If you were a user of SDL Trados 2007 or earlier you will probably be familiar with the concept of “Fields and Attributes”… if you are a new user to this kind of technology then you may not be. But in both cases I hope this article will provide a little bit of useful information on how they are used in Studio.
I used a picture on the left of a filing system because this is how I see them. They are simply a way to organise the translation units that are saved into a Translation Memory so that you can easily find them as your Translation Memory grows and your biological memory fails 😉
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Tag: oldy but goody
Tag used to determine which posts should be reposted.
The SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter
This application, free on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore), 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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The PowerShell what?
The PowerShell Toolkit… that’s what!
None the wiser? Me neither… but it sounds like a really cool idea so I thought if I can do it then so can anyone else if I share the concept a little. So I’m writing this article as I learn how to use this toolkit!
Powershell is a task automation framework that is installed as part of Windows… the PowerShell Toolkit compiled by Patrik Mazanek of SDL uses this framework and in simple terms it’s a way of providing the tools for automating things that Studio can do without having to redevelop the computer code to do them yourself. So you already have the means to do this and like me may not have known it at all!
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Glueing your files…
Update January 2015 : Note that this is possible in Studio 2014, but now you can also merge after the project is created too!
The use of the term “glue” in describing what “Trados Glue” was used for made it very clear what it was intended to do. In fact the term “glue” for merging files together is almost a standard! I have no idea whether it was Trados that first coined the term in the context of CAT tools but it certainly stuck 😉
Today I see the question of how to “glue” files together to make it easier to manage them quite often… sometimes accompanied by the phrase “Trados Glue”. So it seems appropriate to provide a quick article on how this is achieved with today’s CAT, SDL Trados Studio. Studio has had a similar feature since it was launched back in 2009 but it is not called “Studio Glue”, although perhaps it should have been, it is simply called “Merge Files”. It is also a big improvement over the original Trados version allowing you to merge any filetypes you like and work on them as a single file.
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AutoCorrect… for everything!
Microsoft Word has a very neat, at least some users think it’s very neat, autocorrect feature that can correct your words as you type. So when you are working in Microsoft Word you can take advantage of this.
If you like this feature wouldn’t it be great if you could use it in Studio as you typed to supplement the other great features like AutoSuggest, QuickInsert etc… in fact wouldn’t it be great if you could use your autocorrect lists from Microsoft Word in any editing application you have on your computer? If you like autocorrect then of course it would be, and I see this come up in various forums quite often.
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Duplicates and Roadshows…
A strange title, and a stranger image with a pair of zebras and a road, but in keeping with the current fascination with animals during the SDL Spring Roadshows I thought it was quite fitting. Nothing at all to do with the subject other than the Zebras may be duplicated and they are hovering a road to somewhere that looks cold!
The problem posed at the SDL Trados Roadshow in Helsinki by some very technical attendees, after the event was over, was about how to efficiently work on a Translation Memory (TM) so you could remove all the unnecessary duplicates.
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A clean editing environment?
I love to see technology being used to help provide a clean environment for us to live in and to bring up our children. This topic regularly comes up in our household as my wife and son support the ethos behind this ideal wholeheartedly… actually I may even be understating this point a little!
But this isn’t the clean environment I want to talk about today. I’m interested in a clean editing environment when you use a translation tool.
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"Memory is the mother of all wisdom"
I believe this interesting quote can be found in “Prometheus Bound”, a play by a Greek dramatist called Aeschylus. I haven’t read the play, but I like the quote, and it certainly lends itself to the importance of memory… even when we refer to a Translation Memory rather than your own built in capability. It’s because your Translation Memory is such an important asset to you that you need to regularly maintain it, and also reuse it wherever possible to expand the benefits you get from it.
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It's all English… right?
7 June 2018 update: note that the application referred to in this article is actually part of the product in Studio 2015 onwards. So no need to download it!
English spoken in Australia, Belize, Canada, Caribbean, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Malaysia, New Zealand, Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States and Zimbabwe. Also known as en-AU, en-BZ, en-CA, en-029, en-IN, en-IE, en-JM, en-MY, en-NZ, en-PH, en-SG, en-ZA, en-TT, en-GB, en-US and en-ZW. These are the language codes used by Microsoft in their National Language Support (NLS) API Reference for the different flavours of English supported and this is what Studio bases its language support for English on… then it’s further complicated as it can also vary depending on the operating system of your computer (Win XP, Vista, Win7 etc.)
Of course this is English, or flavours of it. But there are differences and Studio always insists on knowing which flavour of any language is being used. So 16 variants… and it’s even more with Spanish for example where we have 20 variants.
So does it really matter that 23/08/2005 in the United Kingdom is written as 8/23/2005 in the United States, or that 1,234,567,890,123.45 in the United States is written in Spain (Spanish (Spain)) as 1.234.567.890.123,45?
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Translate with style…
Quite often people ask me how to handle XML files where the author has written guidance notes as a tag in the XML. These guidance notes should not be translated so you don’t really want to see them presented as a translatable segment as you work, but you would like them to be clearly visible as a reference for the translator to help clarify meaning or give guidance on the maximum number of characters allowed for each segment when this could vary throughout the file for example.
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