Growing a product range, buying new companies, being bought yourself, adopting new technology, reorganising etc… all of this creates significant change across an organisation that often feels as though you’re on a merry-go-round where things change as you go around until you’re back to where you started and then it all changes again. I can only imagine that feeling applies to customers and employees alike as each revolution strives to be better than the last, easier to navigate, meaningful in its purpose and full of the promise of success once properly implemented… and yet slightly confusing at the same time!
Tag: Passolo
What’s in a name?
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
In Shakespeare’s soliloquy, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet isn’t allowed to be with Romeo because his family name is Montague… sworn enemies of the Capulet family. Of course she doesn’t care about his name, he’d still be everything she wanted irrespective of what he was called. The rose would still smell as sweet irrespective of what it was called. “Trados”, “SDL” and “RWS” have endured, or enjoyed, a feuding history as competitors in the same industry. Our names are our brand and now that they’re changing do we still smell as sweet? Sadly things don’t end well for poor Romeo and Juliet… but in our story we fare a little better!
The versatile regex based text filter in Trados Studio…
After attending the xl8cluj conference in Romania a few weeks ago, which was an excellent, and very technical conference for translators, I thought it was about time I wrote an article around the things you can do with the Regular Expression Delimited Text filter since it is so useful for solving all kinds of tasks related to text based files that don’t fit any of the out of the box formats available in the product. Files such as software string files and csv files are common examples of where understanding how to work with this customisable file type can yield many benefits. So this article is food for thought and a few things that might be helpful to you in the future. It’s also pretty long (I’m not kidding!), so maybe grab a cup of coffee before you start to go through it!
Continue reading “The versatile regex based text filter in Trados Studio…”
Who’s up for a little bit of Passolo?
I can remember being asked in early 2007 to organise a report on the benefits of Passolo compared to other tools that also supported visual software localization. In the same year, shortly after that, SDL purchased Pass Engineering and SDL Passolo was born. At the time I didn’t know a lot about Trados Workbench or SDLX either as I had a very different role, and I only started getting interested in the technology we (and our competitors) use in 2008 just prior to the release of SDL Trados Studio 2009 the following year. In all that time since then, until a few months ago, I’m ashamed to say I’ve never taken more than a cursory look at it. It’s taken a course I’m doing at the moment at the University of Strasbourg to really bring home the value. One of the modules on this course is “Localization of Graphical User Interfaces” and under some expert tutorage I’m plugging many of the gaps I have in my knowledge of this industry. I’m even putting it to good use in my daily work!
A business resolution for 2019…
There are three things that have stood out for me this year. The first is how much support SDL have provided to their users to make sure they are able to work successfully with their investment. The second is how little many users are aware of this, and the third is just how many users have used Trados for a decade or more and were not aware of what a support & maintenance contract can bring you. This last one has been the biggest surprise to me as I’ve spoken to people who thought a support contract was more than the cost of the software; to people who thought it was support only and to people who didn’t know SDL provided any support at all! So, one of my resolutions for 2019 will be to try and make sure that all our users are more aware of how to get help, even if they don’t want to purchase a support & maintenance contract. So, I’ll cover these things:
- Support & Maintenance Contract
- SDL Community
- The Customer Experience Team
- The SDL AppStore Team
- The SDL Marketing Team
- Training
- Customer Experience Program
Cutie Cat?
A nice picture of a cutie cat… although I’m really looking for a cutie linguist and didn’t think it would be appropriate to share my vision for that! More seriously the truth isn’t as risqué… I’m really after Qt Linguist. Now maybe you come across this more often than I do so the solutions for dealing with files from the Qt product, often shared as *.TS files, may simply role off your tongue. I think the first time I saw them I just looked at the format with a text editor, saw they looked pretty simple and created a custom filetype to deal with them in Studio 2009. Since that date I’ve only been asked a handful of times so I don’t think about this a lot… in fact the cutie cat would get more attention! But in the last few weeks I’ve been asked four times by different people and I’ve seen a question on proZ so I thought it may be worth looking a little deeper.
The JSON files…
Update Sept 2016: You can find an excellent filetype plugin for JSON files on the SDL AppStore if you don’t want to tackle this yourself.
The JSON files… not really related to Jason Voorhees of course, but for some users who have received these file types for translation the problem of how to handle them and extract the appropriate text may well seem like an episode of Friday the 13th! I’ve seen a few threads in the last couple of weeks sharing various methods for handling these files ranging from opening them in MSWord and applying a hidden style to the parts you don’t want, to asking vendors to create variations on javascript filetypes. But I think Studio offers a much simpler mechanism for handling them out of the box.
So what are these file types and how can you handle them with Studio 2014, or even 2009/2011? In this article I’m going to look at the regex filetype as this is very well suited to files like this, but before we get into that detail let’s take a look at what they are. Continue reading “The JSON files…”