Friday, September 27, 2013

A very special offer on QA Distiller

QA Distiller is a useful translation QA tool that lets you run a series of tests on various types of bilingual files, including Xliff (SDL Trados Studio and MemoQ), ttx (Tag Editor), and TMX.

QA Distiller offers a wider range of QA checks than Xbench or SDL's internal QA tools. When compared with Xbench, it does not have the very useful terminology functions that Xbench offers, but (besides the higher number of tests performed) it does have a useful advantage over Xbench: you can edit the incorrect segments directly from within QA Distiller.

On September 30 only, on the occasion of the International Translation Day, QA distiller is offered at a very special price: 100 Euro instead of the regular 1000 Euro (so a 90% discount).

The link for the special offer is www.qa-distiller.com/anniversary. Other useful links: a flash demo of the tool, the on-line help file (use Firefox to display the online help: I had problems displaying it in Chrome) and a series of FAQs.

Saturday, September 07, 2013

A quick Xbench trick

When using Xbench as a terminology reference tool, in many translation applications you can select the test you want to look up by highlighting it, then using the Ctrl+Alt+Ins hotkey to invoke Xbench and send that text to Xbench's source search box (or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to send that text to the target search box).

In certain applications, however  (for example in SDLX), these hotkeys do not work: if you highlight some text and press Ctrl+Alt+Ins Xbench appears, but in the search box you get the last content of your clipboard, instead of the text you had highlighted.

The workaround is to highlight the text to search, use Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard, and only then use the Ctrl+Alt+Ins (or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace) hotkeys.

Remember that most hotkeys can be changed in Xbench: if you do not want to use Ctrl+Alt+Ins and Ctrl+Alt+Backspace - for example because they are already used by another application - you can change them in the Settings window (Tools -> Settings -> Layout & Hotkeys).

For more information about Xbench and how it can help your translations, a good place to start is my presentation, which you can download from the Xbench tab above.