English to French IT Translator Blog

Switching back from Reviewed/In Sign-off status in Trados Studio 2011

I had yet another issue with Trados Studio 2011 recently. For a translation project, I was asked to deliver files with the “Translated” status. So I used this tip to make sure all was fine, and analyzed all of my project files again to update their statuses.

Problem: some of them still appeared with the “In Sign-Off” or “Reviewed” status in the project view, although the files had the right status when I opened them. As it turned out, the status of files is also stored in .sdlproj files, but in a very different way – and no simple find/replace trick can help with it.

If you ever have this issue after completing your translation, create a new project and then import the files (.sdlxliff files in the target language folder of your previous project) you modified following the tip mentioned above. Trados should recalculate the respective statuses of your files and display them correctly. A little tedious, but it does the trick.

By Anthony Teixeira | February 18, 2014 | Trados |

Just Completed Big Software (Cloud/Big Data) Project

What a week! I have been extremely busy working on a large software company for one the very biggest IT companies in the world. The theme was mainly cloud/big data, backup and recovery. It was an interesting project, technical but not overly complex.

The biggest issues I had were related to -will this surprise anybody?- Trados. This software can save me significant time on small to mid-size projects, but it becomes so slow and prone to crash when you try to do something a little more complex with it. If I count the time I spent installing/learning the thing, the crashes, the time it takes just to start working on a project and saving large files (despite quite reasonable machinery), the total time may very well be higher than the time the software actually saves me. And from what I have been reading, Trados 2014 doesn’t really address these issues (or not yet at least).

Anyway! I’m done with my tasks for the week and I am getting ready for a little rest home – the town is covered in snow today, no chance to go very far by this weather.

By Anthony Teixeira | February 8, 2014 | Uncategorized |

Trados Studio Packages (.sdlppx) Taking Time to Load

SDL Trados Studio can be quite slow to execute some tasks that shouldn’t be all that complex.

Take packages (.sdlppx files) for example. They’re essentially a bunch of project files bundled together – nothing too different from what you’d get in a .zip or .rar archive. Yet, if you have a rather large package, for example with a massive TM or a very high number of files to translate, Trados will take a huge amount of time or just freeze while trying to open the whole thing. I have no idea what takes it so long, I assume it’s just one of the many under-optimized features of the software.

There’s no easy fix to that issue to my knowledge. In such situations, I usually get back to my client and just ask them to send me the project files in a compressed archive rather than a Trados package. Archives extract themselves infinitely quicker and .sdlproj files also open up very quickly.

If you know a better way to speed up the whole process, I’d be delighted to know about it!

By Anthony Teixeira | January 31, 2014 | Trados |

How to Solve Error 31102 “Key too long” in Trados 2007 (.iix file issue)

I love Dropbox, it’s a saved my translator’s life or at least made it much simpler a great number of times. But today it caused me a little bit of trouble. While I was translating, the software decided to lock one of my TM’s files (the .iix file to be exact), which caused the Error 31102, “Key too long” to appear in Trados 2007.

Fortunately, I managed to solve the problem by reorganizing the TM in Workbench (you need to open the TM in exclusive mode to be able to use the menu option). After doing a little bit of research, it looks like it also helped a few people who had the same problem.

If this doesn’t work, you can also try to export the TM as a .tmx file and import it again in a new TM.

If none of these tips worked, the only solution to keep your translation work going smoothly would be to find a backup of your TM and update it by cleaning the files you were working on. Not the ideal solution, but at least you will be able to save some of the strings you had translated.

By Anthony Teixeira | January 19, 2014 | Trados |

Importing an Excel File as a Translation Memory (for Trados and others)

Sometimes my clients send me references materials as “Translation memories” in Excel files. Usually, it will be pretty simple files with column A being the source and B the target translation.

If you work with such files and want to import them in Trados, or at least put them in an exploitable format, you can do it in a pretty straightforward way with XBench.

