software review

Over the last 30 days, I have been trying out SDL Trados Studio 2017, the latest version of SDL's flagship CAT tool for translators. My first impressions have been mixed: some good, some bad.



The very first thing you should be aware of when you request a free trial version of Studio 2017 online is that you will not be getting a full-feature version of the package to try out, but one with some major restrictions. This was my first surprise as the other CAT tools I have tried out so far like memoQ translator pro, Déjà Vu X3, OmegaT, Swordfish and memsource have always been fully functional versions. Although the interface of the trial version of Studio 2017 includes icons for MultiTerm, the termbase program, and for software localisation using a powerful tool from SDL called Passolo, clicking on the icons will trigger a message saying that these programs are not installed. In other words, you can't try them out. Trying to use a CAT tool that has a translation-memory ('TM') module but not one for terminology is frustrating as it means you can translate proper files with it, but you can't import terms from other programs, which would help you with the translation.



Funnily enough, some features of MultiTerm are actually included in the trial version, meaning you can save new terms if you want, but you can't export the termbase you create to send it to someone else or import into another CAT tool; it's stuck inside Studio 2017. I hope SDL decides to include full MultiTerm support in the next version of Studio, if not before, as being able to draw on terminology you have already collected is important for a translator.



What did I like about Studio 2017?



- The interface, which is quite easy to work with (i.e. it's designed in a logical way) and uses a colour scheme I now find easy on the eye (I didn't like the gaudiness of earlier colour schemes). The interface also contains a number of very useful icons such as links to tutorials and to SDL AppStore (an external, web-based resource from SDL where you can get extra add-ons to enhance Studio's out-of-the-box functionality; it used to be called OpenExchange).



- The amount of customisation possible for the interface - you can add specific functions you need a lot to a Quick Access bar, for example.



- The vertical translation grid, which - like memoQ's - is clear and easy to use; the source language is displayed in segments on the left, the target in segments on the right (at least in my LTR language pair, German and English; I presume this order is reversed for languages written in RTL scripts like Hebrew and Arabic).



- You can filter segments using a wide range of practical criteria.



- The two or three software updates that Studio installed during the trial period went quickly and smoothly.



- The Release Notes that come with the package tell you exactly what's new in Studio 2017. They also say what issues there are with it (optical character recognition, or OCR, in PDF files that Studio can read is limited to 14 languages at the moment).

What didn't I like about Studio 2017?



- It's not very easy to export a TM to TMX format (which is a common file format for exchanging TM data between different programs). You can get around this limitation by installing a special add-on for exactly this purpose or by checking a settings box that allows you to export the TM in 'a Trados 2007-compatible format' (i.e. TMX!).



- Some features that are a standard part of memoQ translator pro are not included in Studio 2017; if you want them, you need to install an add-on from SDL AppStore first. MemoQ lets you import terms from a CSV file, for example, and you can look up tricky terms on the web straight from the translation grid. Not so with Studio (yet, at least):

 



- The trial version includes a small number of pre-installed apps, but you can't install any extra ones of your own choice (like the Glossary Converter), meaning you can't see what they do or how well they work. (That was disappointing since there were a number of apps from SDL AppStore that I wanted to try out, too.)



- The Studio 2017 software package is considerably bigger than memoQ translator pro's in terms of hard-disk space and takes longer to launch as well.



- Studio 2017 won't run on Windows 8.0, Windows Vista or Windows XP; it will only run on the latest versions of Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. So some versions of Windows are fine, others aren't. Woe you've got the wrong one on your PC!



- Studio 2017 also has issues with certain web browsers and versions of Microsoft Office.



Please read the Release Notes carefully to see if your PC meets Studio's requirements before you install it.



