Review of the SDL Studio Roadshow Dublin – May 30th, 2013

9:30 – 10:00 Registration and welcome coffee with chocolate cookies

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!