Tag: oldy but goody

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Spot the difference!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 5 Comments

001I don’t know if you can recall these games from when you were a kid?  I used to spend hours trying to find all the differences between the image on the left and the one on the right.  I never once thought how that might become a useful skill in later life… although in some cases it’s a skill I’d rather not have to develop!

You may be wondering where I’m going with this so I’ll explain.  Last weekend the SFÖ held a conference in Umeå, Sweden… I wasn’t there, but I did get an email from one of my colleagues asking how you could see what changes had been made in your bilingual files as a result of post-editing Machine Translation.  The easy answer of course is to do the post-editing with your track changes switched on, then it’s easy to spot the difference.  That is useful, but it’s not going to help with measurement, or give you something useful to be able to discuss with your client.  It’s also not going to help if you didn’t work with tracked changes in the first place because you’d need some serious spot the difference skills to evaluate your work!

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Committing the cardinal sin…

~ Paul Filkin ~ 67 Comments

001Strong words… “Committing the Cardinal Sin“!

I can remember from my early days with SDL many interesting, and often frustrating conversations with the then Product Manager for MultiTerm.  The almost religious use of phrases like “You can’t use spreadsheets for terminology”… “It only takes a few steps to be able to create a simple glossary with MultiTerm”… “You can’t properly export a MultiTerm termbase to Excel”… and many more discussions along these lines.  Well, over the last year or so mainly thanks to the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) which removes the shackles of being tied to “the way it’s always done” we have seen one tool in particular that has proven this traditional way of thinking wrong.  But not because our friendly product manager was wrong… he was mostly right.  When you think about Terminology Management in the traditional sense then Excel is not really suited to managing concept oriented databases that are designed for the terminology professional.  It has its place, but is definitely prone to error and difficult to manage as the database grows.  But what if you only want a glossary?

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Tinkering with tradition… APIs in Studio 2015 SR2

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

001If you regularly read the articles I write you may have noticed that I like to talk about the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) a lot.  I write articles about some of the cool applications that are available to users of the SDL Language Platform (Studio, MultiTerm, GroupShare, Passolo etc.)  I see this platform in a similar way (albeit a smaller scale) to an I-Phone or an Android phone… the core features are already there in the products and the APIs support the ability for any developer to create more features and capabilities to do anything they like!  Things that might only be useful for a small group of users, or they might be interesting for many… or they might support the breaking of long standing traditions!

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Recording Translation Memory metadata

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

001Back in July 2013 I wrote an article called “Fields and Attributes in Studio” which was all about adding different types of metadata to your Translation Units every time you confirmed a segment to make it easier, or more complex depending on what you’ve done, to manage your Translation Memories.  If you’re not sure what I mean by this take a look at the article as I won’t repeat a lot of that here… at least I’ll try not to!  This capability in Studio is probably quite familiar to most users of the old SDL Trados 2007 and earlier, and was even essential to some extent because you could only use a single Translation Memory at a time.

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Paying it forward with MS Publisher files

~ Paul Filkin ~ 18 Comments

001If you’ve never come across Microsoft Publisher before then here’s a neat explanation from wikipedia.

“Microsoft Publisher is an entry-level desktop publishing application from Microsoft, differing from Microsoft Word in that the emphasis is placed on page layout and design rather than text composition and proofing.”

It’s actually quite a neat application for newbies to desktop publishing like me, but it’s a difficult tool to handle if you receive *.pub files (the format used by MS Publisher) and are asked to translate them.    And I do see requests from translators from time to time asking how they can handle them.  The file itself is a binary format and even with Office 2016 (which includes Publisher if you have the Professional version) the only export formats of PDF, XPS and HTML are not importable.  So very tricky indeed if you need to be able to provide your client with a translated version of the pub format.

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We’re leading up to Christmas….