In sum, I enjoyed using the trial version of the program, which in my opinion is the best one I've worked with so far. However, my experience as a user would have been even better if all of Studio's functionality had been available. Since trial versions of programs are intended to persuade potential new users to buy the package, it doesn't make sense to offer them a restricted-feature version that will hamper their productivity rather than boost it. Apart from that, having worked with CAT tools for a good few years now, I found Studio 2017 relatively straightforward to use – many of them now work in a similar way. What I wasn't able to see instantly, however, was what clear advantages the tool has over other sophisticated packages like memoQ.



If you are interested in getting a licence for SDL Trados Studio 2017, I recommend you to take a look at the group buys that frequently take place on Proz.com as you can save a lot of money that way. SDL also runs several promotions a year itself. If you are a member of a translators' association, that may have made a special arrangement with SDL to allow its members to buy the software at a reduced rate. So there are various options you can benefit from.



Regards,



Carl





Related articles elsewhere on the internet



- Product review by Andrea Luciano Damico



- FAQs about Studio 2017 on SDL's own website



- Emma Goldsmith's blog post on fragment recall in Studio 2017, a new feature in Studio to improve automatic assembly of target sentences



- Order a free trial of Studio 2017 from SDL

For anyone interested in computer-aided translation, which has become as omnipresent in the translation world as Microsoft Office has in business generally, it's always intriguing to hear when a major new release of a CAT tool appears on the market. MemoQ has become very popular among freelance translators and translation agencies in recent years and has been evolving at a very fast pace – faster than the product documentation, in fact. This week (the second week of December), a new version of the tool is going to be released called memoQ 2014 R2.



What exactly's new about it? Well, the most obvious change is that it now has a ribbon interface. This aligns it with Microsoft's Office products as well as with a number of memoQ's competitors like SDL Trados Studio 2014 and Déjà Vu X3. Although memoQ's current interface (I'm referring to memoQ 2014 "R1" and memoQ 2013 here) has been around for a while and users have got used to it and can find functions reasonably easily on it, there have been plenty of calls for a better menu bar from users.



The new menu bar is now divided into sections of related functions. This makes the interface more intuitive to use and less cluttered, which is also due to the fact that the functions that used to be available in the bottom half of the screen have now been moved up into the ribbon as well. The groups of features have been designed to reflect a typical translation workflow:

The ribbon bar can be reduced in size just like Word's menu bar to save space if you need more room to view your translation or other windows in the interface. This is also useful if your list of projects is quite long as more of them are now displayed. At the moment, the ribbon can't be customised by removing or adding any features, however (which I personally like about Word). What it does do, though, is change its contents, depending on whether or not you have opened a project to work on. Besides having a "memoQ" tab and "Project" tab, it then adds one called "Documents", another one called "Preparation" and one called "View". If you click on an icon like "Translate" in the "Documents" tab, four more tabs appear: "Translate", "Review", "Edit" and "Quick Access", all of which contain functions of particular interest for that step of the translation workflow. So this is a nifty way of putting a lot of functions at a user's disposal as and when they need them.



The ribbon toolbar displays tooltips whenever you move your mouse over specific icons, which can be instructive en passant and may even help you re-discover features you forgot about in the old interface, where many of them were hidden from view.



Another new aspect of memoQ 2014 R2 is that its translation memory editor has been pepped up and made more convenient to use. Meta-data (e.g. the name of a customer) can now be altered, for example, and tags can be handled better (e.g. they can all be removed from the segments you select just by clicking a button). It's also possible to edit an unlimited number of segments at one go, whereas that was limited to a hundred in the past. Filtering has been enhanced as well: you can now select specific groups of segments (those translated by a particular person, say) and then search for certain segments in that group (e.g. those containing a particular term). To make it easier to resume your editing work later, it's now possible to mark segments with a flag as well. A short video on these points is now available on YouTube.



Segmentation of source files has also been improved by making it easier for users to add abbreviations to the list of existing segmentation rules and even re-segment a file on the fly after doing so, giving better segmentation results in the translation grid.



Compatibility with other software formats has always been an important aspect of memoQ, which supports a large number of formats and makes working with files processed by users with different CAT tools relatively simple. In memoQ 2014 R2, Kilgray has improved compatibility with WorldServer by improving how it deals with SDL WorldServer’s file formats, XLZ and WSXZ.



