Last month we talked about memoQ 2015; this time it's Trados Studio's  turn to talk about version 2015! The new version of Trados Studio and MultiTerm 2015 will be released later this month, and the new version of SDL GroupShare comes out in August.

I had a meeting with Daniel Brockmann last week to talk about the new Studio (and briefly about MultiTerm and GroupShare), and there certainly are some things in the new version that are very interesting for existing users and new users alike. Since it's a paid upgrade, existing users will have to decide whether it's enough to shell out the applicable upgrade fees, but I imagine that many will take the plunge. And for the newbies, the new version looks quite a bit better than the last.

Before we commence, however, note that I haven't had a chance to try out the new version for myself. The one feature I asked Daniel to test for me unfortunately didn't work (more on that below).

SDL likes its release themes in threesomes: Trados Studio 2014 was heralded as "easier, faster, smarter" (hey, who wouldn't want all of those?), and the 2015 version promises "productivity, personalization and quality" -- also sounds great! I'll take it!

I hope you enjoyed this review. Stay tuned for a review of Trados Studio 2016 in about a year!

OK -- just kidding...

What do these categories stand for?

Let's start with "quality." In previous journals I talked about quality assessment models, in particular the "Multidimensional Quality Metrics" model -- MQM for short -- and the TAUS Dynamic Quality Framework (DQF) (Premium edition subscribers can find these articles in editions 234 and 236). Along with the now relatively defunct LISA QA model and SAE J2450 (which was developed for the automobile industry and is used by SDL internally), these are being made available in all new versions of Trados Studio. In practice, this means that you can evaluate a translation on a per-segment basis according to these fairly complex schemes (and any segment can have as many different types of evaluation within the same scheme as you want). You can then generate handsome reports on the basis of that evaluation. I'm not aware of any other tool that offers all four of those QA models in a predefined manner; for instance, memoQ has all but MQM, and XTM has MQM but not the others. (Breaking news at press time: here's the long-awaited announcement that MQM and DQF will merge.)

Another interesting development is "Retrofit" -- essentially the same feature that memoQ calls "monolingual review." This allows you to export a translated document into its native file format (Office formats or InDesign, for example), make changes, and then reimport it into Trados Studio to overwrite the target side in the translation editor. Since the changes may involve some structural changes (such as added or deleted segments) or unwanted edits, you'll have to review them in Trados' alignment editor before committing them to the project. Before opening the alignment editor, you'll see a dialog in which you have to "Set the quality threshold for retrofit updates." This sounds about as ominous as the "Alignment quality value" sliding scale that was introduced with the non-reviewed alignment in Studio 2014 (and later sort of buried). The idea is that a document with up to 30% changes (the default value) can easily import, whereas if you have more changes than that you will have to change the sliding scale. Make sense to you? No, me neither. But I guess it's all right as long as we can leave the value where it is and import the reviewed file.

Still, I think this is a very welcome feature because it allows you to present files to clients, lawyers, or anyone else in a way they can handle and without any file format restrictions (unless the source files were bilingual files, including XLIFF).

Another added feature is AutoCorrect. Since SDL thought this should have been done long ago, they did it for a whopping 130+ languages, an identical number to the languages that MS Office supports -- which is not surprising since that's where they got the AutoCorrect lists. I asked Daniel whether I'm allowed to share that Office was the source of the long and helpful lists, and he was fine with that, so SDL must have found an agreement with Microsoft that allows them to do that. That's nice. If your language is not among those supported, you can manually add your own list of AutoCorrect entries. If you want to exchange your lists with others (or with another computer of yours), you can export and import through an XML format. What's missing yet is a feature to add new entries as you translate, but I'm certain that this will be in the next update. Or there'll be an app for that.

Mentioning the theme of my life lately provides a good segue to Trados Studio's productivity features (the more productive, the more time for naps...). Here are some other translator-friendly enhancements:

AutoSuggest -- the automatically suggested portions that come up as you're typing -- has been substantially enhanced. While previously it used only termbase entries and entries from the non-dynamically-generated AutoSuggest dictionaries, it now also uses subsegments through automated concordance of the TMs and suggestions of MT subsegments. I'm really glad about this. AutoSuggest dictionaries are okay, but they don't reflect your current state of translation (unless you continuously regenerate them, which really isn't reasonable). The new subsegmenting feature should give you immediate benefits from what you just sent to the translation memory (remember, I haven't tried it out myself).

