Ever since Trados came about one of the most requested features for translators has been merging across hard returns, or paragraph breaks. Certainly for handling the translation it makes a lot of sense to be able to merge fragments of a sentence that should clearly be in one, but despite this it’s never been possible. Why is this? You can be sure this question has come up every year and whilst everyone agrees it would be great to have this capability, Trados has not supported it through the product. The reason for the reluctance is that when you merge a paragraph unit (the name given to translation units separated by a paragraph break) you probably need to be able to decide how this change to the structure of the file should be handled in the target document. Sometimes this might be simple, other times it might not be, and the framework that Trados products use is not designed in a way that supports the ability to alter the look and feel of the target file across every filetype the product can open. Even the release of the Studio suite of products still uses the same basic idea of being able to handle the bilingual files directly rather than importing them into a black box and whilst this does offer many advantages, this problem of merging over paragraph units remains… until now.
Tag: Trados Studio
More power to the elbow… upLIFT
“More power to the elbow”… this is all about getting more from the resources you have already got, and in this case I’m talking about your Translation Memories. In particular I’m talking about enabling them for upLIFT. upLIFT, in case you have not heard about this yet despite all the marketing activity and forum discussions since August this year, is a technology that is being used in SDL Trados Studio 2017 to enable some pretty neat things. I’m not going to devote this article to what upLIFT is all about as Emma Goldsmith has written a really useful article today that does a far better job than I could have done. You can find Emma’s article here, called “SDL Trados studio 2017 : fragment recall and repair“. But a quick summary to get us started is that upLIFT enables things like this:
- fragment matching
- whole Translation Units
- partial Translation Units
- fuzzy match repair
- from fragment matching
- from your termbase
- from Machine Translation
Read this and I may have to shoot you!
Chapter One
“Gabriela descended from the train, cautiously looking around for signs that she may have been followed. Earlier in the week she’d left arrangements to meet László at the Hannover end of Platform 7, and after three hours travelling in a crowded train to get there was in no mood to find he hadn’t got her message. She walked up the platform and as she got closer could recognise his silhouette even though he was facing the opposite direction. It looked safe, so she continued to make her way towards him, close enough to slip a document into the open bag by his side. She whispered ‘Read this and I may have to shoot you!’ László left without even a glance in her direction, only a quick look down to make sure there was no BOM.”
SDLmocha…
I was playing around with livemocha.com which is a free language learning website I came across this weekend… I really like the concept where people with an interest in learning a language, or an interest in helping others learn a language, can come together in an environment where they are provided with the tools to help them satisfy their interest. I even boosted my own score spending a little time correcting the English lessons completed by others… this also made me feel pretty good and I hope the comments were helpful; now I just need to try out the learning part myself which requires more discipline than I have been able to muster to date!!
With a little help from my friends…
Updated to support Studio 2017, also it’s now an sdlplugin rather than a standalone tool, September 2016
… is a theme I’ve used before to describe how easy it is to share resources in the desktop version of Studio because of the open and friendly technology platform used. It’s easy because Studio allows you to take good advantage of the sort of things (maybe even more than a 100 😉) you may already use on a daily basis, like dropbox, or google drive for example. I was talking about what users could do before, so this time I’m really excited to see how we can perhaps extend this idea of sharing and pool the expertise that only a developer can bring to the table so that developers can gain from each others work, and users of the software see what this can achieve as well. Romulus Crisan started this off when he began moving many of the OpenExchange applications he had developed, and some of the older ones as well, into Github as OpenSource projects.
This is a new concept for SDL Language Technologies that was started earlier this year, and whilst we have only seen a few contributions from developers adding their own improvements and paying them back for others to use, I do know that this idea of sharing examples of real applications is starting to pay off, and many developers have been able to progress their own ideas after getting a little inspiration from the work of others. Continue reading “With a little help from my friends…”
Studio 2015, first things first!
In my world you’d have to be on another planet not to know that Studio 2015 was released this week. The release is very good and contains lot’s of new features, many of them translators and project managers have wanted for a long time. In fact even if you did know it was released you might be one of the users who’s still wondering what’s in it, how do you get it and install it, how it affects previous versions, how you migrate your data, how you use your Studio 2014 OpenExchange Apps. etc. Lot’s of practical questions that you might not be able to readily find the answer to. So, first things first! Continue reading “Studio 2015, first things first!”
Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!
Projects, packages, segmented SDLXLIFF files, unsegmented SDLXLIFF files, source files, target files, Translation Memories, Termbases, AutoSuggest Dictionaries… are they buried deep in your computer by Studio without you knowing? Are you really subjected to a message like the one on the left? Sometimes the posts in the technical forums make it seem that way, but I think it might not really be like this, so in this post I want to take a look and see how all these things work. I have discused many of these things in the past here and there, but now seems a good time to consolidate all this into one article and try to explain the workings of Studio with regards to file locations. Let’s start with Projects. Continue reading “Maybe it’s buried where you put it!!”
Adjusting the view…
It’s funny how questions seem to appear like London buses… you don’t get any and then they all come at once! More often than not it’s very specific questions that behave this way too. So you don’t see them for ages and then you get the same question in a number of places for a day or two and then it goes quiet again! One of the topics that falls into this category is changing the view in the Editor. By this I mean the colour of the text, the font types or the background you’re working on. All these things can be changed in Studio to make it easier if you’re dealing with documents that don’t display well and you want to work in wysiwyg mode.
Since the release of Studio 2009 the things I’ll cover here have always been available through the options, but now that we have the ribbon in Studion 2014 it’s even easier. To make this easier to see (hopefully!) I addressed where the options are in this article and then I recorded a short video so you can see in one go how these work in practice. This is the text I’m working with, “theview“, which is obviously a deliberately prepared file containing some things that can make it very difficult to read and work with when working in the default view and you can download it to have a play if you like. Continue reading “Adjusting the view…”
The ins and outs of AutoSuggest
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!
AutoSuggest comes from a number of different sources, some out of the box with every version of the product, and some requiring a specific license. The ability to create resources for AutoSuggest is also controlled by license for some things, but not for all. When you purchase Studio, any version at all, you have the ability to use the AutoSuggest resources out of the box from three places: Continue reading “The ins and outs of AutoSuggest”
The future is bright… it's not Java!
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!
Continue reading “The future is bright… it's not Java!”