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01… and path handling in Studio can still be a little challenging.  I imagine that’s a statement not too many users would disagree with!  There is a knack to using it, and if you can allow Studio to do its thing, which is what the black box translation environments of some competitive solutions do anyway, then it is something you can live with.  But if you want to have the physical Studio projects set up in the same way as your customer folders, which the black box approach can’t do, then Studio can be a little frustrating at times when in your eagerness to tackle the work your projects are stored in a location you didn’t intend because you missed the prompts to change it!  I even wrote about this once in an effort to explain the inner workings of path handling in Studio, “Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!“.

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Good bugs… bad bugs!

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01What the heck is a good bug? I don’t know if there is an official definition for this so I’m going to invent one.

“An unintended positive side effect as a result of computer software not working as intended.”

I reckon this is a fairly regular occurrence and I have definitely seen it before.  So for example, in an earlier version of Studio you could do a search and replace in the source and actually change the source content.  This was before “Edit source” was made available… sadly it was fixed pretty quickly and you can no longer do this unless you use the SDLXLIFF Toolkit or work in the SDLXLIFF directly with a text editor.  In the gaming world it happens all the time, possibly the most famous being the original Space Invaders game where the levels got faster and faster as you killed more aliens.  This was apparently not by design but it was the result of the processor speed being limited, so as you killed the aliens the number of graphics reduced and the rendering got faster and faster… now all games behave this way!  Another interesting example in the Linux/Unix world is using a dot at the start of a filename to hide it from view.  This was apparently a bug that was so useful it was never “fixed”.

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Feature rich… it’s overflowing!

~ Paul Filkin ~ 19 Comments

01I first wrote about the Glossary Converter on September 17, 2012… over three years ago.  Not only is it a surprisingly long time ago, but I still meet people at every conference I attend who have never heard of this marvelous little tool, and in some cases never heard of the OpenExchange either.  So when I toyed with the idea of writing an article about Xmas coming early and talking about the OpenExchange and all the goodies inside, part of me couldn’t resist writing about this tool again.  In the three years since it was first released it’s morphed beyond all recognition and today it’s awash with features that belie it’s appearance.

I like to take a little credit for the emergence of this tool because back in 2012 I asked around trying to get someone to create one so that it was straightforward for anyone to create a MultiTerm Glossary from a simple two column spreadsheet… the sort of glossary that most translators use for their day to day needs.  I was over the moon when Gerhard (the developer) was interested and created the tool I wrote about back then.  But I can take no credit whatsoever for what the tool has become today and it’s well worth revisiting!

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Read this and I may have to shoot you!

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01Chapter One

“Gabriela descended from the train, cautiously looking around for signs that she may have been followed. Earlier in the week she’d left arrangements to meet László at the Hannover end of Platform 7, and after three hours travelling in a crowded train to get there was in no mood to find he hadn’t got her message. She walked up the platform and as she got closer could recognise his silhouette even though he was facing the opposite direction. It looked safe, so she continued to make her way towards him, close enough to slip a document into the open bag by his side. She whispered ‘Read this and I may have to shoot you!’ László left without even a glance in her direction, only a quick look down to make sure there was no BOM.”

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A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing;

~ Paul Filkin ~ Leave a comment

01Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

I’m quoting Alexander Pope in 1709, rightly or wrongly, for hitting the nail on the head when it comes to the truly intoxicating mix of language and technology.  A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing and it’s something I know I’ve been guilty of all my life… I learn a little something new and now I’m an expert.  That is of course until I learn a bit more, and then a little more after that, and before I know it I realise I know nothing at all!  Translation technology is great for dropping us all into this trap… Trados user since Trados 5, translator for over 20-years… can handle any type of file.  Falling into this trap is pretty easy in fact, especially when the tools available for translation today take a lot of the effort out of the tasks at hand.  But not everything is what it seems and sometimes it takes a mistake or three to sober us up again!  There’s a reason why well organised and successful translation companies, dealing in all kinds of content, have Project Managers, Translators and Localization Engineers within their midst.

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