To help you learn more about this new version, Kilgray is offering a number of free webinars on it in December. These are intended for both freelance translators and project managers (as each user group works with a different version). To see which webinars are being staged and register for them, go to their webinar page.



Regards,



Carl

Related links



- Overview of memoQ 2014 R2 on Kilgray's website



- Kilgray's blog



- A recorded webinar on memoQ 2014 R2 by Kilgray on YouTube



- Translator Dominique Pivard explains how to create a project and translate a file in memoQ 2014 R2



- Kevin Lossner's blog post on the first project he did using memoQ 2014 R2



- A post of my own on the introduction of SDL Trados Studio 2014, which also features a ribbon interface.

Over the last few weeks, I've been busy working on a big translation and editing project for a customer. There were a lot of Microsoft Word™ files to translate, and during the project, I wanted to measure the length of the translations in order to issue a preliminary bill for the work that had been completed by then.


Obviously, I could have opened each file in Word and then measured it using the program's own word-count feature, but that would have taken ages to do for so many files. What I really needed was a dedicated program for counting the amount of text automatically in a number of files, and more or less simultaneously. What's more, I wanted it to go a step further and calculate the figures I needed for invoicing: the net amount to be invoiced, the amount of VAT due and the grand total.


This is where dedicated text-counting programs come in. One of these tools is AnyCount, a program with three different versions made by Ukrainian software producer Advanced International Translations, aka AIT (also the developer of Translation Office 3000, in which it has been incorporated). As its name implies, AnyCount can count a large number of file types (I made it 36 in the latest version of the Enterprise edition, v8.0.8, including images, HTML, XML and exchange formats like .mif for FrameMaker™ files). Needless to say, this range also covers Microsoft Office™ formats (PPT, DOC, XLS and the more recent XML-based ones), but PDF and OpenOffice™ formats have been included as well, which makes AnyCount very versatile. Even Microsoft Visio™ and compiled help files (CHM) can be processed. A full overview is available on AIT's website (click here).

The workflow with AnyCount

Before you measure a file with AnyCount, you can make a number of settings in it to specify what gets counted and what doesn't. Under "Settings" in the menu bar, you can say whether headers and footers should be included and even how often (once per page or once per section). If there are footnotes or end notes in the file you want to count, you can also specify which of these it should cover, as the screen shot on the left shows.

Objects that are embedded in files, such as Excel tables in Word or PowerPoint documents, can be measured, too, along with a number of other (albeit rarely needed) options like shapes and hidden text.

Under "Settings", you can also choose the unit of text you want to be measured, a feature that includes words, characters with (or without) spaces, lines and pages, and define how many units make up a line or page, for example:



Select the files you want to measure under "Files", check you've made the right settings and then count the files by clicking on the "Count!" icon in the menu bar.

The whole workflow is summarised by this screen shot from the interface:

Putting it to the test


It took AnyCount less than two minutes to count the number of characters in 16 Word docx files and calculate the overall figure and resulting cost. You can either process this data yourself or get AnyCount to export it to a file format like Excel to make a printout. If you have configured a template for invoicing in the program, you can even get AnyCount to create an invoice automatically using the data. It can save you a lot of time by automating such data-processing steps.

What I like about version 8 of the tool is that...

• it's simple to use


• it measures the amount of text in files quickly and seems accurate (I want to check this more closely, though)
  


• the interface is attractive (a nice shade of blue!) and intuitive to work with
  


• you can configure a good number of settings yourself to suit your own way of counting
  


• and it lets you output the results as reports in a number of common formats such as Excel, HTML or Word (these can also be printed out without much editing).

