Hi Miriam

These settings are not controlled by Studio but rather Studio picks these up from the 'Region and Language' settings in Windows.  You can access this by going to: Control Panel\Region and Language:

If you want to make any adjustments to the default settings you will need to do it here and then restart Studio for the settings to take effect.

To be honest, this is the very first time in my carrier I hear about this "standard".

I'm afraid, you're out of luck in Studio with automatic numbers replacement according to this "standard". Studio supports only language-specific formats in the automated numbers localization. It sets the format according to what you can see in Region and Language settings in Control Panel. There is no way to configure this automated numbers localization to use other format.

You need to use some search & replace trickery to achive what you want.

Unknown said:

It's quite simple: Trados changes 1.234,56 to 1,234.56. That is no good. It should be 1234.56 or for numbers with more digits, there should be thousands separators of a non-breaking space. It is THE international standard and REQUIRED by all my clients.

Hi Paul Carmichael 

Quite interesting but not anything I've seen before.  I get it when the four digits relate to a date, 2017, 1999 etc. but I think it becomes very unclear and must only be used by very few people in other situations.  At least 20 years as a Civil Engineer and I've never seen this, nor would I have accepted its use.

However, all that is irrelevant if this is what your client wants!

I suggest you allow Studio to do what it wants and then search and replace the target numbers afterwards using regular expressions to get what you want.  Or use the regex autosuggest provider to do it on the fly as you work... although I'd do it afterwards so you can more easily QA check to make sure your numbers are correct etc.

If you want a better solution then please suggest it in the ideas site as there is no other way it'll happen -  http://ideas.sdl.com

Regards

Paul

Hi Paul Carmichael,

As you pointed out, the format you want has been an international standard since 2003 ("Current standards" section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark).

I also wanted to change Studio's number and date formats in the past. It was one of the first things I wanted to do when I started using Studio many years ago.

But SDL doesn't seem to have the money to hire the enough coders. So you learn to live with the bugs and limitations and figure out workarounds.

And you curse when a new release comes out and new problems are added due to side-effects of the changes.

So I completely sympathize with you. We all have changes that would make Studio better for us.

If there were more Studio users, then SDL would have more money for coders. But there are probably many users who think Studio is already too expensive.

So if SDL invested in more coders to handle bugs and rewrite large sections of old code, would it attract more users and increase its revenues to pay off the investment?

Could SDL increase the price of Studio because it was now a better product?

Apparently this is a risk SDL is not willing to take.

Best regards,
Bruce Campbell
ASAP Language Services

Unknown said:

Seems a strange question, given that I wrote " If you look at any international (recent) standard, the numbers will be in the format I just mentioned. It is a worldwide standard. Has been for quite a while." Everybody uses this standard. It was decided ages ago to completely ban thousands separators of anything other than a space. Either a comma or a dot can be used for decimal, but a dot is preferred. I'm flabbergasted that anyone in this industry wouldn't know this.

I guess what really matters here is what you want, and not what the standard is (whether this is what everyone uses or not).  Studio draws it's language settings from your computer operating system.  An example of the sort of thing this means would be here (this is actually out of date now and is only W7 but the settings have not changed much):

https://www.microsoft.com/resources/msdn/goglobal/default.mspx?submitted=0809&OS=Windows%207

Looking at Oracle we see something similar:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html

I don't know how old that is, but it's clear that it's still quite normal to handle numbers in this way.

One thing I would agree with Bruce on is that we should support a more flexible way to handle numbers.  I've wanted this for a long time, and this is because it doesn't matter at all what the standards are, it only matters what your client expects to see, and what you have been given in the source.  We're not here to judge the way documentation is put together.  But we don't have it right now so I'm trying to be honest and helpful with you so you can handle the task you have been given.  There's no point in me doing anything else.  That's why I wondered about your response.

In my opinion the best approach when faced with something like this is the following:

1. Let Studio do what it wants as long as the numbers are being transposed correctly (forget the formatting for now).  This way you get accuracy where it's most important and consistency
2. Once the job is complete run a search and replace on the numbers across your project using something like the sdlxliff toolkit which lets you tackle the whole project in one go
   https://multifarious.filkin.com/2017/01/14/revisiting-the-toolkit/

Then submit your idea, or vote for the ones already there.  The only way things will change is if enough people make their voice heard where it counts.

...and here is the idea to vote for: 

https://community.sdl.com/solutions/language/translationproductivity/translation-productivity-ideas/i/trados-studio-ideas/autolocalisation-of-numbers

Unknown said:

...and here is the idea to vote for: 

https://community.sdl.com/solutions/language/translationproductivity/translation-productivity-ideas/i/trados-studio-ideas/autolocalisation-of-numbers

Exactly... and yet it only has 15 votes!  Considering how much noise these problems generate I'm amazed this isn't at the top of the list!

Unknown said:

Exactly... and yet it only has 15 votes!  Considering how much noise these problems generate I'm amazed this isn't at the top of the list!

The reason is VERY simple - vast majority of Studio users doesn't go to the forum, not mentioning some nicely hidden voting...

