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Things you do in SDL Studio that it probably wasn't really intended for

Michael Bailey

I've been using Trados from version 6.5 (parallel port dongle!) and now use SDL Studio 2019. Over the years I have found a few strange uses (the ones that get friends who use SDL Studio giving me a funny look when I mention my "hack" having a beer) although in the cold light of day they have often come back to me and said, that crazy as my suggestion sounded in the bar, it might actually work and be useful. Does anyone else have similar uses?

One such example is one I call "Monolingual SDL Studio in Excel". We get a lot of questionnaires to fill out in Excel where the answers are as narrative texts (think word-processing in Excel...) which I receive for editing / language check. Since the questionnaires are usually from the same sources (international organisations), their format is standardised. I have a little Excel Macro that recolours all their questions cells (ie. to then allow me to ignore those cells) and then only the output that I want to edit is shown in SDL Studio. I have a project definition set up, only for editting Excel files, and the empty TM I have is either in German (German (Liechtenstein)-German (Germany)) or English (in SDL Studio 2019 I use English(Europe) - English(UK)) and then set up the project. Where it also works well is when the same answer is given to multiple questions in ensuring consistency. At the end of it, I export the target file and use another Excel Macro to change the recoloured cells back. 
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  • Hi

    Nice workflow... although I think it's exactly what Studio is intended for. Great that you share this idea though as I'm sure it'll be a useful process for others faced with these sort of tasks.

    My personal favourite is to use Studio as a PDF converter. The PDF filetype, and IRIS, definitley wasn't provided to use just as a converter. The intention was to be able to open a PDF and translate it. I have a different use and workflow for PDFs as I think you are better off opening the PDF in Studio using Ctrl+Shift+O and then closing the file immediately. This gets you a DOCX which you can tidy up (transtools or something like that...) and then you translate the DOCX in Studio instead. If you don't have Abby or something like that for your conversions then Studio is a great solution and it will save time dealing with tags in the translation, and in DTP work after the translation.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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  • in reply to Paul

    Hi , hi  

    I use Studio as a PDF converter too, creating a Word file then tidying it up and base the translation project on that.

    If the client wants a Target PDF, all you then have to do after translation is Save as Target, open the resulting Word file (which is what you get anyway when translating from PDF) then you can Save as from Word to PDF.

    All the best,

    Ali :)
  • in reply to Alison Field

    Hi Ali and Paul,

    The PDF converter is something I have rapidly come to love in SDL Studio 2019 working in financial market supervision where I have to frequently translate administrative decisions (passed on as PDFs to me, due to their containing an electronic signature). Fortunately as the PDFs are originally Word documents, the formatting is not so bad, but I have also used it before now to align an existing translation of a law prior to using Perfect Match with deductions. The only problem that threw up in one instance was an "Unexpected Token Error"

    The OCR part of it has come into its own where I have non-OCRed scans of faxed reporting submissions from a couple of very small supervised entities - the OCR feature is a marked improvement of the previous having to retype the PDF files (1-2 pages of text).

    Michael
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  • in reply to Alison Field

    Hi Ali and Paul,

    The PDF converter is something I have rapidly come to love in SDL Studio 2019 working in financial market supervision where I have to frequently translate administrative decisions (passed on as PDFs to me, due to their containing an electronic signature). Fortunately as the PDFs are originally Word documents, the formatting is not so bad, but I have also used it before now to align an existing translation of a law prior to using Perfect Match with deductions. The only problem that threw up in one instance was an "Unexpected Token Error"

    The OCR part of it has come into its own where I have non-OCRed scans of faxed reporting submissions from a couple of very small supervised entities - the OCR feature is a marked improvement of the previous having to retype the PDF files (1-2 pages of text).

    Michael
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