Python 3 script for Deepl Translator Pro Among the MT (machine translation) providers Deepl is the new kid on the block, but it has been making waves ever since it appeared. Frankly speaking, as soon as I found out how good the Deepl MT is, I actually abandoned Google Translate. If I am to pay for a service, I'll pay for the one which delivers better results. Before Deepl announced the paid Pro service, there was (and still is) the free Python module called pydeepl. It used to work until recently, but the ‘backdoor’ making it possible to programmatically get free translations in the era of the paid service has recently been plugged. (For the record, I subscribed to the paid service as soon as it appeared). There also is a Deepl Translator plugin for SDL Trados Studio. It is quite simple and almost no settings, except for the API key, can be entered. My Python script for pydeepl was more sophisticated, for example I added a replacement table for cases where I did not like Deep...
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USING A CAT TOOL WITHOUT SPENDING A PENNY OR A CENT So, here I am again after four months. And I wouldn't be writing this, if one of my clients wasn't doing maintenance of their online translation system, preventing me from downloading files for offline work at the weekend. Nowadays, translators working with translation agencies are often asked what CAT tool they use and/or are even expected to use a CAT tool. A CAT tool, regardless of the vendor, is your translation environment. It converts the original to its internal format (more often than not it is a flavor of the xliff format), it helps you re-use your translations by saving them to a translation memory, and helps you be consistent with terminology, by offering the glossary or termbase functionality). When you are done translating, it converts your translation back to the original format. These are the most basic functions of a CAT tool. But what if you're just starting out as a freelancer and cannot af...
XSLT to the Rescue
XSLT TO THE RESCUE The immense amount of work that I have had in the recent months kept me away from this blog for much longer than I would wish, but also forced me to brush up some skills that I started acquiring long ago. I had so much work that I was forced to subcontract a large part of it. One of the projects that I needed to subcontract required that the translator followed the provided terminology strictly. I had a multiterm termbase, but how do I provide that to a translator who only uses Cafetran? The termbase had entries in many languages and also entries flagged as blacklisted. Fortunately, you can export the whole termbase from Multiterm in tbx (termbase exchange) format. Cafetran can read TBX, but the file still contained all the redundant languages and blacklisted terms, and as much as I like Cafetran, it is too dumb for that. But there is this thing called XSLT, which is used to transform XML files into other XML files or other formats. And TBX is basically ...
Macros, scripts, coding In the early years of my freelancing I worked mostly in Microsoft Word. I either did not use any CAT tool or I used the free version of Wordfast (now called Wordfast Classic) which is a set of macros in itself. I was looking for ways to make my tedious work of translating in Microsoft Word a bit easier. Soon I found out about macros. Initially I created them by recording, then I learned more about coding them. Now, though most of my translation work is done outside of Microsoft Word, in CAT tools, I still have most of the macros I created more than 10 years ago. Many of them fell into disuse, but there is one that I use regularly when I need to do some work in Word. It is the macro I called ‘TextFieldFit’. When I draw a text box, I run the macro to reduce the inner margins, remove the border around the box and reduce the font size. I use text boxes to translate drawings that did not get imported into my preferred CAT tool, the SDL Trados Studio. I...
SDL Studio Terminjector Plugin - Reactivated
SDL Studio Terminjector Plugin - Reactivated The original Terminjector plugin by Tommi Nieminen was repackaged for Studio 2017 (I guess the installer will also work for Studio 2015). Even though some of its functionalities, similar to match repair, are now also available natively in Studio, or through the Regex Autosuggest plugin, I believe it is still worth giving it a spin, because there’s always more than one way to skin a CAT. The original Terminjector documentation is still available here: http://www.tntranslations.com/TermInjectorHelp.html and you can find the installer for the new version in the SDL AppStore . Below I have copied my e-mail discussion with the plugin’s author from the end of 2012, when I was just beginning my adventure with SDL Trados Studio. I believe it may be useful not only for me, because it clarifies some things covered in the original instructions. Regexp to replace hyphen with n-dash 45 messages Piotr <piotrbienkowski@gm...
Doing the maths to get paid The Christian Holy Scripture says that the “ worker is worthy of his (or her) wages ”. I think you will agree with this obvious statement irrespective of your religion, if any. What's more, even most clients (fortunately) agree with it. But sometimes you have to walk the extra mile to arrive at the bottom line that you should get paid. In Poland, as opposed to other countries, many clients still pay by the standard page, which is often defined as 1800 characters, including spaces. Some count the source text, some the translated text. One of my clients pays by the standard page, but they recently discovered the savings that CAT tools can bring them, and so they wanted to pay less for repetitions, fuzzy matches and internal fuzzy matches, still paying by the page. It is a good client and a regular payer, so I though to myself, why not. SDL Trados Studio provides excellent analysis reports, even with character counts, but unfortunately the...
THE PERILS OF CSV WARNING: Highly technical content. Hit the back button, if you're faint of heart. ;-) Some translators will cringe away from the technicalities of their job. But if you work with CAT tools, then by definition you are prepared to work with many different file formats. And there is no getting away from the technical side of this job. Here's my experience with a certain CSV. It was clearly exported from a content management system. Only some columns were intended for translation, and one of these columns contained very lengthy strings of text with HTML and CSS tags. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you want to view a CSV file and prepare it for translation in a CAT tool such as SDL Studio? Excel, of course. But then it turns out that the wizard for importing a CSV file is far from intuitive. You have to set the content type for each column one by one. For comparison, in LibreOffice Calc you can select all columns in the wizard and ch...