The debate over who’s right, and what’s the correct spelling… localization or localisation… will undoubtedly go on for a long time, unless you ask my Mother who knows the British are right of course! I always lean towards the British spelling, probably the result of my upbringing, and when asked I always take the British point of view.
There are many Americanisms that have crept into our everyday speech, and if I’m really honest I use them too! If I’m even more honest I think I always used them and didn’t even know they were American English and not British English. The “z’s” are easy, but who gets cypher and cipher the wrong way around, disk and disc, gaol and jail or even meter and metre. No doubt there are those amongst us who would never get them wrong (my Mother would never get them wrong) but I think there are plenty of words like this that have become, dare I say it… interoperable! But what happens if you don’t want to get them wrong, and if you always want to stick to American English or British English? In our business this is often an important distinction, so with that introduction let’s take a quick look at how you could manage something like this using MultiTerm and Studio.
Continue reading “Yanks versus Brits… linguistically speaking!”
So now let’s flip the process on its head!
Something we see some users of SDL products saying, and often non-users even promoting, is that MultiTerm is a complex product and very hard to use. Is this true? Well if I’m honest there probably isn’t any smoke without fire… but perhaps this is really all down to a lack of good documentation with plenty of examples to explain how to do things? Or perhaps this is down to converting spreadsheets or other formats into MultiTerm format; so specific operations rather than simply being able to use MultiTerm itself? Certainly MultiTerm Convert, which you need to use in order to create a termbase from another format can be quite complicated if you don’t understand a little about the structure of a termbase in MultiTerm. If you only want a simple glossary the entire process is much simplified thanks to the 
People often tell me that using Studio is complicated. Other people, who have been working with Studio tell me it’s actually quite logical once you get your mind around it. I clearly lean towards the latter and whilst I always try hard to see the difficulties the conclusion I always come back to, rightly or wrongly, is that many users who used Trados in the past expect Studio to be similar and then struggle when they discover it’s not.
… and this will be particularly good news for users working in 