• When error messages attack: using ChatGPT to make peace with your users!

     
    I’m sure everyone reading this is no stranger to the often completely unintelligible error messages that can be generated when software goes wrong!  You can even find in the most voted for ideas in the RWS Community ideas platform that is related to just that, “ Get those cryptic error messages more human “.  As computers have become more and more complicated and software is  relying heavily on inbuilt technologies provided…
  • ChatGPT + Powershell = Localization Superpowers!

     
    Localization engineers are the miracle workers behind the scenes of localization workflows, and without them many of the projects we see couldn’t happen.  The skillsets they possess go far beyond the sort of things that most translators know how to do, and often require the ability to code.  I’ve already written a little about these sorts of things in the last three or four articles I published this month, mainly because…
  • Never get lost with ChatGPT…

     
    As I’m getting lost in my own thoughts around just what to talk about next with regard to AI technologies and in particular ChatGPT… and as I’m pondering about the effect this is going to have on our industry I recalled a couple of questions around the use of XPath in the community.  One of these questions was yesterday and it related to how to use XPath to extract one of the languages in a TMX file using the XML filetype…
  • Styling with ChatGPT!

     
    Continuing the theme of how to make use of AI technologies to help with the more technical nature of localization I thought I could revisit an article I wrote back in 2013… this month a decade ago!  In that article I explained how to write a very basic stylesheet that could be used to provide more context when translating XML files.  To do that I had to learn some basics myself and that did give me enough of a skillset…
  • Say goodbye to doppelgangers with ChatGPT…

     
    With all the excitement and interest around ChatGPT these days, and with the numerous interesting projects we’re working on at RWS that involve the use of AI, its hard not to allow the lure of the technology to pull you in.  Last month I wrote an article on corrupt translation memories, and in doing this I dabbled a little with SQLite queries… an SDLTM is a SQLite database.  They are pretty much new to me as I’ve only…
  • Introducing the Trados portfolio

     

    As you may know, we are the longest-standing translation technology provider and have pioneered how the translation industry has worked for the past 30 years. We are now in a new exciting era, and after becoming the General Manager back in April 2022, I'm proud to lead our cloud-first strategy across our family of products. As with all industries, technology evolves at a rapid pace, so I wanted to take a moment to…

  • TM corruption…

     
    This is a topic that probably occurred a lot more in the old days of Trados and Translators Workbench where it was relatively easy to corrupt a translation memory.  In those days the translation memory consisted of five file types with the extensions .tmw, .mwf, .mtf, .mdf and .iix and when problems did occur it was probably related to the files that supported indexing and lookup speeds for example.  The .tmw file itself…
  • Community helps those who help themselves…

     
    Everyone is probably familiar with a similar phrase, often mistakenly attributed with biblical origins, “the Lord helps those who help themselves”.  The phrase actually originated in ancient Greece through one of Aesop’s fables called “ Hercules and The Wagoner “: A Waggoner was once driving a heavy load along a very muddy way. At last he came to a part of the road where the wheels sank half-way into the mire, and the…
  • Can’t see the wood for the trees…

     
    Back in 2015 I wrote an article called “ Good bugs… bad bugs! ” which was all about the unintended positive side effect as a result of computer software not working as intended.  I’d actually forgotten about this article until this weekend as I was pondering my own behaviour in responding to a post in the RWS Community.  In fact it was my wife that got me thinking as I allowed the community thread to frustrate me because…
  • Character counts…

     
    The most viewed article I have ever written by far was “ So how many words do you think it was? ” which I wrote in 2012 almost ten years ago.  I revised it once in 2015 and whilst I could revise it again based on the current versions of Trados Studio I don’t really see the point.  The real value of that article was understanding how the content can influence a word-count and why there could be differences between different…
  • The portfolio merry-go-round…

     
    Growing a product range, buying new companies, being bought yourself, adopting new technology, reorganising  etc… all of this creates significant change across an organisation that often feels as though you’re on a merry-go-round where things change as you go around until you’re back to where you started and then it all changes again.  I can only imagine that feeling applies to customers and employees alike as each revolution…
  • Translating AI…

     
    Why would you have to?  Surely Ai can translate itself?  If not it sounds like a pretty big topic… or I’m just confused.  Acronyms can do this to you and these days we do have good reason to be confused… Multiterm/Machine Translation (MT), National Aeronautics and Space Administration/North America South America (NASA), Role Playing Game/ Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG), Wages For Housework/Working From Home (WFH)… the…
  • The Black Box…

     
    An interesting thing about Trados Studio is how easy it makes it for new users to save all their projects in one place, all their translation memories and all their termbases.  In fact it’s so easy that I’m absolutely certain many users never give these things a second thought as they start to get to grips with using the software itself.  But then, one day, these users upgrade… in some cases even the upgrade seems to…
  • Introducing the multilingual XML… super filetype!

