As you might know from my birthday wishlist, I wanted to buy the new version of Trados Studio. Well, I am generally very much into the idea of fulfiling my dreams, so I decided to use the special offer for SDL vendors and upgrade from Studio 2011 to Studio 2015 for EUR 99. After a month of using the new version, I think that it is certainly worth the money I spent. The new features really make me translate faster. I won’t bore you with describing them all – you will find the necessary details on the product site. I just want to list 5 features that I find the most useful from my point of view as a freelance translator.
- To look for a term using the Concordance search function, you just have to highlight the word and press Concordance Search button or F3.
I use Concordance Search function all the time, as I want to keep terminological consistency in the project on the highest possible level and the termbases (TB) delivered by clients and translation agencies don’t always contain all important terms. Well, no wonder as updating the termbases tends to be pretty time-consuming… - But no longer in Studio 2015! Now, if you want to quickly add a term to the TB (without editing it), you just highlight both terms (in source and target file) and choose the function Quick Add New Term (CTRL + Shift + F2).
Now, I update my TBs when I re-read my translations. In the previous version of Trados Studio, it took too much time and I frequently skipped this stage in order to review faster. Moreover, I frequently forgot to save the term before adding another one, which caused the previously added term to be deleted. - AnyTM feature
I would never come up with a function like this. I really have to add it to my post on My Dream CAT Tool, because it is extremely useful. Why? Using this feature, you can add to your project those translation memories that have a different language flavour or combination. I will give you an example: I usually translate medical texts from English into Polish (manuals, device specifications that kind of things), but when I sometimes get a translation from Polish into English (and my translation memory for this combination is not that big), I can add to the translation project my huge English-Polish medical translation memory. Another example: as far as marketing translations are concerned I have two English – Polish translation memories. English (US) – Polish and English (UK) – Polish. My clients come both from the States and Europe and I usually get reference files in either US English or UK English, so I had to adapt my TMs. Now, if I get a British project that is similar to something I did in the past for e.g. an American client I can use the US English TM. As a result, I have much more resources to use when I translate. - OCR Functionality
Trados Studio 2015 has now an integrated OCR functionality. So far, I have tested it only for files that have been converted to PDF from Word files and it works great. I have not yet tested how it works with scanned files, but I think it will be a great time-saver as I won’t have to OCR the file in ABBY FineReader. - Font adaptation
In Trados Studio 2015, you can easily adapt the size of fonts used in your translation. The font adaptation feature is available in the View tab, so you don’t have to look for it among many configuration options. A small thing, but helpful. - And last, but not least – language-specific quotation marks!
Finally! The quotation marks typical for a target language are automatically inserted as you type. Previously, Studio inserted programmer’s quotes, which was a huge pain in the neck, when there were many quotation marks in the text (for instance a bibliography in a medical scientific text) and you had to insert them all using the alphanumeric keyboard. Thank you very much SDL!
I know that this “review” is a bit one-sided. Surely, you can find some things to complain about in Studio 2015, but from my point of view as a freelance translator previously using 2011 version, it is certainly a change for the better. I currently use Studio for ca. 70% of work I do and in my opinion it is certainly more effective than Across and Translation Workspace. I would say that memoQ 2015 is its greatest competitor, but I am in no position to compare them in more detail as I don’t have my own licence for memoQ 2015 (when I use it, I obtain the licence from translation agencies for a specific project).
And what do you think about Studio 2015? Have you already bought it? Are you going to do it? Why/why not?
