Tips 'n' Tools for Translators - SDL Trados Studio

SDL Trados Studio 2017 - first impressions

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 21:13:01 +0100

Over the last 30 days, I have been trying out SDL Trados Studio 2017, the latest version of SDL's flagship CAT tool for translators. My first impressions have been mixed: some good, some bad.

The very first thing you should be aware of when you request a free trial version of Studio 2017 online is that you will not be getting a full-feature version of the package to try out, but one with some major restrictions. This was my first surprise as the other CAT tools I have tried out so far like memoQ translator pro, Déjà Vu X3, OmegaT, Swordfish and memsource have always been fully functional versions. Although the interface of the trial version of Studio 2017 includes icons for MultiTerm, the termbase program, and for software localisation using a powerful tool from SDL called Passolo, clicking on the icons will trigger a message saying that these programs are not installed. In other words, you can't try them out. Trying to use a CAT tool that has a translation-memory ('TM') module but not one for terminology is frustrating as it means you can translate proper files with it, but you can't import terms from other programs, which would help you with the translation.

Funnily enough, some features of MultiTerm are actually included in the trial version, meaning you can save new terms if you want, but you can't export the termbase you create to send it to someone else or import into another CAT tool; it's stuck inside Studio 2017. I hope SDL decides to include full MultiTerm support in the next version of Studio, if not before, as being able to draw on terminology you have already collected is important for a translator.

What did I like about Studio 2017?

- The interface, which is quite easy to work with (i.e. it's designed in a logical way) and uses a colour scheme I now find easy on the eye (I didn't like the gaudiness of earlier colour schemes). The interface also contains a number of very useful icons such as links to tutorials and to SDL AppStore (an external, web-based resource from SDL where you can get extra add-ons to enhance Studio's out-of-the-box functionality; it used to be called OpenExchange).

- The amount of customisation possible for the interface - you can add specific functions you need a lot to a Quick Access bar, for example.

- The vertical translation grid, which - like memoQ's - is clear and easy to use; the source language is displayed in segments on the left, the target in segments on the right (at least in my LTR language pair, German and English; I presume this order is reversed for languages written in RTL scripts like Hebrew and Arabic).

- You can filter segments using a wide range of practical criteria.

- The two or three software updates that Studio installed during the trial period went quickly and smoothly.

- The Release Notes that come with the package tell you exactly what's new in Studio 2017. They also say what issues there are with it (optical character recognition, or OCR, in PDF files that Studio can read is limited to 14 languages at the moment).

What didn't I like about Studio 2017?

- It's not very easy to export a TM to TMX format (which is a common file format for exchanging TM data between different programs). You can get around this limitation by installing a special add-on for exactly this purpose or by checking a settings box that allows you to export the TM in 'a Trados 2007-compatible format' (i.e. TMX!).

- Some features that are a standard part of memoQ translator pro are not included in Studio 2017; if you want them, you need to install an add-on from SDL AppStore first. MemoQ lets you import terms from a CSV file, for example, and you can look up tricky terms on the web straight from the translation grid. Not so with Studio (yet, at least):

- The trial version includes a small number of pre-installed apps, but you can't install any extra ones of your own choice (like the Glossary Converter), meaning you can't see what they do or how well they work. (That was disappointing since there were a number of apps from SDL AppStore that I wanted to try out, too.)

- The Studio 2017 software package is considerably bigger than memoQ translator pro's in terms of hard-disk space and takes longer to launch as well.

- Studio 2017 won't run on Windows 8.0, Windows Vista or Windows XP; it will only run on the latest versions of Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. So some versions of Windows are fine, others aren't. Woe you've got the wrong one on your PC!

- Studio 2017 also has issues with certain web browsers and versions of Microsoft Office.

Please read the Release Notes carefully to see if your PC meets Studio's requirements before you install it.

In sum, I enjoyed using the trial version of the program, which in my opinion is the best one I've worked with so far. However, my experience as a user would have been even better if all of Studio's functionality had been available. Since trial versions of programs are intended to persuade potential new users to buy the package, it doesn't make sense to offer them a restricted-feature version that will hamper their productivity rather than boost it. Apart from that, having worked with CAT tools for a good few years now, I found Studio 2017 relatively straightforward to use – many of them now work in a similar way. What I wasn't able to see instantly, however, was what clear advantages the tool has over other sophisticated packages like memoQ.

