We’re excited to announce the general release of our new SDL Trados Live Team solution, a complete localization platform powered by SDL Language Cloud. Our solution drives the localization cycle end-to-end and empowers several user roles to do their job more effectively: administrators, project managers, linguists, terminologists, engineers. For more information and context, you can follow this link to our original article on the release of the Language Cloud platform: https://community.sdl.com/product-groups/sdl-language-cloud/b/blog/posts/sdl-language-cloud-early-preview-to-general-availability

Further details on SDL Trados Live Team, it’s rich feature set and how to use it can be found in our online documentation at SDL Trados Live Team - docs.sdl.com.

With SDL Trados Live Team users now have an easy way to create new projects, add content, select the best translation resources and leverage previous efforts while managing and sharing these projects and resources with other team members online.

Linguists have access to robust translation and review options, as well as direct integration with their preferred productivity tools such as SDL Trados Studio and SDL Online Editor. Role-based dashboards help team members focus on the most important tasks and reduce administrative tasks.

SDL Trados Live Team provides a full set of features and capabilities, including the following highlights: 

• Easy Project Creation: With simple project forms and pre-configured workflows, projects are created quickly and get underway earlier. 
• Built-in Translator Productivity: With 100% SDL Trados Studio compatibility, translators can use the working environment they already know and prefer. 
• Smart Dashboards and Notifications: Modern user interfaces provide project status visibility and escalations. 
• Sophisticated Neural Machine Translation: Instant translation automates much of the work, allowing translators to focus on editing content that requires more nuance. 
• Scalability: Performance to support any volume of content. 
• Security: Provides security and data protection standards for complete peace of mind. 

Beyond the capabilities described above, SDL Trados Live Team launches with a host of innovative new features to bring working with translation projects to the next level.

Real-Time Microsoft Word Preview 

SDL Trados Live Team now offers real-time Microsoft Word Preview (for DOCX, DOC, PDF and RTF source formats) when working on documents in the Online Editor. We have been able to achieve fidelity extremely close to the final result, while at the same time offering real-time navigation in both directions, so when you edit a segment, the preview will update in real time, while if you select a sentence on the preview, it will jump to the respective segment in the Editor. 

You can have the Preview show Side-by-Side as in the screenshot or below the Editor, by going to View->Preview and selecting the desired Preview option. 

Use central resources 

SDL Trados Live Team can now make use of resources from folders higher up in the folder hierarchy. This enables you, for example, to use a central translation memory across multiple customers. Another use case would be to use a central File Type configuration, so you can make changes once and use them wherever you need them. 

Parent inheritance means that child folders inherit resources from their ‘parent’ folder (or ‘grandparent’ folder or even higher above). 

In brief, inheritance ensures that: 

• Users can see and use the resources stored in the folders above them (‘parent’ or ‘grandparent’ folders). 
• Users cannot see and cannot use the resources stored in ‘brother’ folders or ‘uncle’ folders (unless specifically granted access through membership in additional groups). 

Inheritance differences: projects vs. project resources

There is an important difference between the way projects and project resources are accessed based on inheritance. This includes all the elements needed to create a project: users, project templates, workflows, linguistic resources etc.

As a user, you can access the project resources from:

• Your current folder (see and use)
• Your parent folder and above (see and use)

As a user, you can access the projects from:

• Your current folder (see and manage)
• Your child folders (see and manage)

As part of this, you can also structure your users and groups in folders to reduce visibility and use sub-groups for work assignments.
You will also be able to flag customers as "Private" to reduce visibility from below.
As part of the above changes we have also removed the Shared Resource folder.

More details on this change are available in the Documentation: Read more

Translation Memory Maintenance

You can now edit the content of translation memories directly from your browser. To do this, go to Resources->Translation Memories->Click on a TM and select the TM from the list of languages.

This will launch the TM Maintenance in another browser tab:

Mid-Project Updates

This feature enables Project Managers to add additional files to a running project, i.e. additional file drops can be added to an existing project.
In order to initiate a Mid-Project Update, click Projects on the main menu bar and select a project in the list to see details for that project. Now click on Files in the sub-menu and click on the Update files button (as per the screenshot below).

This opens the Update files view, which enables you to upload one or more files. Files can be marked as Translatable or Reference (see below).

Once new file(s) have been added to an existing project, a parallel workflow will be initiated called a Batch (as shown in the screenshot below). Subsequent Batches will increase the Batch number, enabling you to track the flow of each Batch through the project.

A new Batch will inherit the same workflow tasks, settings and assignments as the previous Batch unless the project manager changes any settings or assignments after the initiating the project. For example, a project manager may create a project containing PPT files but (while the project is still ‘in flight’) change the file type setting from ‘don’t extract slide notes’ to ‘extract slides notes’- as a result futures Batches will adhere to the latest setting.

The Analysis report will be updated with the additional volume associated with new Batches.

See the video below for a live demo. This video was created for the SDL Language Cloud Translation Management offering, which includes additional capabilities as customer quoting and fully editable workflows:

Translation Unit statuses

Translation Unit statuses are a more modern way to work without the need for traditional project/working Translation Memories, by leveraging the Segment status information that has, until now, only been available as part of SDL Trados Studio.

The segment status information will now travel into the Translation Memory for the first time, allowing each translation unit to include metadata on the quality of the Translation unit.
Based on this additional data, you can now configure TU Status penalties (as well as configure filters on TU Status) to be applied during Pre-translation in the Project Settings (the defaults are set to 0).
In addition, you can configure which TU Statuses you want to be stored in the TM during the Update TM process for non-interactive use-cases.

The available Translation unit statuses are visible in the screenshot above.
The Online Editor will visually indicate and store which of these new penalties will be applied.

In terms of TM Import/Export, we now include the TU Status in the TMX files. During Import of a TMX, statuses are preserved as per the import file.
If the import file does not have status information, for example importing TM data 3rd party tools, we automatically set the status to Approved.

Users and Groups per folder

You can now create Users and Groups in specific locations enabling you to grant permissions to groups on a more granular level. For example, Project Manager and/or Linguist groups where you want to limit access to one or more specific customers.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields allow users to provide additional information when creating a project. For example, users may need to specify a project code when creating a new translation project or they may need to specify the number of pages that are being submitted for translation. Custom Fields can be created and managed under Resources > Custom Fields. When creating a Custom Field, users can specify the name, description, location and the resource to which the field applies (currently only Project). Each custom field has a Field Type which can be one of the following values:

In addition to the above users can also specify:

• The default value for the field
• Whether the field is read-only
• Whether the field is mandatory
• The visibility of the field in both SDL Trados Live Team and Customer Portal which determines whether the field is shown during project creation and in the project details.

Once a field has been defined, it can be used in project templates or during project creation. It can also be used when editing an existing project. See the video below:

Terminology

Embed images in text fields

Terminologists can now embed images in text fields when editing a term. Clicking the image icon prompts the user to enter the URL for the image which will then be placed into the attribute:

Manage cross-references in text fields

When editing a text field, clicking the link icon will prompt for a cross-reference which will create a link to one of the following:

• A Term in the same termbase (any language)
• A specific Entry ID in the same termbase
• A hyperlink to a specific URL