square pegs in round holes…

01It’s all about the termbase definition when you want to merge termbases, or import data into MultiTerm termbases.  The XDT… otherwise known as the MultiTerm Termbase Definition file is the key to being able to ensure you are not trying to knock square pegs into round holes!  I’ve written in the past about the flexibility of MultiTerm and it’s this flexibility that can make it tricky for new users when they try to merge their collections of termbases together, or add to their data by importing a file from a colleague.

So what do we mean by definition?  Let’s think about keys as I think this is quite a good analogy… the four keys in the image on the right will all open a lock, but they won’t all open the same lock.  If you want one of these keys to open another lock then you need to change its shape, or it’s “definition”, to be able to open the lock.  A termbase definition works in a similar way because MultiTerm is flexible enough to support you creating your own lock.  That lock might be the same as someone else’s, but theirs could also have a different number of pins and tumblers which means your key won’t fit.

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Two heads are better than one…

001… and hundreds or thousands of heads are better than two!!

I wrote an article a little while back called “Vote now… or have no say!” which was a follow up to the SDL AppStore competition SDL ran for a few months.  I wanted to remind everyone to go and vote if they wanted to have an opportunity to see an app developed that would be useful for them.  Well the competition is over now and we have a winner, so now we can move onto the task of creating it.

The winning idea from Marta, a Spanish freelance translator, was the “Quick Wordcount” idea and we have encouraged all users to contribute to this so it’s as useful as as we can make it for as many users as possible whilst ensuring we deliver the intent of the original idea.

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The spelling & grammar antidote!

002Over the last year or so I’ve been asked by quite a few translators whether SDL Trados Studio supported using Antidote as a spelling and grammar tool.  To be honest I’d never even heard of them but duly looked them up and discovered that this great sounding name for a correction tool was a plugin for Word and various other applications aimed mainly at French speakers, although they do offer a “Module Anglais”.  They also have an API, but it’s not made public on their website… so this is where our fun starts!

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Vote now… or have no say!

001This year seems to be the time our voices can be heard.  There’s been some pretty big decisions on the table already this year that have produced some very surprising results.  Brexit… who knew the majority of people in the United Kingdom would vote to leave the European Union.  Who knew it would be called Brexit… guess UKexit  was too hard to pronounce!  Who knew Donald Trump would become the Republican Presidential nominee; who knew Bernie Sanders would not fare so well for the Democrats?  If you live in these countries then these were all big decisions that you may have had a hand in even if you didn’t vote.  If you’re unhappy with the result, you should have voted; if you think now they were bad decisions then perhaps more could have been done to help ensure you were better informed?

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Tackling a translators graffiti!

001a“Tags” are something we normally like to avoid, whether it’s graffiti or documents prepared for translation in a CAT tool,  and you can find articles and forum threads all over the internet about how to avoid them.  But what if you want them… the ones in a CAT tool?  Let’s say you receive a project from your client in a package, and they didn’t prepare the files as well as you would have liked, leaving you to deal with strings you’d rather have protected as tags, or even tags you don’t want to have to tackle at all.  In a nutshell, if you’re using Studio you’re stuffed!  You can prepare the files again as you like (possibly), translate them in your own project, and then pre-translate the real project afterwards from your TM, correcting any tag differences before returning the package to your client.

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Spot the difference!

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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Managing your SDL Plugins…

001The SDL Appstore is growing!  At the time of writing this article there are 161 apps on the store and over 220 thousand downloads from our users.  This is quite impressive and we are still only getting started as the number of APIs available for developers increases.  At the moment, in Studio alone we have APIs that allow a developer to do these sorts of things:

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Committing the cardinal sin…

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

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

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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