This year at the Spring Trados Roadshows the emphasis was firmly placed upon education. Almost all the presentations were based on providing translators, project managers, localization engineers etc. with great material to help them as they work with the Trados toolsets.
I had a few presentations at this event and decided it might be useful to post a few of them here, especially the ones that might help with some of the common filetype questions we see in the communities from time to time.
So I’m starting with this one… which is intended to be an introduction to XML for anyone working with Trados Studio who might be a bit of a beginner when it comes to handling files of this nature. It’s a very short blog post… for me… but I hope the 40 minute video will make up for it 😉 The structure of the video is based around what you need to understand to be able to use the XML filetype in Trados Studio and covers these topics:
- What is XML?
- An explanation of elements, attributes and CDATA
- What makes an XML file invalid and how to troubleshoot it
- And lastly a demo of how to create your XML filetype in Trados Studio
So don’t forget… this isn’t intended to be for experienced users, and I hope it’ll be helpful for anyone venturing into the realm of XML translation.
Length: 41.23 minutes
And last but not least… if you have never attended the Trados Roadshows before, or if you just missed the notifications, you can register for the Autumn Trados Roadshow already… they’ll take place in October but there’s nothing like being prepared!
Using stylesheets to enhance the translators experience when working with XML files can be very helpful and sometimes essential. It allows you to pull details from the XML and display them in a preview pane so that the translator has more context around the translatable text. It can also provide a mechanism for displaying text that you don’t want extracted from the XML for translation at all. This is nothing new of course and localisation engineers and experienced translators have been doing this for years. In fact I’ve even 
If you’ve never come across Microsoft Publisher before then here’s a neat explanation from wikipedia.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
I ran a beginners and an advanced workshop at the ATA56 pre-conference day in Miami this year. A really fun day for me as we start the day with no specific agenda or pre-defined course and then try to shape the session to suit the needs of the attendees. The beginner tends to be a little more prescribed, to start off with at least, and the intention is to try and cover the basics of how Studio and MultiTerm work.
My favourite conference by far is the ATA… and not just because the location changes every year and it’s always somewhere fantastic! This year was in Miami and the location was no exception… a great choice and huge numbers of translators interested in translation technology and how they can get more from it. My own involvement at these conferences is always very satisfying because I get to spend the full conference speaking to people, from the moment the doors open until they close, about technology. This year kept me particularly busy with two pre-conference sessions, mostly on Studio and MultiTerm; the “Toolbar” which is open all conference and is an area manned by technical representatives from all the tools vendors present; and a conference presentation I’ve wanted to deliver for a long time. This article is about that presentation, “XML, XPath, XSLT… the ‘X’ Files?”
I love this cartoon with the husband and wife fishing on a calm weekend off.
This week I spent some time in Stockholm attending one of the SDL Roadshows. As usual it was a great event, and we have more to come. In fact this year I get to attend a fair few so if you’re attending Copenhagen, Milan or Paris in May then I’ll look forward to seeing you there!