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!
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Tag: terminology
The ATA55 in Chicago and the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore)… which apps?
This year at the ATA in Chicago all the tool vendors who attended the event were given the opportunity to run a little “Tool Bar” where attendees could come and ask any question they liked. This was a great initiative, and despite the first day where we were perhaps mistakenly tucked away under the arctic air conditioning in the corner where nobody could see us, I think they were very well attended. Certainly from an SDL perspective we were non-stop from the moment we started till the end of each day. It was a great experience for us as we get to meet lots of new users and many we only speak to by email, or on twitter, and I hope it was an equally great experience for anyone who attended.
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IATE, the last word… maybe!
By now I think we’ve discussed the import of an IATE TBX into CAT tools as much as we can without going over old ground again. But if you’re reading this and don’t know what I’m talking about then perhaps review these two articles first:
What a whopper! – which is all about the difficulties of handling a TBX the size of the one that is available from the IATE download site.
A few bilingual TBX resources – which is a short article sharing a few of the TBX files I extracted for a few users who were having problems dealing with the 2.2Gb, 8 million term whopper we started with.
So why am I bringing this up again? Well I do like to have the last word… don’t we all… but this time I wanted to share the work of Henk Sanderson who has put a lot of time and effort into breaking the IATE TBX into bite sized chunks and at the same time cleaning them up so they can be more useful to a translator. I also wanted to share the successful import of the complete original TBX from IATE directly into MultiTerm Server:
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Talk to the hand…
… because the head is listening!
In my last article I wrote about the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ, and the idea they had of attempting to elicit questions prior to the event through their Conference Bulletin Board. This was a really great idea because it gives the tool vendors the opportunity to focus their presentations and workshops on the things users really want to know about.
There can be nothing worse, for an experienced user, than turning up to an hours presentation and listening to the same presentation on how to do the basics with a translation tool that you hear every time you make the effort to improve your knowledge.
So the idea of raising questions from people who wish to attend prior to the event is a really good one because not only does it mean the content should be more relevant to the things users really want to know, but it also gives the vendor time to prepare for any really tricky questions that might otherwise have to be taken off line. So I thought I’d use this article to do two things.
- Shamelessly promote a couple of conferences I’m attending this year where there are opportunities to ask questions
- Get some questions!!
FIT XXth World Congress – Berlin
This week I attended the FIT XXth World Congress in Berlin hosted by the BDÜ where I got to meet many translators and technology specialists who I’ve only spoken to via email or through the community forums and twitter… that was really great! It was my kind of event, hundreds of translators… thousands even… and lots of interesting and taxing questions about how to use Studio and MultiTerm. In many ways it was similar to my favourite annual event which is the ATA event… the main difference between the two for me would be the lack of air conditioning which you’d never see in an American event and maybe the lack of facilities for the tools vendors as I had to resort to running my 90 minute session with my laptop balanced on my knees and displaying on a large TV screen that was really too small for this type of a workshop. Hopefully if these sessions are repeated the preparation will be improved and perhaps the scheduling too so that more people could attend. The ATA events are always really well attended, so I guess this was another difference between the two as the room provided wasn’t much bigger than my hotel room… in fact I’m ready to do a deal if the opportunity arises in Brisbane in 2017 😉 (Thank you Hans for correcting me about the date in the comments!)
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A few bilingual TBX resources
Since writing my last article on handling large TBX files I have extracted a few TBX files as language pairs only from the very large TBX provided by IATE and thought I would share them here for others to use. If you want a specific language pair from the 25 languages within the IATE TBX then drop a note into the comments. I can’t guarantee I’ll do it quickly, but as the process is fairly straightforward I will add them from time to time.
All of the files below are extracted from the following original: Download IATE, European Union, [2014]
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What a whopper!
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!
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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.
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Multitudinous terminology!
Why is MultiTerm a separate program, I can do exactly the same thing with another CAT tool? This is a fairly common question, and it has a very good answer too. It’s because MultiTerm is multitudinous! That is, it can be extended by you to provide a variety of termbases, so many in fact that you could probably create a structure to match anything you liked and you won’t be shoe horned into a fixed structure. As I thought about this the Penrose steps came into my mind. They don’t necessarily have anything to do with terminology solutions for translators, but these steps don’t behave in a known manner either and my mind enjoyed the nonsensical link! I also liked this word multitudinous; partly because of the obvious use of the prefix multi- but also because the use of a word like this suggests complexity to me, and in many ways this is what users think when the subject of MultiTerm comes up.
Is MultiTerm really that hard to learn?
Something we see some users of SDL products saying, and often non-users even promoting, is that MultiTerm is a complex product and very hard to use. Is this true? Well if I’m honest there probably isn’t any smoke without fire… but perhaps this is really all down to a lack of good documentation with plenty of examples to explain how to do things? Or perhaps this is down to converting spreadsheets or other formats into MultiTerm format; so specific operations rather than simply being able to use MultiTerm itself? Certainly MultiTerm Convert, which you need to use in order to create a termbase from another format can be quite complicated if you don’t understand a little about the structure of a termbase in MultiTerm. If you only want a simple glossary the entire process is much simplified thanks to the Glossary Converter available free through the Open Exchange… but is this enough and does this represent a majority of usecases?
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