By CTA Member Eve Lindemuth Bodeux
On February 28, in Westminster at the College Hill Library, a central location in the metro area, eight attendees participated in a Studio Users Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Sharing session. This idea came out of discussions at the monthly CTA Lafayette Networking Coffee and, as a member of CTA, I agreed to organize it. The idea was for Studio users to share knowledge with each other. In the past, CTA has brought in experts to train members on the use of this and other tools and these trainings have been well-received. The idea of the peer group was to supplement such trainings, rather than replace them, and pool our own, local knowledge about this specialized software application. We were able to address nitty gritty issues in Studio in a way that is normally not possible in more formalized training sessions.
We started the session by introducing ourselves, describing our experience with Studio and what we hoped to gain from the session. Some people had used Studio for many years and others for much shorter amounts of time. In the spirit of “knowledge sharing,” every participant was able to share an idea that was new to all the others present—peer-to-peer in action. We all have our own ways of using the software and it was very helpful to have such a wide range of perspectives.
We discussed resources available for day-to-day support on Studio such as The SDL Trados Studio Manual (http://tradosstudiomanual.com/) that is written by an individual who is not affiliated with SDL but who has a very strong understanding of the program and who, according to attendee Riccardo Schiaffino, has created a clear and efficient user guide. Other resources include SDL webinars (https://www.sdl.com/resources/recorded-webinars.html) and SDL’s YouTube channel (http://tradosstudiomanual.com/) for free training, SDL’s Studio “Evangelist” Paul Filkin’s blog (https://multifarious.filkin.com) and several other resources. See the photos of the white board where we noted various learning resources, enclosed with this article.
It would be impossible to cover all the tips and issues we covered during our discussions, but they touched on a wide range of topics, from questions submitted in advance and others that attendees asked to the group onsite. For example, one of my burning questions was how to stop Studio from “correcting” number thousands and decimal markers, particularly when a source text contains inconsistent formats (in my case this meant it used the American format instead of the French, used both a space and comma as a thousands marker, etc.). This issue had cost me a lot of time recently on a large project. I couldn’t remember where the option to modify auto-substitution of numbers was within Studio’s many settings. Fellow attendee Maria van der Heijde-Zomerdijk knew right where to point me: Project Settings > Your Language Pair (not “All Language Pairs”) > Translation Memory and Automated Translation > Auto-substitution, and then select the appropriate category for numbers or other items listed.
Other issues we tackled included ways to more efficiently interact with Studio’s Translation Memory view, how to efficiently enter accented characters when your keyboard doesn’t allow it (lacks a keypad or other), efficiently aligning files, using the regular, Community, and Advanced filters effectively, the SDL App Store and what apps are crucial, regular expressions, efficient workflow and much more.
If other CTA members are passionate about a different program and would like to share information and learn more about it from peers, I encourage you to organize a peer-to-peer session. Everyone in attendance at the Studio session felt it was a success and we hope to organize additional sessions in the future.