The MT feature is essentially the existing MT AutoSuggest app directly integrated into the core product with some additional improvements (such as having several MT engines come up with suggestions of subsegments simultaneously). I have often maintained that this is really one of the major and essential steps toward using machine translation in a more productive and translator-friendly way. (The next step in this particular development will be to look more deeply into the machine translation engines by using not just the first suggestion but many others as well.)

There are a couple other apps that have now been integrated. (Allow me to digress just a little: When I mentioned to SDL several years ago that one of the big benefits of the OpenExchange app store is that SDL can see what users really want by just looking at the download numbers and comments and then integrating them into the product, I caused a lot of frustration for one SDL representative, who thought this was preposterous. Love you, too, Paul.) AnyTM Translation Provider is one such an app -- now a feature -- that "allows you to use any translation memory with SDL Trados Studio, regardless of whether its source and target languages match the languages of your translation project." In practice, this means that a) you'll have to be a little careful not to mess up your TMs and b) it's going to finally be a cakewalk to import that Canadian French TM into your existing European French TM.

Also nice is the now integrated SDL Trados Studio Symbols app, which does exactly what it sounds like -- including, for instance, those smart quotes that are so important to many languages.

One productivity feature that I was super-excited about was the enhanced PDF filter. If you have read this journal for some time you know that I've been less than enthusiastic about most translation environment-internal PDF filters. They always sound great, but in reality they're often more frustrating than helpful unless you have very simple PDF documents.

But clearly one way to enhance these filters is by adding OCR -- optical character recognition -- to the feature set. ABBYY SmartCAT has done this with its ABBYY-owned PDF/OCR technology, and Wordfast Anywhere has accomplished it as well. Now Trados Studio has also started to offer this feature by utilizing the OCR (for English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish) of Studio's existing integrated third-party PDF conversion tool Solid Documents. I sent an image-based PDF document to Daniel to run through Studio to see what we would get and ... it didn't work. We'll see what this means for other documents (according to Daniel, some beta test users love the feature and others hate it), but it looks like there is some room for improvement.

By the way, as I was preparing to get the document back from Daniel, I also sent the same PDF through other supporting tools and got really interesting results: Wordfast Anywhere did a very fast and really remarkably good job, ABBYY SmartCat did a rather mediocre job, Adobe's ExportPDF service also did a poor job, and ABBYY PDF Transformer did a terrible job. What does that mean? That Wordfast Anywhere might really be a great -- and free -- way to transform image-based PDFs (or, as they call it rather fittingly, "dead PDFs") to editable Word documents, no matter whether you end up using Wordfast for translation or not.

One more thing about productivity for Studio: There is a new alternative Word filter that is more forgiving when there are what Trados might consider structural problems with Word documents resulting in Trados' inability to export them properly. With the new filter, the documents export and you're then pointed to problematic sections. This was done particularly in response to tools trainer and consultant extraordinaire Angelika Zerfass' nagging of SDL to do something like that. Danke schön, Angelika!

Most of you have probably guessed what's new under "personalization." Yes, the ribbon is now completely customizable -- even to the point of being able to add new ribbon tabs and anything else your heart desires. For existing users of the old "dead" ribbon, this definitely is a nice plus.

Also, the icons have been completely updated. Kind of what memoQ did in its 2015 version, but I have to say that I prefer SDL's icons -- they're much closer to what the computer user knows from other Windows programs.

There you have it.

No, wait. MultiTerm is also being updated with the same personalization features, as well as better individualization for larger organizations through individual and shareable templates.

Another change for MultiTerm (and Trados Studio) is the much wider number of supported languages. The upcoming Windows 10, which is fully supported of course, will provide input tools for 500 languages (and with sublanguages, a total of 800 languages -- five different keyboards for Tashelhit/Shilha, anyone?), and so will the new SDL products.

And that should be it. 

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In the last couple of Tool Box Journals I mentioned an upcoming webinar I was conducting with your help. It was a continuation of two webinars from 2014 where we looked at some specific areas in translation technology that needed improvement. This time we tried to go a step further, attempting to describe the "Next Big Thing" that we could make out on the horizon of translation technology.

