I love this cartoon with the husband and wife fishing on a calm weekend off.
“Honey, I got a big one on!”
She’s hooked a whopper and he casually responds in the way he always does when she occasionally catches a fish on Sunday morning.
“Yes dear, uh huh…”
The equipment they’ve got, from the boat to the fishing rods, is all perfectly suitable for their usual weekend activities but hopelessly inadequate for handling something like this! Little do they know that the whopper under the surface is going to give them a little more trouble when they try to bring him on board!
Continue reading “What a whopper!”
Tag: OpenExchange
Great ideas!
This week SDL launched an OpenExchange Developers competition. Actually it was launched a month or so ago but the number of downloads for new applications started counting at of the beginning of this week. The key dates are these:
19 March to 31 July Apps can be submitted
1 June to 31 July Downloads counted
Early August Winners announced (Actual results are here)
Over the last month or so I’ve been lucky enough to see some of the things the developers are creating and there are really some fantastic ideas and apps in progress. Most of the apps for this competition will be free for Studio users, but you will have to be using Studio 2014 to take advantage of them. This is because the competition is all about using the integration API in Studio 2014, so developers can create new ribbons, new views, new ribbon groups etc. This allows for anything from a simple feature to a full blown application, and I’m seeing some fantastic examples of both.
Upgrading your leverage
I’m onto the subject of leverage from upgraded Translation Memories with this post, encouraged by the release of a new (and free) application on the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) called the TM Optimizer. Before we get into the geeky stuff I want to elaborate on what I mean by the word “leverage” because I’m not sure everyone reading this will know.
Let’s assume you have been a translator for years (English to Chinese), and you always worked with Microsoft Word and Translators Workbench. TagEditor came along, but you didn’t like that too much so you kept working with Word and Workbench. It had its problems, but until Studio came along and in particular Studio 2014, you were still quite happy to work the same way you had for years. But now you wanted to buy a new computer, and you really liked the things you’ve been reading about Studio 2014 so you took a leap and purchased a license of Studio. The first thing you want to do is upgrade your old Workbench Translation Memories so they could be reused in Studio. You’ve got around 60,000 Translation Units in one specialised Translation Memory and you really need to be able to have this available as soon as possible to help with a job you know is just around the corner. You upgrade the Translation Memory and this worked perfectly!
Yanks versus Brits… linguistically speaking!
The debate over who’s right, and what’s the correct spelling… localization or localisation… will undoubtedly go on for a long time, unless you ask my Mother who knows the British are right of course! I always lean towards the British spelling, probably the result of my upbringing, and when asked I always take the British point of view.
There are many Americanisms that have crept into our everyday speech, and if I’m really honest I use them too! If I’m even more honest I think I always used them and didn’t even know they were American English and not British English. The “z’s” are easy, but who gets cypher and cipher the wrong way around, disk and disc, gaol and jail or even meter and metre. No doubt there are those amongst us who would never get them wrong (my Mother would never get them wrong) but I think there are plenty of words like this that have become, dare I say it… interoperable! But what happens if you don’t want to get them wrong, and if you always want to stick to American English or British English? In our business this is often an important distinction, so with that introduction let’s take a quick look at how you could manage something like this using MultiTerm and Studio.
Continue reading “Yanks versus Brits… linguistically speaking!”
Unclean… who thought of that?
I spent the weekend at my Mothers house the week before last and was digging around looking for photographs of myself when I was the same age as my son. I found a few… a few I wouldn’t share with anyone else but my son! What was I thinking with the baggy trousers and platform shoes…!
I also found some old Army pictures including these two taken during my basic training, which did an excellent job of shaking me out of my baggy trousers and platform shoes! Also provided me with the most tenuous link yet into the translation environment because I wanted to write about clean and unclean files. I don’t know who came up with this terminology, but if I think about it, the description probably fits quite well. But the first time I heard it I’m sure something like these photos would have been closer to mind!
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.
You only need a key!
Why is the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) called the OpenExchange?
If you weren’t familiar with SDL and the OpenExchange initiative then perhaps the name suggests it could be a platform of some kind that supports an open exchange of information or tools to help manage the open exchange of data or processes that are not supported out of the box in the core products. Maybe you might also think that the word Open could refer to some kind of opensource facility?
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!