     
    I was compelled to make a return to a previous theme around Marvel Comics because it’s the only way I can do justice to the amazing work the RWS AppStore team carry out on a daily basis.  There are some things you just can’t wait to get up in the morning for, and for me, one of these things is being able to work with this team on a daily basis.  The first meeting of every day for me is with this team and what a fantastic…
  • Let’s learn about XML…

     
    This year at the Spring Trados Roadshows the emphasis was firmly placed upon education.  Almost all the presentations were based on providing translators, project managers, localization engineers etc. with great material to help them as they work with the Trados toolsets. I had a few presentations at this event and decided it might be useful to post a few of them here, especially the ones that might help with some of…
  • What’s in a name?

     
    “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” In Shakespeare’s soliloquy, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet isn’t allowed to be with Romeo because his family name is Montague… sworn enemies of the Capulet family.  Of course she doesn’t care about his name, he’d still be everything she wanted irrespective of what he was called.  The rose would still smell as sweet irrespective of what…
  • A file with a view…

     
    I started thinking about “A room with a view” by E. M Forster when I contemplated how to start this article.  But as you can see from the images on the left my mind wandered from this idea and was focused more on the “view”.  This is quite possibly because our R&D team started a “Working from home” distance challenge to cover as much distance as you can every day for a month by physically getting out of your office/home…
  • Short term memories…

     
    “Not only is my short-term memory horrible, but so is my short-term memory.”  I have no idea who this quote can be attributed to, and its certainly not original, but it is quite appropriate when I start to think about the evolution of Trados.  Ever since Trados Studio was launched you can be sure to find many “experts” in places like ProZ and even the SDL Community recommending you don’t upgrade because there is no difference…
  • Psst… wanna know a few more things about file types?

     
    I wrote under this title back in 2013 and provided a bit of information about the Word filetypes in Studio.  It was a pretty popular article and I always meant to circle back and do some more.  Seven is a lucky number so now we’re in 2020, seven years later, I thought I’d do it again… and it’s also just as long, so grab a coffee first! The message I wanted to leave users with after that article is that it’s always worth…
  • A Private AppStore…

     
    All the apps come in these places And the apps are not the same You don’t look at their faces And you don’t ask their names You don’t think of them as human You don’t think of them at all You keep your mind on the money Keeping your eyes on the wall I’m your private AppStore, I don’t cost no money I’ll do what you want me to do… Every time I think the words “Private AppStore” that song comes into my head and…
  • A Private AppStore…

     
    All the apps come in these places And the apps are not the same You don’t look at their faces And you don’t ask their names You don’t think of them as human You don’t think of them at all You keep your mind on the money Keeping your eyes on the wall I’m your private AppStore, I don’t cost no money I’ll do what you want me to do… Every time I think the words “Private AppStore” that song comes into my head and…
  • Some you win… some you lose

     
    When we released the new Trados 2021 last week I fully intended to make my first article, after the summary of the release notes , to be something based around the new appstore integration.  The number of issues we are seeing with this release are very low which is a good thing, but nonetheless I feel compelled to tackle one thing first that has come up a little in the forums.  It relates to some changes made to improve…
  • Some you win… some you lose

     
    When we released the new Trados 2021 last week I fully intended to make my first article, after the summary of the release notes , to be something based around the new appstore integration.  The number of issues we are seeing with this release are very low which is a good thing, but nonetheless I feel compelled to tackle one thing first that has come up a little in the forums.  It relates to some changes made to improve…
  • Not your usual stuff!

     
    Time seems to be going faster as I’m getting older as it doesn’t seem that long ago since we saw the release of the 2019 version of SDL Trados Studio.  But here we are, it is that time again and many users will already have noticed they have a shiny new version in their account… SDL Trados Studio 2021.  Fast as it is, we don’t want to do these product launches too often because I can tell you it’s a major undertaking…