its head from time to time, is how to handle the spaces between a number and its unit.  So it thought it might be useful to tackle it in a simple article so I have a reference point when asked this question, and perhaps it’ll be useful for you at the same time.

I have a background in Civil Engineering so when I think about this topic I naturally fall back to “The International System of Units (SI)” which has a clear definition on this topic:

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Paying it forward with MS Publisher files

~ paulfilkin ~ 18 Comments

001If you’ve never come across Microsoft Publisher before then here’s a neat explanation from wikipedia.

“Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and design rather than text composition and proofing.”

It’s actually quite a neat application for newbies to desktop publishing like me, but it’s a difficult tool to handle if you receive *.pub files (the format used by MS Publisher) and are asked to translate them.    And I do see requests from translators from time to time asking how they can handle them.  The file itself is a binary format and even with Office 2016 (which includes Publisher if you have the Professional version) the only export formats of PDF, XPS and HTML are not importable.  So very tricky indeed if you need to be able to provide your client with a translated version of the pub format.

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Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!

~ paulfilkin ~ 18 Comments

01This article is all about out with the old and in with the new in more ways than one!  In the last week I have been asked three times about converting Wordfast translation memories and Wordfast glossaries into resources that could be used in Studio and MultiTerm.  Normally, for the TXT translation memories I get I would go the traditional route and use a copy of Wordfast to export as TMX.  Then it’s simple, but what if you don’t have Wordfast or don’t want to have to try and use it?  Wordfast glossaries are new territory for me as I’d never looked at these before.  But on a quick check it looked as though they are also TXT files so I decided to take a better look.

Before I get into the detail I’ll just add that I’m not very familiar with Wordfast so I’m basing my suggestions on the small number of files I have received, or created, and the process I used to convert them to formats more useful for a Studio user.  I’ll start with the glossaries as this is where I got the idea from,  I better explain my opening statement too… this is because after I did an initial conversion using the Glossary Converter from the SDL Openexchange I was asked to explain how this would work with MultiTerm Convert.  This of course made me think about the old versus the new… I wouldn’t compare Wordfast and Studio in this way at all 😉 Continue reading →

FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin

~ paulfilkin ~ 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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Disappearing forum posts!

~ paulfilkin ~ 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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X-CAT… the next generation?

~ paulfilkin ~ 21 Comments

01If 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!

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The SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter

~ paulfilkin ~ 12 Comments

#01This application, free on the SDL OpenExchange, has been around for about a year and a half and is one of the most popular applications on there.  It was written by Patrick Hartnett and is incredibly useful in more ways than one.  In fact it’s so useful I have referred to it quite often and used it for working around other issues in many of the articles I have written… so why haven’t I written specifically about it here until now?  The answer is I have no idea… but I should have done!  What prompted me to write now is that Patrick hasn’t released many updates to this tool, mainly because it did what was needed from the start and has been a really reliable and useful application; but he has released an update this week.
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Great news for terminology exchange…

~ paulfilkin ~ Leave a comment

Terminology Exchange... TBX… and this will be particularly good news for users working in SDL Trados Studio with SDL WorldServer.  Today the Glossary Converter was updated on the OpenExchange with a number of very cool enhancements.  These are support for users still working with SDL MultiTerm 2009, support for Microsoft Excel workbooks containing multiple worksheets, Spanish user interface, a number of smaller usability improvements and bugfixes and the one I’m most interested in here… support for TBX.  TBX is a TermBase eXchange format that was developed for sharing terminology between different tools.  The reason I’m so interested is because if you want to use a TBX file in Studio as a resource for your AutoSuggest then you have to use MultiTerm Convert in order to create a MultiTerm TermBase.  This is not too difficult, but it can take a little work if there is a complex structure in the TBX… and of course it can take a little while as it’s at least a two-step process.  So making this easier would be great.
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My favourite OpenExchange apps in 2012…

~ paulfilkin ~ Leave a comment

When I started writing this blog the first article I wrote was about the SDL OpenExchange.  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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Working with Variable Lists

~ paulfilkin ~ 12 Comments

Updated January 2015 : Also possible, and easier, to use the Variable Manager from the SDL OpenExchange for this.
I mentioned in a previous post that it wasn’t possible to import long variable lists into a Studio Translation Memory using the desktop version of Studio. You can do this with GroupShare, but the ability to do this in the desktop version is a work in progress.
Well that wasn’t quite true and as I’ve been preparing for some roadshows and events that are coming up this month I figured out a simple workaround using SDL Trados 2007 Suite.
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