Why is MultiTerm a separate program, I can do exactly the same thing with another CAT tool? This is a fairly common question, and it has a very good answer too. It’s because MultiTerm is multitudinous! That is, it can be extended by you to provide a variety of termbases, so many in fact that you could probably create a structure to match anything you liked and you won’t be shoe horned into a fixed structure. As I thought about this the Penrose steps came into my mind. They don’t necessarily have anything to do with terminology solutions for translators, but these steps don’t behave in a known manner either and my mind enjoyed the nonsensical link! I also liked this word multitudinous; partly because of the obvious use of the prefix multi- but also because the use of a word like this suggests complexity to me, and in many ways this is what users think when the subject of MultiTerm comes up.
Tag: oldy but goody
Tag used to determine which posts should be reposted.
Quicker Inserts!
If you work with special symbols when you are translating in SDL Trados Studio, and don’t have the appropriate keyboard then you are faced with a number of options. You can add the symbols you want as Quick Inserts; this is fairly straightforward and I’ve discussed this a number of times in the past. You can use AutoHotkey or some other tool that makes it easy to add special characters based on a keyboard shortcut. You can install a different keyboard layout and then learn where the various keys are. You can use windows alt codes… so to add the letter a with an umlaut ( ä ) I would use Alt+0228. Actually on my laptop I’d have to use Alt+Fn+0228 as I don’t have a numeric keyboard, so the combinations can be tricky, and you have to remember them all or leave post-its all over your screen 😉 You could also use the windows character map, where you can select the symbol you want and then copy and paste it into your target segment. And lastly (I think… although I’m open to more suggestions) you could keep MSWord running in the background and copy and paste as needed from a page containing the symbols you normally use.
All I want is a simple analysis!
If this title sounds familiar to you it’s probably because I wrote an article three years ago on the SDL blog with the very same title. It’s such a good title (in my opinion ;-)) I decided to keep it and write the same article again, but refreshed and enhanced a little for SDL Trados Studio 2014.
Something I only occasionally hear these days is “When I used Workbench or SDLX it was simple to create a quick analysis of my files. Now I have to create a Project in Studio and it takes so long to do the same thing.” I do think this is something you’re more likely to hear from experienced users of the older products because they initially find that getting a quick report out of Studio is a far more onerus process than it used to be. What they might not think of is how you can use the Projects concept to make this easy for you once you become just as experienced with the new tools.
AnyTM… or SuperTM!
In February last year I wrote an article called “It’s all English… right?“. It was about a Translation Provider plugin available through the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) and it resolved a common request from users. The request was why can’t I use my en(US) Translation Memory with my new customer who wants the work as en(GB)?
It’s a valid question, and Studio does have valid reasons for wanting to retain the differences between the different flavours of English… or any other language you work with that also has different flavours, like Spanish, French or Arabic for example. But it’s also a valid request to be able to use one Translation Memory for this because it’s perfectly simple for you, as a Translator, to maintain multiple Translation Units and handle any other differences between placeables that Studio assigns automatically based on the language flavour.
Those Project Settings!
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the SDL blog explaining the differences between Project Settings and Global Settings. Things have changed a little now, although the principle is the same, and Studio 2014 has a different interface so I thought, given the number of times this still comes up, that I’d refresh the article a little and have another go at making this clear. If you are still using Studio 2009/2011 then the original article might still be helpful – Studio… Global or Project Settings?
If you’re using Studio 2014 then here’s the update….
X-CAT… the next generation?
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!
Solving the Post Edit puzzle
It would be very arrogant of me to suggest that I have the solution for measuring the effort that goes into post-editing translations, wherever they originated from, but in particular machine translation. So let’s table that right away because there are many ways to measure, and pay for, post-editing work and I’m not going to suggest a single answer to suit everyone.
But I think I can safely say that finding a way to measure, and pay for post-editing translations in a consistent way that provided good visibility into how many changes had been made, and allowed you to build a cost model you could be happy with, is something many companies and translators are still investigating.
The 12 QA checks of Christmas…
On the first day of Christmas my Studio gave to me…
12 Verification SDK and API!
11 QA Checker Profiles
10 Segments to exclude
9 Punctuation checks
8 Regular Expressions
7 Terminology Verification
6 Trademark checks
5 Number checks
4 Segment Verifications
3 Length Verification checks
2 Word Lists
… and no Inconsistencies by default
The Quality Assurance features in Studio are quite extensive, and they are often loved and hated all at the same time. Loved because when used correctly they can provide excellent assurance that you’ll have happy clients… hated because the automated recognition of numbers, dates etc. in Studio follow the settings of your computer and sometimes these are not what you need.
Bookmarking your work…
Studio 2014, whilst containing many significant user enhancements, also brought with it some significant additions to the technology platform available to developers.
These enhancements provide a developer with the ability to extend or customise the user interface… so change the way Studio looks and is used… and it also allows a developer to create custom functionalities that they can add into the interface as if they were part of the application itself. Actually once added they are indeed part of the application!
Making variables work for you
It’s funny, but when I think of “variables” I think of something that changes… a bit like the Transformer robots my son used to play with. So when I look at how they are used in Studio, and in Trados before that, the name doesn’t really make sense at first!
In practice, “variables” in Studio are words or phrases that don’t change at all when you translate them. So it’s useful to be able to ensure they are handled automatically in Studio by defining lists containing these “variables”.