If you are interested in getting a licence for SDL Trados Studio 2017, I recommend you to take a look at the group buys that frequently take place on Proz.com as you can save a lot of money that way. SDL also runs several promotions a year itself. If you are a member of a translators' association, that may have made a special arrangement with SDL to allow its members to buy the software at a reduced rate. So there are various options you can benefit from.

Regards,

Carl

Related articles elsewhere on the internet

- Product review by Andrea Luciano Damico

- FAQs about Studio 2017 on SDL's own website

- Emma Goldsmith's blog post on fragment recall in Studio 2017, a new feature in Studio to improve automatic assembly of target sentences

- Order a free trial of Studio 2017 from SDL

MemoQ in 5 minutes (3): changing the font used in memoQ's translation grid

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Sun, 31 Jan 2016 22:32:00 +0100

Did you know you can use a range of different fonts to display segments in memoQ's translation grid? You don't just have to stick to one, but can customise the appearance.

Many translators probably don't even consider using a different font to display text in their CAT tool, but it may well be worth your while to try a few other fonts out from time to time. You may even want to change which font you use in the course of a day as your eyes get tired.

I find that sans serif fonts are particularly easy to read on screen. These include popular fonts such as Calibri and Arial. MemoQ allows you to select a different font from a drop-down list and pick a different size as well. To do this in memoQ 2014, you need to call up the 'Options' menu from 'Tools' in the main menu ...

... and then select the item called 'Appearance' in 'Category'. The dialogue below will then be shown.

To pick a different font, go to the 'Editor fonts' section in the top half and pick a font from 'Font family and size' (click on the downward arrow in the font box to open a drop-down menu listing all the fonts available on your computer). Separate font families are listed for Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Apart from adjusting the font you'll see in the translation grid, this dialogue box also lets you switch the colour of the text – to do this, move down to 'Editor colors' and click on the box to the right of 'Text color'.

After making your new settings, activate them by clicking on 'Apply' or 'OK'. For some specific help on the options available here, just click on the 'Help' button on the far right.

To call up the 'Options' menu in memoQ 2015, go to the dark-blue 'MemoQ' tab at the top left of the screen, click on it and then move down to 'Options' near the bottom of the list, which will display various items. Pick the 'Options' item (the three cogs) to access the settings in the dialogue.

More details are available in the help documentation or on Kilgray's website.

Regards

Carl

Related links

Paul Filken's blog post on making similar adjustments via the 'View' menu in SDL Trados Studio 2014

Working for peanuts?

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 14:31:00 +0200

The other day I happened to stumble across a job advert by SDL plc, a well-known producer of software tools for translators, one of which I reviewed here briefly last autumn. The position was being advertised via monster.de, the big job portal on the internet, and looked as though it was in nearby Munich, which was why it initially caught my attention. It turned out it was actually an internship as an English to German translator. On closer reading, I found that the post was over in Sheffield (in the UK) and that SDL expects the person who is fortunate enough to get the job to work for what I would call peanuts – the National Minimum Wage in Britain, a stunning £6.50 an hour (7.85 euros at today's exchange rate).

Here's the top half of the ad, showing an appealing picture of a young team of professionals around a laptop, presumably to put you in an enthusiastic mood:

Looking at the job description, it sounds like an interesting position for a qualified translator. You would be working with a variety of CAT tools (obviously, since that's what SDL produces) and doing translating and editing work that can be demanding (post-editing machine-translated texts). You'd also have a degree of responsibility because you'd be checking software to find any mistakes or problems with it, testing websites (presumably how well they work) and doing terminological work, which means building up and possibly verifying and editing terms in a terminology database, no doubt for other members of staff (= translators) to use.

You need an educational background in translation or terminology for this job, as SDL specifically requests, and very good skills in two languages as well:

What do you think about this advertisement? My first reaction was one of disbelief; I asked myself why anyone with suitable qualifications should want to undertake work like this for a pittance? After all, it's a full-time position, even if it's only for six months (apparently with no option of being taken on properly afterwards).

Is it reasonable for an employer to expect this kind of work to be done by an intern, do you think? I could understand them offering the internship for a shorter period, say three months, but six seems a bit steep to me under these circumstances. On the other hand, it's become quite common for young people, including recent university graduates, to try and get some work experience in business fields that interest them even if it means them not being paid anything at all – it's the experience that counts for them rather than their earnings. (Think of the media, for example – TV and advertising.) In that respect, this particular position could be regarded as a particularly attractive one since you'd be getting paid all the time in addition to being given the opportunity to learn a lot about modern translation technology.

