SDL Trados Studio is up to Studio 2017 which is the fifth major version since Studio 2009 was first released some eight years ago now. During these eight years I think it’s fair to say we have seen less and less requirement for the old Trados features, yet despite that we do see some interesting tools making an appearance in the SDL AppStore that mirror some of the old functionality. In fact some of these apps are quite recent and seem to have been driven by requests from users who miss some of the things you could do in Trados but still cannot do in the out of the box Studio solution. So I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of these apps and if you are one of those translators who remembers all the good things Trados could do… and can I say forgotten the things it could not… then perhaps you’ll find these apps useful!
tags
Tackling a translators graffiti!
“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.
Handling taggy Excel files in Studio…
By taggy files I mean “embedded xml or html content” that is written into an Excel file alongside translatable text. In the last article I wrote I documented a method sometimes used by people to handle tagged content in a Word file… funnily enough I came across a Word file containing the XML components of an IDML file today and I guess it must have been prepared in a very similar way judging by the enormous number of tags using the tw4win style to hide them when opened by any SDL Trados version! Proof for me that this practice is sadly alive and well. But I digress… because this time I want to cover how to handle a similar problem when you find HTML or XML tagged content in an Excel file. This crops up quite a bit on ProZ so I thought it might be better to document it once and for all so I have something else to refer to in addition to the Studio help.
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A clean editing environment?
I love to see technology being used to help provide a clean environment for us to live in and to bring up our children. This topic regularly comes up in our household as my wife and son support the ethos behind this ideal wholeheartedly… actually I may even be understating this point a little!
But this isn’t the clean environment I want to talk about today. I’m interested in a clean editing environment when you use a translation tool.
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What happened to my QuickInserts?
With the release of Studio 2011 SP2R a few changes were made to the QuickInsert toolbar so that space could be made available on the toolbar for functions that were thought to be more useful to most users… such as custom QuickInserts for example:
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Simple guide to working with Tags in Studio
There are a couple or three ways to add tags into your translation using Studio, and they can be applied using the mouse or using the keyboard. This article is just a simple introduction to using tags in Studio.
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