Paul Filkin's Blog

Last year Judith de Jong, our Client Services Infrastructure Manager, wrote a post about the new knowledge base portal being under construction. Today we are very pleased to announce that she can present it to you...

This week I'm hosting a guest post from our Jeremy Harpham, Senior Product Marketing Manager at SDL.  Jeremy is on site all week, so if you're in tekom drop by and say hello... he'll be there.

This week the tekom Annual Conference takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany. The strong presence SDL has in German speaking markets is reflected at this key industry event from 18 – 20 October 2011. Come and visit the SDL stands (430 & 437 in Hall 4) to see the latest content optimization and translation technology with the arrival of key new products to address the needs of the German speaking market.

What do I mean by "freestyle" document?  This is best described with pictures, but to get you started, how many times have you been unable to manage numbering properly in Studio because the autotranslation puts numbers in your target segment that are not what you want at all?  Well this is what I'm talking about.

I think almost every day I see a problem resolved on a user forum somewhere by understanding what the difference is between Global or Project settings in SDL Trados Studio... otherwise referred to as Tools - Options or Project - Project Settings.  So here's my shot at explaining the difference.

Earlier this year I wrote an article about where to get support for SDL products and mentioned we had started an initiative within Client Services to try and make it easier to find information and get help.  This article about the SDL Knowledge Base is part of that and has actually been written by Judith de Jong.  Judith is the Infrastructure Manager for Client Services and she has been very busy this year working on many improvements.  This is the first one, so expect some more.

All users of SDL Trados Studio 2009 should recognise this toolbar:

This provides the ability to filter the view you are translating in as follows:

• Segments with comments
• Duplicate segments
• Fuzzy matches
• New translated content
• 100% pretranslated content
• All content
• All segments
• Unconfirmed segments
• Segments containing user defined strings in the source or target
• The ability to use regular expressions to filter more precisely

This subject probably needs no introduction because everyone knows how to use Microsoft Word and has seen or used track changes at some point.  So this article is going to focus on how we use it in Studio 2011 and on how we have made this compatible with Microsoft Word to enhance the review process for both translator reviewer and subject matter expert in addition to being able to use this to provide consistent audit trail capability for any filetype.

Translate to what?

Yes, I have to admit I am a relative latecomer to Trados tools and I have had to learn more about Translators Workbench after getting familiar with Studio, rather than the other way around.  Sometimes I think this gives me an advantage over many experienced users because I probably don't know what I'm missing..!

Certainly this is the ideal situation for every software vendor who would like their tool to be the only one their users need... one desktop and only one tool needed..!  A couple of years ago I ran a survey to look at the different applications that a translator used and the results, whilst not entirely surprising, showed that the average translator had two different translation tools installed; and a multitude of applications you wouldn't believe..!  I imagine some of you will know quite a few who have three or even four translation tools installed, but wouldn't it be better if you only needed one?

Pseudo-translate: traditionally this has been used in software localization to test dialog boxes and other UI elements, but, we now extend this concept to document translation simulation.  Why is this useful?  It allows you to very quickly produce localized files that can be used to test things like:

• font display problems in a software GUI due to differences in text encoding between languages
• likely extent of DTP work due to layout problems where translated text is too long... or too short
• the completeness of extracted text for translation... helps with custom XML filetypes and identification of incorrectly hard coded strings in software localization
• prevention of string truncations and/or concatenations in software localization
• successful roundtrip simulation within the translation environment