How do you then find that earlier segment and compare the transation in it with the found inconsistency? Presumably you have to filter on the source text, and display the 2 or more segments with identical source text, but different target text, and fix the error. So you “Verify” the files (F8), and you get a message that a particular segment is translated inconsistently with another one, earlier in the same file, or in an earlier file. (So you’re under time pressure!) You want to compare them with each other to ensure cross-file consistency. Imagine you’re checking multiple translated files, at the end of a job. Yet Studio has the most annoying QA function I’ve ever seen – This is an excellent thing to want to do! In the technical texts we translate, consistency across multiple files and releases is essential. Studio QA: finding and fixing inconsistent transations Studio apparently doesn’t do this, so you type more, and have to physically select terms found in the Term Recognition window, to paste them into a segment. It’s then the translator’s job to fix the grammar -what humans are good at! Nothing like machine translation: just terminology database lookup and recogntion, and insertion. You will find this function in Atril’s Deja Vu tool: the tool takes known, approved terminology and inserts authomatically in the selected segment. This is partly to do with memory management (see below) and also due to missing and ineffective functionality (see below for some examples). Studio 2104 is so slow, compared with any favour of Atril’s Deja Vu in the last 15 years, that we have a company policy of never translating more than 50 words in it at once. Declaration of interest: I do not work for Atril, the providers of the Deja Vu translator’s tool (current version DVX3), or receive any payment or reward for promoting that tool. My views on Studio 2014, based on using it almost exclusively for final QA on translations over the last year or so.
Whether you’re wondering where you type the translation (as I wondered when I first opened the software), or how to write regular expressions for use in Studio, this manual literally has it all. It’s no wonder that this manual has *all* five-star reviews on the SDL site and has been downloaded almost 1,800 times. You can purchase the manual for US $49 from Mats’ website or for the same price from the SDL OpenExchange website.
Disclosure: Mats provided me with a free review copy of the manual when he released it. I’ll reserve a special mention for Mats Linder’s Trados Studio Manual. Either hire a trainer ( Tuomas Kostiainen offers remote training on your own computer several of my students have used him and raved about it) or buy the manual (see below) and go through it step by step.
Think of it like learning Photoshop or InDesign it’s not something that you just install and learn how to use in a couple of hours.
This will be great the Java applet is slow and aggravating (and I have a slow computer, so it’s really, really slow) which creates a disincentive to add terms on the fly.
But for the features I use, the upgrade to 2014 was fairly painless, and the ribbon-style interface is easy to use. I don’t use SDL Language Cloud or any MT or QA plugins, or any of the project management features, so I can’t really comment on those.