Just a random collection of things I thought it might be useful to know, mostly about translation technology in Trados ….
When the developer of the Word Cloud plugin for SDL Trados Studio first showed me the application he developed I was pretty impressed… mainly because it just looked so cool, but also because I could think of a couple of useful applications for it.
This 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 “Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!”
One of the reasons SDL Trados Studio, and Trados before that, has been such a popular choice for translators and small teams is the ability to work with shared resources. Many Translation Environments require the use of a server solution in order to share work and if you only do this occasionally, or if you work with a couple of colleagues, then whilst the server solutions can offer a lot of additional capabilities they are often over the top for simple sharing needs and may even require you signing up for things you may not be interested in.
Sharing resources at a simple level is pretty straightforward with Studio because they are mostly file based. So you have a Translation Memory (*.sdltm), and a termbase (*.sdltb) for example, both of which can be accessed by several translators at the same time. You may well have read that several times just to make sure this is what I actually said! If this is possible then why do we sell server solutions at all, as we have SDL GroupShare, SDL WorldServer and SDL TMS? The reason of course is that sharing a filebased resource like this has many limitations and it’s not a solution for serious Projects. Limitations like these that are detailed in KB Article #5098 in the SDL Knowledgebase:
I spent the weekend at my Mothers house the week before last and was digging around looking for photographs of myself when I was the same age as my son. I found a few… a few I wouldn’t share with anyone else but my son! What was I thinking with the baggy trousers and platform shoes…!
I also found some old Army pictures including these two taken during my basic training, which did an excellent job of shaking me out of my baggy trousers and platform shoes! Also provided me with the most tenuous link yet into the translation environment because I wanted to write about clean and unclean files. I don’t know who came up with this terminology, but if I think about it, the description probably fits quite well. But the first time I heard it I’m sure something like these photos would have been closer to mind!
Why is the SDL OpenExchange called the OpenExchange?
If you weren’t familiar with SDL and the OpenExchange initiative then perhaps the name suggests it could be a platform of some kind that supports an open exchange of information or tools to help manage the open exchange of data or processes that are not supported out of the box in the core products. Maybe you might also think that the word Open could refer to some kind of opensource facility?
If 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!
The launch of SDL Trados Studio 2014 this month brings with it the news that SDL Trados 2007 Suite will no longer be supported from the end of this year. I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone as SDL had already ceased to support SDL Trados 2007 since the end of 2012, and with the releases of the 2009, 2011 and now 2014 versions of SDL Trados Studio it’s inevitable that the 2007 Suite version will follow suit.