Still, I must say I find it unsettling to see low-paid positions being advertised that require skills that not everybody happens to have. Although the person's manpower would be tied up for half a year and the work they'd do would benefit the employer's own web marketing, they'd only be offered a token salary. Something's not quite right there, is it?

Carl

About Trados Studio 2014

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 16:29:51 +0200

Well, the build-up to its appearance on the translation stage was big, as you might expect from SDL Trados! Have you heard the news yet? If you're also a translator and use translation software to help you with your daily work, then you may already be aware that the largest maker of computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools recently launched the latest version of its key product (on 30 September).

It almost seems to have been a little early in arriving on the market, actually, as it's known as "Studio 2014" ... but then again, I expect they wanted to get a competitive edge over one of their main competitors, the Hungarian firm Kilgray (the makers of memoQ 2013 and other state-of-the-art tools for translators, translation agencies and terminologists).

The previous version of SDL Trados's tool, Studio 2011, has been around for a while and become widely used among freelance translators and agencies alike, partly because it supports bilingual file formats created by its much earlier predecessor, Trados 2007, which many agencies once invested in and weren't prepared to drop when Studio first came out.

Studio 2014 is based on the 2011 version, but the interface has been enhanced to make it easier to use. One of the main changes you'll notice is that a ribbon-based interface has now been adopted, organising related functions in tabs in a similar way to the programs that come with Microsoft Office 2007/2010. So if you're used to working with the latter, you ought to find it relatively easy to get to grips with Studio 2014. In addition to that, new areas have been added to the interface for training purposes – you can now access training videos directly from the program, for example – and you can access additional "apps" for Studio from here, too, by following an internal link to SDL's OpenExchange platform rather than having to call up the page separately in your web browser. So users can get information faster and more conveniently, which is great.

Apart from this, the sales people at SDL Trados have been listening to user feedback and passing it on to the developers, who have consequently come up with a number of "new" features such as AutoSave (to save your work automatically), Track Changes, Real-time Preview, a fast alignment tool (to replace WinAlign), QuickMerge (for combining individual files to speed up translation) and a customisable editing environment with user-defined short cuts for specific functions. (These are certainly enhancements in Studio, but they have actually been around in memoQ for a while.)

A few of the new features really are novel, however:

enhanced concordance search, i.e. terms are looked up automatically in your translation memory (TM) if a search at segment level fails to find anything there, and partial matches are shown, which can help you come up with an appropriate translation

InQuote, which is a new OpenExchange app that can be installed in Studio 2014 to generate quotations from project statistics. These stats can be output in Word or Excel or copied into another application or e-mail from your Clipboard to send to a customer, for example.

Well, that's the rundown so far. I'll learn more about it once I've tried it out myself. Hope it's not too buggy, being a new release...

To find out about the software suite yourself, you can watch various short videos that SDL Trados has produced. Click here, for instance: SDL Trados Product Tutorial Video. (N.B.: there's no sound in the video.)

The presentation below is also informative and it's spoken at a reasonable speed (unlike various other videos they've made, which are too short to be of much value and are narrated much too fast for non-English speakers):

Studio 2014 - Getting started; a quick tour, by Daniel Brockmann, SDL Trados (lasts approx. 15 mins.).

This video is actually one of those that are accessible from the training tab in Studio 2014. Dominique Pivard has been kind enough to provide the individual links on his own blog, CATguru's vlog, so anyone can watch them in a browser and get an idea about using the CAT tool that way.

In sum, I'd say Studio 2014 looks like a very promising, mature tool, even if many of its new features aren't pioneering ones. That said, I'm keen to see what the forthcoming version of memoQ 2013 ("R2" aka "6.8") will be like, which is due out at the end of October and is said to include several new features that will make our work more convenient – like the ability to incorporate final changes made to translations into your translation memory once the texts have been exported (e.g. customer changes). Studio can already do this to a degree if the translation is converted from SDLXLIFF to Word beforehand, but this new solution may go much further. And be a real time-saver!

