secureSDLXLIFF - the life insurance for project managers and professional translators

Well, simply, because your translation memory system or translation management solution might cause funny results or may even stop working if you feed documents into the workflow that are faulty, corrupted or set up in a way that makes the work of the translator a nightmare and thus more expensive than necessary.

 

Prepare and optimize batches of documents for the translation process

For example, you need to remove track changes from Word documents if you want to avoid the annoying errors that may come up in your translation environment should you forget to do so. With secureSDLXLIFF, you can automate this task for 5, 10, 100 and more documents in a row. But secureSDLXLIFF does not stop there - it even removes those track changes that would still survive, even if the Track changes feature is turned off in Microsoft Word.

Have you ever translated an Excel table with grouped columns or rows? If so, you may know that neither TagEditor nor SDL Trados Studio will open content in those columns or rows for translation if they are collapsed in Excel. With secureSDLXLIFF you can make sure to unfold those collapsed parts of the Excel document and make the content available to the translator again.

Speaking of Excel tables - what if they are embedded in a Word document? Will you ever detect them before handoff date if you do not scroll through each page before starting the project? No - you won't. With secureSDLXLIFF, however, you will, as the tool will issue warnings if it finds embedded objects such as Excel sheets, PowerPoint slides etc.

Test the translation workflow

As a project manager you want to make sure that there is no bad or faulty files in the batch and thus test whether all customer documents will survive the conversion processes to and from TTX or SDLXLIFF. In order to run this test, you can open each document in TagEditor or the SDL Trados Studio and run a fake translation. However, this is a manual and time-consuming process. With secureSDLXLIFF you can automate this test: Simply press the Start button and wait for secureSDLXLIFF to do the work. You will receive a report that shows whether each file could be converted to the bilingual format and back to the original format.

If a file fails, you are not alone - you can still try one of the repair options offered by secureSDLXLIFF. But there is even more than that: secureSDLXLIFF keeps all source language TTX files and SDLXLIFF files that are produced during the test process. This means that you will not have to create those files manually but you can let secureSDLXLIFF do the dirty work and you can be sure that those files will convert back after the translation has been finished.

How is all this possible? Simply, because Microsoft Office, SDL Trados 2007 and SDL Trados Studio 2009 provide well-documented application programming interfaces. Thanks to those APIs, developers can automate recurring tasks and make the lives of project managers and translators easier so that they can concentrate on what they do best - produce high quality translations.

Download secureSDLXLIFF and many other fantastic apps by visiting SDL OpenExchange by clicking here

Tom Imhof