This last week I had a rather lengthy demo of the up-and-coming version of SDL Trados Studio and I have been playing since with a beta version.

I told the SDL folks after the demo that I admired them for their chutzpa in coming out with something so different. IT IS REALLY DIFFERENT. I think it's going to be a good tool, but what interests me even more is how well it will be adapted. Because, quite frankly, the switch from either SDLX or Trados to the new SDL Trados Studio is going to be (almost) as big as switching to a completely different tool. So I am very excited, and I know that the SDL guys are excited. The competitors should be, too.

Of course, it might still be a few months before the new version is released -- and SDL would be smart to wait until most kinks are out of the system before releasing it, I would think.

Here are a few of the highlights: SDL Trados Studio is much, much more aligned with industry standard formats. The termbase exchange standard TBX will now be supported, the TM exchange format TMX will continue to be supported, but most dramatically, the actual translation format for all formats will be XLIFF, the XML-based exchange format that was originally intended as a localization file exchange format but has now become THE translation file exchange format. (This means that other TEnTs with good XLIFF support will be able to support the new version of Trados easily.)

So, no more TTX files or bilingual Word files. In fact, no more TagEditor or Word. Everything in SDL Trados Studio, except the terminology maintenance, will be done within one interface -- just like most other tools have done for a long time. So you can view and maintain your TMs -- which, by the way, have a completely new format and are stored in SQLite databases in the freelance editions -- in the same window from which you access all file filters, project management tasks, and of course the actual translation in the so-called Editor pane. This has a tabular form that first reminded me of something between Across and Déjà Vu/Idiom WorldServer Translation Workbench. But when I looked a little closer I realized that there are some unique features about it that prevent it from being simply a clone of something else.

Here are some of those unique features: There is a feature called AutoSuggest, which, just as the name would make you think, suggests terms as you type. This is different from, say, the monolingual technique employed by Excel or browsers or even the new version of Transit (which just looks at the target language of the existing reference material for that particular feature) because it is a bilingual process. With a method that is similar to the TermExtract procedure of the current version, SDL Trados Studio is able to build a bilingual AutoSuggest dictionary from existing TMs that it then uses to interactively suggest terms as you translate. So, if you have the German sentence "Die Katze ist schwarz" and its English translation "The cat is black" in your TM, AutoSuggest would suggest "Katze" as soon as you enter the first letter K. This could become an enormous time saver, and I would not be surprised to see some competitors quickly come up with similar features. (The way the program is configured right now, the freelance version will not be able to build the AutoSuggest dictionaries but it will be able to use externally created ones. Languages that are not yet supported with this feature are Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.)

One feature that has not been available in the freelance edition is the in-context matching ("PerfectMatch"), and it looks like this will now be available for everyone, albeit in a different manner: It will not be done on the basis of previously translated files, but instead, like other products, on the basis of the TM.

Another cool feature is an on-the fly way of formatting that is very reminiscent of how Across applies formatting: You are presented with the formatting options represented in the target, from which you either choose one or apply a completely new formatting. The Editor displays common formatting such as bold or italics as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and more complex formatting with tags.

Also, the quality assurance features where Trados -- along with MemoQ -- had a real advantage over the competition are now used real-time, which means that you don't check when you are done but errors are displayed to you as you translate.

And since we just discussed keyboard shortcuts in the last few newsletters, there are many completely new keyboard shortcuts, but in general the old Trados ones are also applicable. Plus, it is possible to load an external XML-based user profile that contains customized shortcuts.

One thing that will create headaches is that this new version will not be backward compatible. Of course, it will be possible to import old TMs or translate TTX files, but once it's in the new version the only way to go back is through TMX or other common exchange processes. I could imagine that this will cause a certain amount of frustration. On the other hand, I cannot see how this could be solved otherwise with such a different product.

As I said, it shows guts for the market leader to throw nearly everything overboard and go back to the drawing board. It looks as though they have created a superior product in almost every way. Their challenge now may be educating their user group and convincing it of the product's superiority.