Blog Archive

“Object reference not set to an instance of an object” is a puzzlingand rather unpleasant error in Trados Studio. Object reference not set to an instance of an object is one of the most unpleasant error messages in Trados Studio. It seems to be coming not from Trados Studio itself, but somewhere from .NET. It may appear in other programs, too. Likewise, […]

Smartcat decided to create an open-access translation memorybased on the materials about the coronavirus. The same goes for Smartcat. It has become complicated these days to write a post without mentioning the name of this ill-fated virus. Taking into account the numerous texts about the coronavirus, epidemics, etc. being hastily translated in all language directions, Smartcat decided to do […]

In the time of the pandemic, many developers are trying to help their clients. Starting from April 1 and version 9.3.5, QA Distiller (also known as QAD), a semi-automated translation quality assessment program, has become free. No, it’s not a joke. QAD is a competitor of Xbench, Verifika, and other similar programs. It has been offered in three versions so far: Freelance, Professional, and […]

Every language has its specific features, but some of them are quite a challenge for translators. Among the vast diversity of sounds used by humans to construct words, the so-called click consonants, or clicks, which occur in the Khoisan languages, stand out rather distinctly. They are spoken by the people who live in Southern Africa near the Kalahari Desert. The best-known […]

Usually, this error doesn’t prevent you from translating. Nevertheless, you can get rid of it. First, let’s figure out what causes it. When you create a package for translation in Trados Studio, each file you add to it gets converted into the SDLXLIFF format, and the translation is performed in this new file. The name of the SDLXLIFF […]

The topic of machine translation abilities is quite hot these days. Machine translation systems often amaze us with the quality of their product, both brilliant and horrible. Mr. Translator by Tencent, for instance, made a fool of itself. Quote: As of today, the biggest issue about machine translation lies in reproducing the syntax of the source language in […]

In old versions of WordFast, you may get an attribute error. If you use WordFast Pro 5.6 or another version older than Wordfast Pro 5.12 and try opening TXLF files generated in the new version, you may get the following error message: Attribute ‘gs4tr:uuid’ is not allowed to appear in the element ‘file’  It takes place because earlier WF versions can’t recognize this […]

Waste no time on copying and confirming email addresses in Trados Studio: you can move and confirm them all at once. Let’s assume you have a Word file containing a lot of email addresses, like this one: (All names, addresses, and phone numbers here are random.) You have to translate this text in Trados Studio. You create a project, and the […]

You can convert all straight quotes in the text into chevrons with one replacement. We already know how to quickly convert straight quotes into guillemets (chevrons) in Trados Studio and memoQ. Sometimes you get to do this not in the “cat” (that is, not in the CAT tool, a computer-aided translation tool) but right in the so-called “mono text,” i.e., the text […]

Arrange Trados Studio on your laptop screen to make it convenient to work with. When you work with texts, it’s desirable to have two monitors. According to studies, the second monitor allows for productivity gains averaging 25-30%. It’s nice translating or editing on the computer with two displays: throwing a CAT tool on one monitor and dictionaries with the reference on the […]