Intermediate Level Trados Studio 2015 Workshop in San Francisco

I will be teaching a full-day, intermediate level Trados Studio workshop in San Francisco on March 12th. This full-day workshop is aimed at those who have some knowledge and experience of working with Trados Studio but who want to learn its more advanced features.

The main topics covered are translation memory and file management, file type settings, Auto-propagation, AutoSuggest, Studio verification tools, project preparation and the use of the SDL OpenExchange applications. The number of OpenExchange apps keeps growing and it’s getting more and more difficult to stay up-to-date with all the new functions and features available through these apps.

In addition, several “performance-enhancing” Studio tips and tricks will be shown. Participants are also encouraged to submit in advance their own questions and requests for additional topics.

For registration and additional info, see the NCTA website (note that the discounted early-bird registration ends on 2/27). If you have any questions about the content of the workshop, feel free to contact me directly.

Trados Studio Workshop in San Francisco

I will be teaching an intermediate level Trados Studio workshop in San Francisco on September 20th. The main topics covered are translation memory and file management, Studio verification tools, and the use of the SDL OpenExchange applications. The number of OpenExchange apps keeps growing and it’s getting more and more difficult to stay up-to-date with all the new functions and features available through these apps. One of the main goals of this workshop is to help you to find those Studio apps that are the most useful for you and get them (and you) organized so that you can actually use them in your daily work.

In addition, several “performance-enhancing” Studio tips and tricks will be shown. Participants are also encouraged to submit in advance their own questions and requests for additional topics.

For registration and additional info, see the NCTA website. If you have any questions about the content of the workshop, feel free to contact me directly.

My Top 5 OpenExchange Apps

I downloaded the new improved version of Glossary Converter the other day and took a closer look at the available OpenExchange apps just to make sure I haven’t missed any other recent updates or additions. While updating my own list of useful or potentially useful apps, I thought to share some of that info here as well. It’s good to know what kind of apps are available because you never know when you might need them.

1. Glossary Converter

This is my favorite app right now because the new version can also handle additional fields, such as client names and notes. Converting existing glossaries from Excel format takes only a few seconds. It’s incredible if you compare it to the convoluted, multi-step process that’s needed if the conversion is done with Multiterm Convert. Or it’s actually incredible that we had to put up with Multiterm Convert for all those years. However, I have to admit that I’ll miss those little rotating sprocket wheels in Multiterm Convert!

Note that if you include additional fields in the Excel glossary file, they need to be placed on the right side of the language under which you want them to appear. For example, if you have two languages and one additional field in your glossary, organize them this way if you want the additional field to appear under Language 1:

Column A: Language 1
Column B: Additional field
Column C: Language 2

And this way if you want the additional field to appear under Language 2:

Column A: Language 1
Column B: Language 2
Column C: Additional field

2. AnyTM Translation Provider

One thing that I really dislike in Studio is the fact that you can’t mix resources that have different sublanguages, such as US English and UK English memories. This app is handy for situations like that because it allows you to use TMs as reference TMs regardless of their sublanguages (or main languages for that matter). Note that this is a paid app (£9.99).

3. SDLTmConvert

Trados Studio has a really powerful set of quality assurance (QA) functions. Unfortunately, they are only for translated SDLXLIFF files and cannot be used for translation memories. This app allows you to convert a TM to SDLXLIFF format so that you can run the QA checks on the TM content and then convert the edited SDLXLIFF file back to a TM. In addition, it can covert Studio TMs to many other formats, such as CSV, TXT and even to monolingual source and target text files.

4. SDLXliff2Tmx

When working with non-Studio clients, it’s sometimes necessary to send them the new TM content as a TMX export file. You can easily do that in Studio but it does take several steps (create a new TM, import the translated SDLXLIFF files to the TM and then export the TM as a TMX file). This app gives you a faster method to accomplish the same thing, i.e. it exports SDLXLIFF files directly to a TMX file (or optionally to a tab-delimited text file).

5. SDLXLIFF Compare

I don’t know about you but I’m less than happy when I get an edited Studio file back without tracked changes and then I have to go through the whole file and figure out what was changed. This app makes life much simpler in those cases. It displays the comparison results of the two SDLXLIFF file versions in an easy-to-read XML/HTML report. It can also be very useful for project management purposes.

