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.
It’s funny, but when I think of “variables” I think of something that changes… a bit like the Transformer robots my son used to play with. So when I look at how they are used in Studio, and in Trados before that, the name doesn’t really make sense at first!
The launch of SDL Trados Studio 2014 this month brings with it the news that SDL Trados 2007 Suite will no longer be supported from the end of this year. I don’t think this will come as a surprise to anyone as SDL had already ceased to support SDL Trados 2007 since the end of 2012, and with the releases of the 2009, 2011 and now 2014 versions of SDL Trados Studio it’s inevitable that the 2007 Suite version will follow suit.
In the unlikely event you’ve been visiting another planet over the last few weeks, you may not have noticed 
If you were a user of SDL Trados 2007 or earlier you will probably be familiar with the concept of “Fields and Attributes”… if you are a new user to this kind of technology then you may not be. But in both cases I hope this article will provide a little bit of useful information on how they are used in Studio.
So now let’s flip the process on its head!
A strange title, and a stranger image with a pair of zebras and a road, but in keeping with the 
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!
I believe this interesting quote can be found in “Prometheus Bound”, a play by a Greek dramatist called Aeschylus. I haven’t read the play, but I like the quote, and it certainly lends itself to the importance of memory… even when we refer to a Translation Memory rather than your own built in capability. It’s because your Translation Memory is such an important asset to you that you need to regularly maintain it, and also reuse it wherever possible to expand the benefits you get from it.
English spoken in Australia, Belize, Canada, Caribbean, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Malaysia, New Zealand, Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom, United States and Zimbabwe. Also known as en-AU, en-BZ, en-CA, en-029, en-IN, en-IE, en-JM, en-MY, en-NZ, en-PH, en-SG, en-ZA, en-TT, en-GB, en-US and en-ZW. These are the language codes used by Microsoft in their