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: Trados Studio
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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Export for External Review – a detour
***Updated 24 June 2017***
When Studio 2009 was launched one of the first applications on the new SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) was the SDLXLIFF Converter for Microsoft Office. This was an excellent application created by Patrik Mazanek that paved the way for some of the new features you see in Studio 2014 today.
The idea back then was born out of a requirement to export the contents of an sdlxliff file to Microsoft Excel but with no re-import to update the translation. If you were an SDLX user you’d probably recognise that this was something you could do in SDLX, and the request that this would be possible in Studio was coming from many SDLX users.
Déjà Vu, another translation tool, had this concept of “External Views” where you could export the contents of your translation into a couple of formats, one of them being an RTF document formatted as a table containing the source and target text. But the neat thing about this was that you could reimport the RTF and update your translation with whatever edits had been made in the RTF. This was very cool, and as far as I’m aware no other tool had this capability at the time, short of working in Microsoft Word on a Bilingual DOC in the first place. So when Patrik produced his first build of the converter and announced that he had included a similar capability using DOCX in addition to the Excel export this was very exciting!
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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.
Why do we need custom XML filetypes?
My son asked me how my day had gone and before I could answer he said in a slightly mocking tone “blah blah blah… XML… blah… XML … blah blah”. Clearly I spend too much time outside of work talking about work, and clearly his perception of what I do is tainted towards the more technical aspects I like the most! Aside from the note to self “stop talking about this stuff after I leave the office!” it got me thinking about why I probably think about XML as much as I apparently do and how I could help others avoid the very same compulsion! I’ve written articles in the past about how to use regular expressions in Studio, and an article on using XPath, and I’ve probably touched on handling XML files from time to time in various articles. But I don’t think I’ve ever explained how to create an XML filetype in the first place, or why you would want to… after all Studio has default filetypes for XML and this is just another filetype that the CAT tool should be able to handle… right?
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.
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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.
Those Project Settings!
A couple of years ago I wrote an article on the SDL blog explaining the differences between Project Settings and Global Settings. Things have changed a little now, although the principle is the same, and Studio 2014 has a different interface so I thought, given the number of times this still comes up, that I’d refresh the article a little and have another go at making this clear. If you are still using Studio 2009/2011 then the original article might still be helpful – Studio… Global or Project Settings?
If you’re using Studio 2014 then here’s the update….