The speakers supposed to talk about
Machine Translation could not make it and instead it was Vicenta Ten (Regional
Sales Director, SDL Language technologies) and Tania Risoleo (Sales Executive,
SDL Language Technologies) who took care of the morning presentations about Assessing
The Need For Translation, Machine Translation and Post Editing (Vicenta Ten), The
Importance Of Terminology (Tania Risoleo) and What The Translation World Can
Learn From Other Industries (Vicenta Ten). In the afternoon two interesting
workshops took place: 100% Productivity increase with Studio 2011 and Master
Class, Advanced tips and tricks, by Tracey Byrne (Business Consultant, SDL
Language Technologies).
Vicenta spoke about why translation
is needed for Companies to sell their products/services and how to make a
strategic selection of the content needing translation. Then, she continued talking
about machine translation versus quality of human translation, how machine
translation is getting better and better, and how the help of good linguistic
professionals is however most of the times needed in order to check the
correctness of the results. After this, Post Editing Revolution (or Evolution).
The speaker explained what Post Editing consists of and in which it differs
from a review. Her point could be summarized with the formula MT + PE = Faster
than HT (human translation).
After a nice coffee and chat with
the attendants, the second part of the presentation: The Importance Of
Terminology. Tania explained why terminology is important to get the messages across
among Company departments, target audiences, etc. and why homogeneity of terminology
is essential.
To finish this morning presentation,
Vicenta indicated how some particular cases from other industries can be
implemented to the translation industry to eliminate waste (methods: 5S and
Kanban), manage quality (method: 6σ) and projects (method: Price 2).
13:00 Lunch break
After a tasty lunch and an
interesting chat with colleagues, the presentation resumed with the workshop
presentations by Tracey Byrne. The audience was divided in two groups:
beginners (Tania introduced the product and some basic features) and intermediate
users of Studio 2011. In this presentation the productivity features were
introduced and explained, such as Autossugest, Quickplace, External Review,
Context Matching, Perfect Matching, Edit Source, and BeGlobal connectivity.
From these two workshops I will
underline some features, tips and tricks presented to improve productivity with
Trados Studio 2011. Starting with the features:
Autosuggest: feature which suggests content
within context from three sources: Autosuggest dictionaries, Terminology
Database and Auto text Entries.
→ To add terms to Auto
text while typing, press Alt + F7
Quickplace: feature which suggests variables,
placeables, formatting, tags, etc. To open the menu, press CTRL + comma
→ To clear formatting
in a string, press CTRL + SPACE bar
→ To reactivate ghost
tags, for example, deleted by error, press CTRL + full stop
Auto-propagation: Tools > Options > Editor
> Auto-propagation. Settings:
→ Auto-propagate exact
matches to confirmed segments (for consistency through the whole text)
→ Starting position:
FIRST SEGMENT IN THE TEXT (for consistency through the whole text)
→Be prompted options
(in order to check what is being auto-propagated)
Free applications downloadable from
Open Exchange:
→ Glossary converter:
application which converts Excel files (tabs included) to Multiterm format in
an automatic way, faster and more user friendly.
Finally, regarding the advanced tips
and tricks, Tracey divided the content in three:
Project creation: the quick project application and
project templates are very useful to open similar projects or projects from the
same clients in a faster way.
→ Any TM: Free app to
deal with different sublanguages (i.e. en US - en GB)
→Project files >
Add project files: allows to merge small documents in one (even different
formats, PDF, RTF, etc.) to make translation easier and then creates the
original format of the translated files again.
Translation memories: Use of Upgrade translation
memories to merge different memories (even legacy ones).
→ SDLTmConvert: Free app for
maintenance of TMs. Exports TM to a .xliff file and allows to run verifications
in it (shortcuts: F7 and F8)
Excel files: Embeded content, allows defining
tags (<b>, </b>, etc.)
→ Tools > Options
> Excel > Embeded content
And that was all I can tell about
this intense and interesting forum. Thanks to the organizers for this
opportunity and hope to see you again soon!
