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Tag Archives: translation memory

Segacious segmentation…

March 20, 2018
CAT Tools
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Using segmentation rules on your Translation Memory is something most users struggle with from time to time; but not just the creation of the rules which are often just a question of a few regular expressions and well covered in posts like this from Nora Diaz and others.  Rather how to ensure they apply when you want them, particularly when using the alignment module or retrofit in SDL Trados Studio where custom segmentation rules are being used.  Now I’m not going to take the credit for this article as I would not have even considered writing it if Evzen Polenka had not pointed out how Studio could be used to handle the segmentation of the target language text… something I wasn’t aware was even possible until yesterday.  So all credit to Evzen here for seeing the practical use of this feature and sharing his knowledge.  This is exactly what I love about the community, everyone can learn something and in practical terms many of SDLs customers certainly know how to use the software better than some of us in SDL do!

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Spaces and Units…

September 26, 2017
CAT Tools, Studio Tips, Useful tools
13 Comments

The handling of numbers and units in Studio is always something that raises questions and over the years I’ve tackled it in various articles.  But one thing I don’t believe I have specifically addressed, and I do see this rear its head from time to time, is how to handle the spaces between a number and its unit.  So it thought it might be useful to tackle it in a simple article so I have a reference point when asked this question, and perhaps it’ll be useful for you at the same time.

I have a background in Civil Engineering so when I think about this topic I naturally fall back to “The International System of Units (SI)” which has a clear definition on this topic:

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More power to the elbow… upLIFT

November 17, 2016
CAT Tools, Useful tools
14 Comments

001“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

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Recording Translation Memory metadata

January 14, 2016
CAT Tools, Studio Tips, Useful tools
10 Comments

001Back in July 2013 I wrote an article called “Fields and Attributes in Studio” which was all about adding different types of metadata to your Translation Units every time you confirmed a segment to make it easier, or more complex depending on what you’ve done, to manage your Translation Memories.  If you’re not sure what I mean by this take a look at the article as I won’t repeat a lot of that here… at least I’ll try not to!  This capability in Studio is probably quite familiar to most users of the old SDL Trados 2007 and earlier, and was even essential to some extent because you could only use a single Translation Memory at a time.

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Bilingual Excel… and stuff!

September 28, 2015
CAT Tools, Studio Tips
42 Comments

Copyright Rudall30 | Dreamstime.comI’ve written about how to handle bilingual excel files, csv files and tab delimited files in the past.  In fact one of the most popular articles I have ever written was this one “Creating a TM from a Termbase, or Glossary, in SDL Trados Studio” in July 2012, over three years ago.  Despite writing it I’m still struggling a little with why this would be useful other than if you have been given a glossary to translate or proofread perhaps… but nonetheless it doesn’t really matter what I think because clearly it was useful!

So, why am I bringing this up three years later?  Well, the recent launch of Studio 2015 introduced a new filetype that seems worthy of some discussion.  It’s a Bilingual Excel filetype that allows you to handle excel files with bilingual content in a similar fashion to the way it used to be possible in the previous article.  There are some interesting differences though, and notably the first would be that you won’t lose any formatting in the excel file which is something that happened if you had to handle files like these as CSV or Tab Delimited Text.  That in itself mught be interesting for some users because this was the first thing I’d hear when suggesting the CSV filetype as a solution for handling files of this nature.  Most of the time I don’t think this is really an issue but for those occasions where it is this is a good point.

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Converting Wordfast resources… out with the old!

March 2, 2015
CAT Tools, Studio Tips
16 Comments

01This article is all about out with the old and in with the new in more ways than one!  In the last week I have been asked three times about converting Wordfast translation memories and Wordfast glossaries into resources that could be used in Studio and MultiTerm.  Normally, for the TXT translation memories I get I would go the traditional route and use a copy of Wordfast to export as TMX.  Then it’s simple, but what if you don’t have Wordfast or don’t want to have to try and use it?  Wordfast glossaries are new territory for me as I’d never looked at these before.  But on a quick check it looked as though they are also TXT files so I decided to take a better look.

Before I get into the detail I’ll just add that I’m not very familiar with Wordfast so I’m basing my suggestions on the small number of files I have received, or created, and the process I used to convert them to formats more useful for a Studio user.  I’ll start with the glossaries as this is where I got the idea from,  I better explain my opening statement too… this is because after I did an initial conversion using the Glossary Converter from the SDL Openexchange I was asked to explain how this would work with MultiTerm Convert.  This of course made me think about the old versus the new… I wouldn’t compare Wordfast and Studio in this way at all 😉 Read More

Working with shared resources…

December 8, 2014
CAT Tools, Studio Tips
35 Comments

001One of the reasons SDL Trados Studio, and Trados before that, has been such a popular choice for translators and small teams is the ability to work with shared resources.  Many Translation Environments require the use of a server solution in order to share work and if you only do this occasionally, or if you work with a couple of colleagues, then whilst the server solutions can offer a lot of additional capabilities they are often over the top for simple sharing needs and may even require you signing up for things you may not be interested in.

Sharing resources at a simple level is pretty straightforward with Studio because they are mostly file based.  So you have a Translation Memory (*.sdltm), and a termbase (*.sdltb) for example, both of which can be accessed by several translators at the same time.  You may well have read that several times just to make sure this is what I actually said!  If this is possible then why do we sell server solutions at all, as we have SDL GroupShare, SDL WorldServer and SDL TMS?  The reason of course is that sharing a filebased resource like this has many limitations and it’s not a solution for serious Projects.  Limitations like these that are detailed in KB Article #2550 in the SDL Knowledgebase:

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