Did we find it? I'm not sure, but we got fantastic feedback from very generous and thoughtful tool developers (Across, Cafetran, Déjà Vu, memoQ, Memsource, OmegaT, SmartCAT, Star Transit, Trados Studio, Wordbee, Wordfast, and XTM) about our questions.

I compiled all the answers into a fairly comprehensive document that I'm sharing here -- if you're at all interested in translation technology it's a must-read -- and you can also view a recording of the webinar (in which many of the tool developers actually participated).

It might sound strange, but I felt particularly thankful for the people around me after this event. 

Across T-Time - Free Webinar Series for LSPs

The free T-Time webinars are designed to provide valuable information to help LSPs use Across more efficiently. You will also have the opportunity to expand your Across knowledge, share your experience and feedback with other Across users and interact directly with the Across team on more complex topics to increase your Across proficiency. 

Join the webinars and let's get this par-tea started! 

Here are some interesting bits and pieces.

The European Language Industry Association (Elia) is organizing an event next February in Barcelona titled "Together" -- and true to its name, the goal is to bring professional translators and translation companies together to talk about common interests (or maybe find out where interests diverge). The call for papers is out now. (Disclaimer: I'm on the program committee.)

Another event that I'm looking forward to is happening this very weekend in Monterey, California. InterpretAmerica has asked me to speak at their event. Why me? Certainly not because of my vast knowledge of interpretation, but because I know something about the development of technology in the world of translation. As many of you know, technology is becoming increasingly relevant for interpreters, and perhaps there are things that interpreters can learn from the sometimes painful relationship translators have/have had with technology - at least that's the idea of my presentation. You can read an interview about it right here. If you can't make it to Monterey, you can follow the whole conference online.

Let's switch to non-event news.

A few journals ago we discussed the need to bring dictionary data right into our translation environments -- maybe via TBX. Believe it or not, one (yet-to-be-unnamed) company will offer exactly that in the near future. This will be another important step forward!

And here is news about a little step backward: CopyFlow -- the tool that processes hard-to-translate formats into XLIFF formats and back -- will no longer be available for upcoming versions of QuarkXPress. Why? Too little interest by users. This might just be a sign of the times as far as the waning popularity of Quark, but I'm afraid that's not the whole story -- maybe we just weren't vocal enough, or if we were vocal, we didn't put our money where our mouths were.

Have some time to spare?

Ever wonder which translation environment technology UN translators are using? They actually now have developed their own tool. It's called eLUNa, and you can have a glance at it right here.

Since you seem to have time to look at that, here's another fantastic and fun (and challenging!) way to kill time: Could you quickly translate this for me? (360 points by Peter? Yeah, right! Cheater!)

And now your help is requested.

I would like to ask you for some feedback in an attempt to see how translation environment tools could become better tools for editors and reviewers. I asked the talented Itzaris Weyman, who works exclusively as an editor and reviewer, for her comments, and she focused primarily on these very interesting relationship and communication aspects:

As an editor/reviewer, I would like to see the full integration of the reviewer function in a TEnT's production work flow. Besides an additional column with Track Changes functionality, there is a need to address the translator/editor relationship via a comment panel (similar to Adobe Acrobat's Comment function) that would allow the reviewer to communicate/back up the rationale for his/her changes. Last but not least, it would be helpful if questions/answers to questions about jobs were easily available to all production team members via an inquiry function/report. This would be much more efficient in terms of easily identifying the segment in question and avoiding the repetition of questions, plus it would eliminate the number of emails needed to clarify/address such issues.

Would you mind sharing any other comments if you have some? Thanks so much, and enjoy the summer! 

SDL Trados Studio 2015 is nearly here!

SDL Trados Studio 2015 is on its way - delivering the best possible translation experience to meet your needs.

The latest release brings new ways to increase your productivity, ensure the highest levels of translation quality and the ability to personalize your Studio to suit you.

Learn more about SDL Trados Studio 2015 Freelance - Perfect for Freelancer Translators

Learn more about SDL Trados Studio 2015 Professional - Perfect for Businesses 

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