So, SP2 came out about a month ago. What do I think about it? Many good improvements but still plenty of room for improvement and, unfortunately, several issues are still unsolved. I’m not going to list all the changes and improvements because you can find a more detailed list here. However, I will mention those that I have personally found most useful as well as some problems that were not fixed by this SP.
Good:
- The improved Auto-substitution settings, particularly the possibility to control spacing between a number and its unit. I would still like to see a conversion function like in Trados 2007.
- Possibility to analyze internal fuzzy match leverage and turn the cross-file repetition analysis on and off.
- Improved MS Excel file conversion.
- The real time preview seems to function better and the view actually gets updated automatically. There are still occasionally some functional problems with the linking between the preview and the editor; clicking a sentence in the Preview window should activate the corresponding segment in the Editor but I have met several segments where this does not work.
- The new Quick Start Guides and the availability of a fully functional Trial version. This is particularly good news to those who are interested in trying out and getting started with Trados Studio.
Interesting:
- The two new automated translation systems: Google Translate and Language Weaver. You can access these via the Translation Memory and Automated Translation settings. I don’t find this particularly useful for myself because these systems work quite poorly (or not at all) with Finnish. In addition, I would not be able to use them for most of my translation work because of confidentiality reasons, even if they worked better.
- SDL OpenExchange for building applications for Studio. It will be very interesting to see what kinds of 3rd party apps will be developed and offered through this program.
Not so good:
- Finnish spell checker is still not there. My colleague Dominique Pivard pointed out on the Finnish Trados users list that both, memoQ and Wordfast Pro, offer MS Word spell checker option in addition to the Hunspell spell checker (which, by the way, does not work for Finnish in either program). If Wordfast and memoQ have been able to do that, then it shouldn’t be technically too difficult for SDL to do it as well.
- The fuzzy match markings in the translation results window are still as unclear as before, and the fuzzy match results themselves are quite often very strange, as I have mentioned earlier — unfortunately, no improvement here.
- The problems with Translation Memory fields have not yet been corrected. I was really hoping that this would have been fixed by now, since it has been a known issue for a long time and is quite irritating.
- Term recognition is still case sensitive.
- “Non-translatable text” feature is still not working (for details, see this posting).
- Multi-part variables are still not recognized (for details, see this posting).
In summary, a good set of small and large improvements but there are still many features that are not functioning as they should. Waiting for the SP3 then…
My Migration to Trados Studio 2009 – and Life with 2011/2014/2015 