When I used to study maths as a boy my Father, who was an engineer and very straightforward in his views, always used to say 100% was the best you could give. It meant everything, so there was no more. Any talk of giving 101% for example wouldn’t be entertained for a second because you clearly hadn’t given 100% in the first place. It wasn’t possible and anyone who said otherwise was probably in marketing or sales!
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Tag: translation memory
If I knew then what I know now!
People often tell me that using Studio is complicated. Other people, who have been working with Studio tell me it’s actually quite logical once you get your mind around it. I clearly lean towards the latter and whilst I always try hard to see the difficulties the conclusion I always come back to, rightly or wrongly, is that many users who used Trados in the past expect Studio to be similar and then struggle when they discover it’s not.
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Translating Literature…
As I’m writing this I can hear the cry of “Use a CAT tool for translating literature, or prose… no way!” This is a discussion I see from time to time and there are some pretty strong feelings on this subject for a number of reasons. One of the reasons given is that you cannot take this type of material sentence by sentence and just do a literal translation. Other reasons may be more detail around this same point, and also touch on the need for a creative flow because this type of translation requires a very creative writing style rather than literally translating the words.
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My favourite OpenExchange apps in 2012…
When I started writing this blog the first article I wrote was about the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore). I thought I’d start this year off by sharing my favorite applications … my favourite FREE applications. We had a fair few of these over the course of the year but I’ll pick out six that I think are well worth a look. In no particular order (well… alphabetical order) these six are:
- Glossary Converter
- Package Reader
- SDLTmReverseLangs
- SDLXLIFF Compare
- SDLXLIFF to Legacy Converter
- Terminjector
Working with placeables that are not automatically recognised
A few articles ago I spent time explaining how to use the TermInjector OpenExchange application from Tommi Nieminen which allows you to create dynamic variables based on regular expressions.
It is a pretty complex article and I had to reread it a couple of times to get my head around it again, and I needed expert help from Tommi, but it was worth the effort because this tool could prove to be invaluable for users who regularly have to deal with numbers in a document that are not recognised by Studio, or currencies that are not used in a way that Studio can automatically localize them for you.
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"Please translate this short paragraph and return by email"
These “quick” jobs are never that quick if you want to make sure you add the translation to your Translation Memory, or leverage the work you’ve done before. You need to copy the text into a word document, or similar, then open the document in your favourite translation environment, translate the document, save the target translation, open the document and copy the text, finally paste it back into your email to return to your client.
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More useful resources… and multilingual TMs
In October 2012 the European Union (EU) agency ‘European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’ (ECDC) released a translation memory into the public domain containing 25 languages… the 23 official European languages plus Icelandic and Norwegian. This comes in a similar format to the DGT Multilingual Translation Memory of the Acquis Communautaire that I described here in this article but this time it’s much smaller… so we can look at how to handle a single TMX file that contains all of these languages in one file using Studio.
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Working with Variable Lists
Updated January 2015 : Also possible, and easier, to use the Variable Manager from the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) for this.
I mentioned in a previous post that it wasn’t possible to import long variable lists into a Studio Translation Memory using the desktop version of Studio. You can do this with GroupShare, but the ability to do this in the desktop version is a work in progress.
Well that wasn’t quite true and as I’ve been preparing for some roadshows and events that are coming up this month I figured out a simple workaround using SDL Trados 2007 Suite.
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