1. If your Excel file has more than two columns, remove everything not necessary and just make sure you have source in column A and original translation in B

2. Save your Excel file as a Tab-delimited text file (.txt). You should be able to find it in the Save as… options

3. Open XBench, start a project and make sure to add your freshly created .txt file to the project

4. Still in XBench, go to Tools, then Export Items… There, choose TMX memory as the format, choose a name and location for the exported file and don’t forget to add a source and a target language in the list using the same code Trados would use (for example EN-US or EN-GB). You can do a bit of filtering here if you’d like, otherwise just leave the other options as they are

5. That’s it! Now you should be able to import the .tmx translation memory into Trados and other tools that support this format

By Anthony Teixeira | January 11, 2014 | Tips, Translation memory (TM) |

Translation Projects for 2014

First of all, a Happy New Year to all! 2013 has been a fantastic year for me as a translator, I feel I have developed so much as a professional. I have been marketing my services more aggressively (launching this website being only the tip of the iceberg), officially registered my business rather than working as an individual, and just improved as a translator. I learned about new tools that make my life easier (AutoHotKey would be on the top of that list) but also allow me to deliver better translations and avoid silly mistakes (XBench and Antidote are incredible tools for that).

My professional projects for 2014? Trying to deliver better translations and reaching out to more people are always goals, of course. Concretely, I will try to be more efficient with administrative tasks to be able to spend more time on translation/marketing. Improving this website is also somewhere near the top of the list. I will have to get to grips with Trados 2014 and maybe try out a few new tools to stay on the top of my game. Perfecting my Japanese skills and being more active locally is something I should be doing all the time, but I will try to do more of it. Sounds like a good start, and this is only for my professional projects, as a translator. As an individual, there are even more exciting things ahead!

By Anthony Teixeira | January 8, 2014 | Uncategorized |

Back for the New Year

After a few weeks spent in family in France, I’m back for the New Year celebrations in Japan.

This has been a fantastic year for me, working on fascinating translation/localization projects, and I am looking forward to some more for 2014. There are lots of personal projects ahead, and developing my translation services is only one of them.

Thanks again to all those who supported me through 2013!

By Anthony Teixeira | December 30, 2013 | Uncategorized |

Current projects

This week, I have again been working on video game localization. This time it was an adventure game, full of humour and language-related jokes. Difficult but extremely fun to localize – I had to use my artistic side a little more than I usually do, and I have to say it was a lot of fun! I’d definitely love to have a look at the game once it’s available for French-speaking players.

Other than that, I started working on translations for a large Japanese health care company. It’s always nice to work for companies you hear about a lot or whose commercials are on TV daily.

When I am not working on these projects, I am preparing for my upcoming trip to France. Packing everything and, most importantly, making sure everything is ready for my little kid to enjoy the plane trip is incredibly time consuming. Can’t wait to be back home!

By Anthony Teixeira | November 27, 2013 | Uncategorized |

Translated IT/Web Contents for a Major SNS

This week I had the chance and the honor to work on the translation of a framework for one of the most popular SNS out there. It was a very interesting translation, quite technical with a large number of fairly recent terms. Working to translate them in French was a nice challenge and definitely helped me refresh some of my coding knowledge (namely, JavaScript and CSS).

I also worked on a few more classical projects, including software translation and localization of a printer manual. I have a few game localization projects upcoming, and after that, on Dec. 5th, I will be heading to France to prepare for the Christmas holidays.

So, a pretty busy end of year again, but who isn’t busy these days?

By Anthony Teixeira | November 23, 2013 | Uncategorized |

Video Game Localization Rush!

Christmas is always an exciting time for gamers from all over the world. This is even more true this year with the release of two new gaming systems: Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4.

With these releases and the large flow of games coming for existing systems, there are lots of English to French video game localization projects I get to work on, whether this is for translation or proofreading. Although the emergence of smartphone/tablet and social games has transformed the industry, one thing that hasn’t changed is the incredibly busy pre-Christmas holidays time. Looking at the sales charts peaks at that time of the year, you can’t really blame editors for that.

Having been a very active gamer myself in a previous life, it’s always an immense pleasure to translate games and imagine players enjoying titles that I have worked on. It’s funny how game localization differs to other types of translations I do. To me, pre-Christmas time means the return of “character limitations” (also known as “would you please butcher your language to make this fit?”), manufacturer terminologies and the like. It’s a bit of a different world, and this diversity allows me to enjoy my job and fight routine.

By Anthony Teixeira | November 18, 2013 | Uncategorized |