Looking forward to SDL Trados Studio 2019 Service Release 2

SDL Trados Studio 2019 SR2 is ready for the new SDL Language Cloud Translation Management solution that is currently in beta and set to launch later this year. Once this exciting end-to-end localization management platform is released, you will be able to collaborate on Language Cloud translation projects directly from Studio, just like you would with any other project type. This integration is paradigm-shifting in a way, since it will mean that you will be able to access cloud-based resources from SDL Trados Studio, such as cloud-based translation memories and termbases, as well as the latest SDL Neural Machine Translation technology. For me, this is an extremely interesting next step, shifting ways of working with Studio beyond what is possible today. So far, users work mostly in what I call “file-based” and “on-premise/server-based” scenarios. 

With this new solution, it will become possible to work in new ways in the translation supply chain – fully “cloud-based”. Studio has always stood for a very flexible solution that can plug into any workflow and can allow you to accept any job. With this change, we will continue the same theme and enable new ways of working providing the best of both worlds – a cloud-based solution on the one hand, and a rich, productive desktop client that connects to the cloud on the other. This should be a winning combination as it not only considers the needs of content owners and work givers, but also those of the work doers who need the best possible productivity in translation and review. 

More information on this exciting new offering will become available later in 2019. In the meantime, you can be sure that you will be ready for SDL Language Cloud Translation Management with Studio 2019 SR2. Stay tuned for updates! À propos - talking about new ways of working leads me to the next big topic:

SDL Trados Studio is not only plugging into the new SDL Language Cloud flows described above – but it is now also ready to work with SDL MultiTrans Version 7, released in July.

With this integration, users of the SDL MultiTrans flow product will now be able to open tasks from MultiTrans and access MultiTrans resources (TMs and terminology) from SDL Trados Studio. 

For this integration to work, we have developed a new app that you will be able to install from the SDL App Store. The plugin adds a new SDL MultiTrans view in SDL Trados Studio 2019 SR2. From this view, users are able to retrieve MultiTrans projects along with their assigned resources (TextBases and TermBases), work on the projects and return them back to MultiTrans. 

This integration delivers on our promise to bring the rich SDL MultiTrans platform closer to our market-leading CAT tool, allowing MultiTrans users to take full benefit of the productivity features in Studio when working on MultiTrans tasks. This was a key step for us after the merger with DLS last year. More information on this solution will be shared by us in the near future.

This service release is also very rich when it comes to new file types. Among other things, we have developed a new generation of our XML file type which (we? the industry?) refer to as XML2. When developing this file type, we made sure to address customer feedback that we have received over the years on our support for XML. The new XML2 file type is faster, more robust, easier to configure and more flexible when it comes to advanced use cases, such as embedded content handling or XML validation. To allow our users to migrate at their own pace, the new file type will be available initially as a beta version, side by side with the existing one for a while. It is easy to migrate – you can export the settings from any existing XML file type and import them into a new XML2 file type. Then you can further fine tune the settings to take advantage of the new functionality. 

Besides XML2, we are also introducing support for the Markdown format (often seen in the context of modern development platforms and source code repositories, such as Github) as well as a beta version of a brand-new file type for Adobe Photoshop. This continues our ambition to be the CAT tool with the broadest file type support on the market.

Did we stop there? Of course not. As usual, we added a few usability enhancements that should be quite nice to enjoy where needed. Among these several enhancements, all of which are described in the release notes, a couple stands out for me particularly, as we managed to address two particular popular suggestions from our ideas community (besides adding support for Adobe Photoshop, which has many votes also): 

• It is now possible to hide the orange file start and end tags. This can be a blessing when you have files with embedded content, for instance, where there are only a few words in each content section and the actual segments to be translated can be hidden in a sea of orange tags. Being able to hide them makes the Editor a lot less cluttered and allows you to focus more on the translation task.
• The second nice enhancement is what we refer to as “smart cut and paste”. When this is active, Studio will balance out spacing before punctuation marks or adjacent words, so you don’t have to manually add or delete spaces after pasting the text. This is similar to the corresponding feature in Microsoft Word.