In addition to the above Top 5 apps, I also wanted to mention a few others that are worth remembering in case you need those functions one day.

TM management related apps

SDLTmReverseLangs

• for reversing the languages of a TM

SDL Trados 2007 Translation Memory Plug-in

• direct access to file-based Translator’s Workbench translation memories (TMW) without having to convert them

SDL Translation Memory Management Utility

• includes several TM management tasks, such as TM export, duplicate removal and reversing language pairs

SDLXLIFF file management related apps

SDL XLIFF Split/Merge

• splitting large SDLXLIFF files and merging split files into a single SDLXLIFF file

SDL Batch Find/Replace

• for batch find and replace operations in multiple SDLXLIFF files

Miscellaneous apps

PackageReader

• previewing Studio packages directly from an e-mail or Windows Explorer without opening Studio

TAUS Search

• gives access to the terms and phrases in the TAUS translation corpora by allowing the corpora to be used as an external reference TM

Trados Studio Manual

• Mats Linder’s highly rated Trados Studio manual is also available from here. I have planned to review Mats’ manual but unfortunately haven’t had time to do it. Anyhow, while waiting for my review (might be a long wait), you could take a look at what other users and reviewers have to say about it.

In addition, the OpenExchange selection also includes several AutoSuggest dictionaries, Multiterm termbases and various file type definitions (such as for Wordfast TXML files).

Where are SDL TTX It! and MS Office converter?

You might wonder why I didn’t mention these two very useful apps. The MS Office converter functionality is now built into Trados Studio 2011 (File > Export for External Review), so there’s really no need for the app anymore. And the TTX It! app that’s used for batch conversion of multiple source files into TTX format gets installed automatically and can be accessed via the All Programs > SDL > SDL Trados Studio 2011 > OpenExchange Apps folder. By the way, this is the place where many of the other apps get installed as well.

Simple Terminology Check

I was translating a large software project the other day and noticed at one point that I had mixed up the translations for words like file, folder and directory. Don’t ask me how that happened but by the time I noticed this the incorrect translations were all over the place and it would have been a time-consuming task to locate them individually since these terms were in almost every other segment. So I decided to utilize the QA checker to find the incorrect translations. This was easy to do with the Regular Expressions function, and the good news is that you don’t need to know or use any regular expressions to do this.

Go to Project Settings and select Verification > QA Checker > Regular Expressions. Select the Search regular expressions check box, if not already selected. Type a brief description or a name in the Description field. This is just for your own information. In this example we are trying to locate all segments where the word “file” is in the source but the Finnish translation does not include the matching term “tiedosto”, so as a description we can just use the word “File”. Type the source language word (“file”) in the RegEx source field and the target language word (“tiedosto”) in the RegEx target field. For the Condition, select Report if source matches but not the target from the pull-down menu. To save the search settings, click Action and select Add item. Create similar searches for other terms, as needed. That’s it and you can then close the dialog box by clicking OK.

Figure 1. Settings for a search for segments where the source text includes “file” but the target doesn’t include the matching translation “tiedosto”. Note the other similar searches for term pairs “database/tietokan” and “directory/hakemisto” below the “file/tiedosto” search.

When you run the Verification (F8), all segments where the source includes the term “file” but the target doesn’t include “tiedosto” will be flagged in the verification results. It worked beautifully in my case, and I had fixed the problems in less than 5 minutes. Another nice thing with this method is that it works well even with Finnish because you can just use the Finnish word stem without having to worry about the various endings the word might have in the text.

There were a few false positives caused by words like profile (the matching translation would be profiili). These were easy to skip while going through the verification results since there weren’t many of them. However, it’s also possible to fine-tune the search with the help of “real” regular expressions to look for exact matches only, if needed. You can also run the check in the opposite direction for extra security by using the Report if target matches but not the source option.

Tools for Translation Quality Assurance

You might be interested in this webinar that I will be teaching on Monday (Sep. 10) titled “Tools for Translation Quality Assurance – What Every CAT Tool User Should Know About Quality Assurance”. It will include an overview of QA functions in Trados Studio (and memoQ) and a little bit about regular expressions as well. In addition, I will show how some stand-alone translation QA tools, such as Verifika and ApSIC Xbench, function.

For more information or to register, visit: http://www.ecpdwebinars.co.uk/events_89171.html

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