At the end of the day, no two translation businesses are the same, so why should your CAT tool be? That’s why we have now collated over 300 apps, created by our very own AppStore development team (SDL Community Developers) and other third party developers, to extend the functionality of your SDL Trados Studio 2019. However, with so many apps to now choose from, I bet you’re struggling to know where to start!
To give you some inspiration, I’ve collated my top five new apps that were released onto the SDL AppStore in the last year:
1. Rapid Add Term
We all know the importance of using consistent terminology throughout projects and for many, being able to add terms to your termbase whilst translating is of utmost importance. However, when working in SDL Trados Studio, adding terms to your termbase can be less than performant, particularly if you have a large termbase.
Taking all your feedback into consideration, we have developed Rapid Add Term to speed up your translation process. When adding terms to your termbase with the Rapid Add Term option, no longer will your termbase preview window open and refresh, but instead terms will be added to your termbase immediately so they are available in your term recognition window straight away. This is a great solution to an often frustrating process.
2. projectTermExtract
This is another termbase app that I highly recommend. Rather than adding terms to your termbase as you translate, use this great app to extract term candidates from your project during project creation and then create a termbase out of them.
Simply alter the settings to outline what words you would like to be extracted from your project; create a blacklist of words you wish to be excluded, define how many times the word has to occur in the project and set the minimum length of a word before it is extracted. What’s more, as you adjust your settings, watch how the term candidates change, thanks to the visual wordcloud. Once the terms are extracted, translate them in SDL Trados Studio and save the file as a termbase to use in your project.
If you’d like a more in depth description on how to use this projectTermExtract, read this article here.
3. TuToTm
Simple but effective, this app is one of my favourites. Have you ever translated a sentence or two, say in an email or on Twitter, and then wished you could easily add it to your translation memory (TM), without having to save it in a document, create a new project in SDL Trados Studio and translate it first? Well now you can!
With TuToTm, you can now add multiple translation units to numerous TMs at once, without having to create a new project in SDL Trados Studio at all. Simply open up the interface from within the CAT tool, copy across your translation units, select the Translation Memories you would like to add your translation unit to and press save. It couldn’t be easier.
4. DSI Viewer
The ability to view Document Structure Information is one of the many benefits of using SDL Trados Studio; this feature offers additional context when translating, such as where the segment appears within the source document. The only downside of this feature is that you have to click on the DSI column each time you wish to see this information, slowing you down as you translate.
The DSI viewer solves this problem by offering you a separate window that you can position anywhere on your screen and will show this information as you translate, saving you clicks and time!
This app is particularly useful when translating bilingual files, DITA files, custom XML files or even SDLXLIFF files that have been exported from SDL Passolo.
5. Wordlight
Highlighting text in SDL Trados Studio is a very handy feature, especially when reviewing documents, the only disadvantage is that it takes five clicks to actually access the highlight button through the Quick Insert menu. If you use this feature frequently, you’ll be pleased to know that the Wordlight app makes highlighting a whole lot quicker.
With a brand new highlight button situated in the ribbon at the top of the page, highlighting a segment will now only take you two clicks! You can also select from 15 different colours (the same that are available in Microsoft Word), you can highlight any file type (not just the ones currently supported by Quick Insert), plus if the source document is a Word or PDF, your target file will retain and display the highlights!
So these are just a handful of the new apps available on the SDL AppStore; to fully understand their benefits, download them and give them a try!
If you have any feedback, then please remember to head over to the SDL Community and start a discussion. There’s even a new app called SDL Community Inside that enables you to access The Community from directly inside SDL Trados Studio, so that’s worth checking out too.
Plus, make sure you keep your apps up to date with AppNotifications. Whenever an app update is available on the AppStore, a notification will appear within SDL Trados Studio and you can download and install the app update directly from there.
Lastly, don’t forget to take a look at our webinar ‘Top time-saving tips for freelance translators working in SDL Trados Studio 2019’ where we cover even more apps that will help you translate faster and more effectively.
