Whilst I would definitely not claim to be an expert, writing this blog has allowed me to learn a reasonable amount about XML over the years. Most of the articles I’ve written have been about explaining how to manage the many amazing features in the filetypes that are supported by Trados Studio… and of course how to deal with the many changes over the years as the filetypes have become more and more sophisticated catering for the demands of our customers and the changes in the technologies applied to XML in general. The result of these changes has led to some… let’s say… less than user friendly interfaces and features and you’d certainly be forgiven if you thought things were becoming a little chaotic!
Tag: filetypes
Helping the Help!
I really like this image created by DALL·E of a man… maybe a businessman… on a wall, putting down his newspaper and reaching down to offer help to the worker with a ladder. Created with only this prompt – “Helping the Help in the style of Richard Estes.” When we read about how ChatGPT is “only” an advanced autosuggest we really need to think about how it must have some understanding of what was previously said to be able to predict the suggestion. DALL·E really demonstrates this well because it had to have enough of an understanding of the concept of help in terms of not only helping, but also the use of the word help as someone who could be employed to help (in this case maybe a caretaker or janitor)… and then think about how this could be represented as an image, and in the style of a photorealist painter I mentioned by name. Then do all that in a matter of seconds. Quite astonishing really. Continue reading “Helping the Help!”
ChatGPT + Powershell = Localization Superpowers!
Localization engineers are the miracle workers behind the scenes of localization workflows, and without them many of the projects we see couldn’t happen. The skillsets they possess go far beyond the sort of things that most translators know how to do, and often require the ability to code. I’ve already written a little about these sorts of things in the last three or four articles I published this month, mainly because the use of AI (tools like ChatGPT for example) is opening up the possibility for the rest of us mere mortals to benefit from the sort of things they do. Today I’m extending on another such skill that I have introduced only once before back in 2013, a decade ago! It is a very technical, and yet powerful thing to be able to tap into, so now with the help of ChatGPT I’m going to do it again!
Continue reading “ChatGPT + Powershell = Localization Superpowers!”
Never get lost with ChatGPT…
As I’m getting lost in my own thoughts around just what to talk about next with regard to AI technologies and in particular ChatGPT… and as I’m pondering about the effect this is going to have on our industry I recalled a couple of questions around the use of XPath in the community. One of these questions was yesterday and it related to how to use XPath to extract one of the languages in a TMX file using the XML filetype in Trados Studio. Not a particularly tricky thing to do, and I imagined the user was just editing the content or maybe changing the language pair by translating one of the languages into something else, or something like that. But what struck me was the XPath expression he used.
Styling with ChatGPT!
Continuing the theme of how to make use of AI technologies to help with the more technical nature of localization I thought I could revisit an article I wrote back in 2013… this month a decade ago! In that article I explained how to write a very basic stylesheet that could be used to provide more context when translating XML files. To do that I had to learn some basics myself and that did give me enough of a skillset to pretty much create stylesheets for all kinds of basic html table based previews that I come across… but I can never claim to be an expert and if the styling or the XML was more complex I might not be able to do it at all.
Introducing the multilingual XML… super filetype!
I was compelled to make a return to a previous theme around Marvel Comics because it’s the only way I can do justice to the amazing work the RWS AppStore team carry out on a daily basis. There are some things you just can’t wait to get up in the morning for, and for me, one of these things is being able to work with this team on a daily basis. The first meeting of every day for me is with this team and what a fantastic way to start the day it is! I started this article by mentioning Marvel, but as you’ll see, the hero of this story is probably a Honey Badger!
Continue reading “Introducing the multilingual XML… super filetype!”
Psst… wanna know a few more things about file types?
I wrote under this title back in 2013 and provided a bit of information about the Word filetypes in Studio. It was a pretty popular article and I always meant to circle back and do some more. Seven is a lucky number so now we’re in 2020, seven years later, I thought I’d do it again… and it’s also just as long, so grab a coffee first!
Continue reading “Psst… wanna know a few more things about file types?”
Some you win… some you lose
When we released the new Trados 2021 last week I fully intended to make my first article, after the summary of the release notes, to be something based around the new appstore integration. The number of issues we are seeing with this release are very low which is a good thing, but nonetheless I feel compelled to tackle one thing first that has come up a little in the forums. It relates to some changes made to improve the product for the many.
The versatile regex based text filter in Trados Studio…
After attending the xl8cluj conference in Romania a few weeks ago, which was an excellent, and very technical conference for translators, I thought it was about time I wrote an article around the things you can do with the Regular Expression Delimited Text filter since it is so useful for solving all kinds of tasks related to text based files that don’t fit any of the out of the box formats available in the product. Files such as software string files and csv files are common examples of where understanding how to work with this customisable file type can yield many benefits. So this article is food for thought and a few things that might be helpful to you in the future. It’s also pretty long (I’m not kidding!), so maybe grab a cup of coffee before you start to go through it!
Continue reading “The versatile regex based text filter in Trados Studio…”
Wot! No target!!
The origin of Chad (if you’re British) or Kilroy (if you’re American) seems largely supposition. The most likely story I could find, or rather the one I like the most, is that it was created by the late cartoonist George Edward Chatterton ‘Chat’ in 1937 to advertise dance events at a local RAF (Royal Air Force) base. After that Chad is remembered for bringing attention to any shortages, or shortcomings, in wartime Britain with messages like Wot! No eggs!!, and Wot! No fags!!. It’s not used a lot these days, but for those of us aware of the symbolism it’s probably a fitting exclamation when you can’t save your target file after completing a translation in Trados Studio! At least that would be the polite exclamation since this is one of the most frustrating scenarios you may come across!
At the start of this article I fully intended this to be a simple description of the problems around saving the target file, but like so many things I write it hasn’t turned out that way! But I found it a useful exercise so I hope you will too. So, let’s start simple despite that introduction because the reasons for this problem usually boil down to one or more of these three things:
- Not preparing the project so it’s suitable for sharing
- Corruption of a project file
- A problem with the source file or the Studio filetype