Best,

Carl

images: spotlights © Rainer Sturm/pixelio.de, memoQ logo © Kilgray Translation Technologies, Studio 2014 logo © SDL plc

Related posts: Useful extensions for Studio on SDL OpenExchange

multifarious, SDL's blog on its CAT products, written by Paul Filken. Click here to view a recent post on customising Studio 2014 using OpenExchange apps

Emma Goldsmith's blog post on features of Studio 2014 for "beginners" (she was a beta tester)

To sign up for a free 30-day trial of Studio 2014, go to the online form here. (Update: although the form's available online now, I've just been told by a sales rep here in Germany that the trial version hasn't come out yet [it's 15 October now!], so we'll just have to wait for it a bit longer, I guess. Maybe until 2014 after all...!)

Virtual conference day for translators, 30 Sept

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 10:51:48 +0200

Proz.com is holding a virtual conference day for freelance translators today. The event is free – all you need to do is register as a Proz user (if you're not one already) and then log in to the Proz platform and register to attend the conference.

The event starts at 12 noon and is due to go on until 9.15 tonight. Presentations on various topics in English will be held at specific times throughout the day (see the programme here), while other presentations in other languages are available upon demand (just click on them and then they'll start).

Here are just a few of the subjects that are going to be covered today:

How to use the Proz.com platform successfully

EU terminology for medical translators

Online marketing (this is actually a group discussion that you can take part in)

CAT, machine translation and virtual interpreting – the use of technology in translation

Time management (another group discussion)

Human and machine translation

Codes of ethics, standards of practice and national certification for translators

Internet search techniques

Speech-recognition software (group discussion).

If you've got a bit of time to spare, why not drop by and watch a presentation or have a say in a group discussion? It's a good opportunity for translators to learn more about subjects that concern them. Apart from being able to watch the free presentations, you can also benefit from big discounts on software for translators thanks to Proz's special promotion.

Have fun at the conference!

Carl

P.S. This event is actually the first of a series of educational events to be held by Proz.com this week: from Mon. 30 Sept. to Fri. 4 October. Click on this page for more details. Wednesday's event on working with CAT tools looks particularly interesting.

Useful extensions for Studio on SDL OpenExchange

nospam@example.com (Carl) — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:48:31 +0200

If you are a translator who uses one of SDL's computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools (e.g. Trados® 2007 or one of the newer versions of Trados® Studio (2009 or 2011), you will probably already have heard about the firm's relatively new software-development platform SDL OpenExchange.

OpenExchange is an interesting idea as it is a way of enhancing the functionality of SDL's products by harnessing the intellectual power of 3rd-party developers. In the words of SDL:

"By offering a range of plug-ins and associated applications that will extend and augment the product feature set, we aim to see our users achieve a greater return on their SDL investment, while offering developers a stage to showcase themselves before the industry’s largest translation professional community." (quoted from their website)

In addition to this, SDL is using the platform to seek suggestions from users of its products regarding further potential enhancements. In this respect, it currently seems to be ahead of the competition, although other CAT-tool manufacturers such as Kilgray in Hungary (the maker of memoQ) have also started creating user platforms that can partly be employed to exchange software resources (see Kilgray's new Language Terminal, which can be accessed directly from memoQ 6.2 and memoQ 2013).

SDL's 3rd-party development platform currently contains around 80 enhancements in the form of plug-ins and apps. Some of these cost money (quite a lot in some cases), while others are free. Among other things, they include:

Auto-Suggest dictionaries in a variety of language pairs

conversion software (e.g. SDLTM to XLIFF for proof-reading in a different tool)

file-type definitions so that Studio can process further file types (such as PO files or DTP formats like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign)

glossary converters (e.g. for converting an Excel glossary to a Studio or MultiTerm term base)

Microsoft terminology collections in various languages (converted for use in MultiTerm)

machine-translation plug-ins

and even instruction manuals for Studio 2011 in various languages.

To find out more about these and the other apps, check out the OpenExchange site. I would also recommend you to read a recent blog post by another translator, Tuomas Kostiainen, a Studio user and trainer who has taken a closer look at five of the products available there.

As an aside, I noticed that some of these optional plug-ins are actually included in memoQ's functionality; they are there if you want to use them and just have to be activated by ticking a check box - there's no need to download and install them, let alone pay for them. Instruction manuals for memoQ and other CAT tools made by Kilgray are available from Kilgray's own website for free and are also in a range of languages.

Still, a number of the Studio and MultiTerm plug-ins and apps do look interesting and provide enhancements that are still lacking in memoQ. In the course of time, however, memoQ users may find that a growing number of these are being offered on the Language Terminal. Let's wait and see how it evolves...

Carl

images: Kilgray's logo and Language Terminal courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies. SDL OpenExchange: my own screen shot