The ability to work with comments in a managed localisation process is an important part of communication between translator, reviewer, project manager and the end client… and not necessarily in that order! Comments are used to clarify misunderstandings in the source text, questioning completed translations you’ve been told to ignore that just don’t look right, suggesting improved terminology, explaining why you translated something in a particular way, clarifying why you changed a translation in review, providing additional context from the client, adding notes to the target file for an in country review, they could even be comments that are just there to be translated, or ignored… the list of reasons could be pretty long and so could the comments. So it’s very important to be able to keep them linked to the context so it’s easy to deal with the referred text, and also to be able to get to the comments quickly when they might only relate to a couple of segments in three files that are part of a five hundred file project nested within a complex folder structure.
So this post is going to deal with two things… first of all the places where comments can be used in Studio out of the box and secondly a very neat OpenExchange plugin that I reckon many project managers, and translators, have wished for and didn’t know it was there already! Continue reading “Comments… chapter and verse!”
On two previous occasions I’ve been lucky enough to attend the 
The AutoSuggest feature in Studio has been around since the launch of Studio 2009 and based on the questions I see from time to time I think it’s a feature that could use a little explanation on what it’s all about. In simple terms it’s a mechanism for prompting you as you type with suggested target text that is based on the source text of the document you are translating. So sometimes it might be a translation of some or all of the text in the source segment, and sometimes it might be providing an easy way to replicate the source text into the target. This is done by you entering a character via the keyboard and then Studio suggests suitable text that can be applied with a single keystroke. In terms of productivity this is a great feature and given how many other translation tools have copied this in one form or another I think it’s clear it really works too!
I’ve been talking about this image for around a year in various presentations where we talked about the plans for Studio 2014. As of today to be able to finally present it as a fait accompli feels good… in fact it feels wonderful! Whilst this is a good headline it’s not everything you get with SP2 and there are some other things in here well worth a mention. I’m not going to cover them all but I will pick out the headliners that I’m pretty sure people have been asking for. But let’s start with terminology because after nearly 8-years of reading about Java problems, and that’s just my time with SDL and the Trados based software, this is a historical moment worth relishing. Quite a nice 30-yr birthday present for Trados too!
Best practice! This is a phrase I’ve had a love/hate relationship with over the course of my entire career… or maybe it’s just a love to hate! The phrase is something that should perhaps be called “Best Suggestions” and not “Best Practice” because all too often I think it’s used to describe the way someone wants you to work as opposed to anything that represents the views of a majority of users over a long period of time, or anything that takes account the way different people want to work. In fact with new technology how can it be “Best Practice” when it hasn’t been around long enough in the first place? I think for a clearly defined and well established process then “Best Practice” has it’s place… but otherwise it’s often the easy answer to a more complex problem, or just a problem that is considered too hard to address.
… because the head is listening!