Unless you bring it right in front in the users' noses - i.e. put it INSIDE STUDIO - you WON'T get more than few dozens of votes in ANY idea. And even putting it in Studio doesn't ensure any extra improvement.

It's SDL's turn - SDL must show some drastic improvement in fixing long-standing bugs and implementing improvements people are waiting for for years.
And only then you might hope for some more users' involvement...
Peopel were reporting bugs and asking for improvements (NOT new features, just improvements) for years and they got basically nothing... so there is hardly to expect that they will continue...

Unknown said:

Unless you bring it right in front in the users' noses - i.e. put it INSIDE STUDIO - you WON'T get more than few dozens of votes in ANY idea. And even putting it in Studio doesn't ensure any extra improvement.

I don't think you can say they got nothing.  Nobody ever talks about the things they got, only the things they didn't.

The links to the community are in Studio.  Click on the Help ribbon and there is an array of things people never use:

The community itself was revamped only a few weeks ago to try and make it easier for people to find these things, and the Ideas section is on the main navigation menu of the community.

It's always SDLs turn and for you to say we've done nothing over the years is absolute nonsense.  I think we spend our time trying to balance a difficult task which you guys often diminish to us not caring, having no developers, having useless developers, poor management etc.  If you're interested, and can travel to Cluj at your own expense, I'd be happy to give you a tour and you can make your feelings clear to the teams there.  I'm sure they'd all welcome your wisdom.

Unknown said:

The links to the community are in Studio.  Click on the Help ribbon and there is an array of things people never use:

So why is it there if people never use it? ;-)
What I mean by "in front of their nose" is right in the Home screen. But the actual content, not just a tiny icon with a link. The actual list of ideas... The column displayed on the right side of https://community.sdl.com/ideas/translation-productivity-ideas/. Why it couldn't be displayed on the right side of Home page? Similarly to how the good old Studio 2011 GUI displayed the "latest news" list...

Unknown said:

The community itself was revamped only a few weeks ago to try and make it easier for people to find these things, and the Ideas section is on the main navigation menu of the community.

But again - people DON'T go even to the Community, so...

Unknown said:

It's always SDLs turn and for you to say we've done nothing over the years is absolute nonsense.

I did NOT say SDL did nothing.
What I'm saying is that from my long-term perspective SDL did lot of things the users did not ask for. And did not do lot of things the users did ask for (Alignment editor usability being one small example ;-) )...
And I'm expressing my personal opinion why it's like that. That opinion is based on my experiences from multiple companies of various sizes. And I hope that it's not a crime to express own opinion.

Unknown said:

What I mean by "in front of their nose" is right in the Home screen. But the actual content, not just a tiny icon with a link. The actual list of ideas... The column displayed on the right side of https://community.sdl.com/ideas/translation-productivity-ideas/. Why it couldn't be displayed on the right side of Home page? Similarly to how the good old Studio 2011 GUI displayed the "latest news" list...

In fact I agree with you.  We actually had an internal competition last year to come up with an idea that development would do and a group of us actually build a demo of exactly what you are saying.. and more!  We didn't win :-(

Unknown said:

I did NOT say SDL did nothing.
What I'm saying is that from my long-term perspective SDL did lot of things the users did not ask for.

This is not true.  Of course we do many things that users don't ask for... users don't always know what the best way forward is... but most of what we do on a day to day basis is 100% based on what users want.  We support a wide range of users and products and it's easily enough to give us more work than we can handle as it comes in.  Every item in Jira (our development database) has a list of customer references against them in addition to the new things we plan.

Unknown said:

And I'm expressing my personal opinion why it's like that. That opinion is based on my experiences from multiple companies of various sizes. And I hope that it's not a crime to express own opinion.

Of course not.  The same goes for me I hope?

Unknown said:

We actually had an internal competition last year to come up with an idea that development would do and a group of us actually build a demo of exactly what you are saying.. and more!  We didn't win :-(

It's good to hear that my ideas are not that off... ;-)
And it's not good to hear that such logical idea lost the battle... It then opens a question "why?! what was THAT problematic on that?!"
I belive that even putting the ideas list instead of the basically useless Latest News (of course with appropriate title, like Improvements Ideas... or maybe Studio Vox Populi ;-) ) would do...

 But perhaps it means there is no actual will at certain levels to have users' ideas "polluting" the development plans?

Unknown said:

 But perhaps it means there is no actual will at certain levels to have users' ideas "polluting" the development plans?

Not at all.  The competition was across all of the SDL products and there were a lot of fantastic ideas, so we just didn't make it this time.  There's always the opportunity to do it through the appstore team, and we may pick it up if we get through all the things ahead of it.

It's easy to see SDL as the company that only does SDL Trados Studio.  But we're not and one of the things that has consumed much of the resource we have for a while now has been integration efforts between products, trying to rewrite lots of work under the hood to simplify and make development easier and faster in the future.  You don't see any of this so I don't expect you to know, but I do think we are very close to a completely different kind of development organisation in the near future.  Getting all these things to work well together is no small task.