Despite us being well into the computer era, dictionaries are still an essential language resource for any translator. The dictionary-making industry has had to move with the times, which has rocked the boat quite a bit at established publishers such as Langenscheidt, but even so, it has managed to come up with electronic alternatives to paper dictionaries – and equally importantly, various ways of paying for them. Electronic dictionaries are now available as apps for mobile phones and portable e-readers like the Kindle, as PC software and as Web-based applications, for example. This post is about the latter, which are offered as paid services to which users subscribe (software as a service, or "SaaS").

One of the online dictionary services I use is MOT dictionaries and is run by a Finnish company called Kielikone. This firm provides various linguistic services via the Web that cater to people with an interest in translation and proof-reading, including Web-based dictionaries (e.g. via MOT mobile), machine translation (MOT translation) and online proof-reading (MOT proofing):

In addition to these three groups, Kielikone also offers its customers a small number of language guides, e.g. on English and Swedish grammar and on writing and spelling Finnish correctly, which caters to needs in their local market in Scandinavia.

Rather misleadingly, MOT translation is actually concerned with machine translation – from one of nine European languages and (Mandarin) Chinese into English and vice versa. Kielikone realistically admits that its MT system is only capable of making a "quick" translation of a text and is best suited to translating technical texts, instructions and news, i.e. material in which the focus is on content rather than style. In other words, post-editing is necessary to polish up the engine's translations (another task we human translators get lumbered with).

Rather than relying on MT's statistical algorithms, however, I prefer to use several of Kielikone's online dictionaries to help me translate my work. A wide range of monolingual and bilingual works are available, each of which costs a relatively small amount of money to subscribe to (around 15 euros for three months or roughly 49 euros for 12, for example). I've signed up for three German-English dictionaries, viz. MOT Collins German Dictionary, MOT Langenscheidt Muret-Sanders Großwörterbuch Englisch and MOT Oxford German Dictionary, and have an annual subscription, which is rather better value than a quarterly one. These electronic dictionaries are all based on well-known printed versions and have been licensed to Kielikone. (Installable versions for Windows PC users are also available, incidentally.)

To use the dictionaries you have chosen, you just log on to the MOT server via your Web browser using the user data that go with your subscription. It's very fast (and the connections I've set up have always been totally reliable). Set the language for the browser interface when you first start using MOT – it can be in English, German, Swedish or Finnish at the moment – and then pick the dictionary you want to use from a drop-down list:

If you set the system to search all of your dictionaries at once (by picking "Multiple dictionary selection" and clicking on the round plus symbol and selecting the works to be used), then when you enter a search term on the right, the results of your search will be displayed in a vertical list of all the dictionary entries that were found. The hits actually look much like those in a paper dictionary, with the entry being on the left and translations of it on the right together with sample sentences showing how the words are used (i.e. with contextual information):

Different kinds of searches are possible, depending on which option you select:

Like CD-ROM dictionaries, searches for terms can be done very quickly online, but I'd say the real advantage of subscribing to a number of MOT dictionaries is that you can see which dictionaries come up with hits instantaneously and the hits all appear on your monitor at once; there's no need to make individual searches in each dictionary as a universal search is done. So a system of this kind can save you time. Plus the fact that no maintenance is needed at the user's end, no system updates are called for and there's no need for any troubleshooting if anything goes wrong – this is all taken care of by the company providing the dictionaries over the Net.

So there's no hassle at all. What's more, you can try out additional dictionaries whenever you like, with no obligation to take out a subscription for them. If you find them useful, you pay for them and they get included in your personal software "suite" for immediate use. And if you decide you want to stop using your suite for any reason, you can simply cancel your subscription.

I thoroughly recommend "MOT dictionaries" as a translation resource as it's convenient to use, flexible and very helpful in many cases. Apart from including general dictionaries, the range also covers several commercial, technical and specialist dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Here's a sample:

If you'd like to try out the MOT dictionaries, get in touch with the Sales team at Kielikone and ask for a free trial.

Regards,

Carl

Further reading

- More on Langenscheidt's restructuring programme (in German)

images: screen shots from Kielikone's website; logo and other website images by courtesy of Kielikone Oy

As you may have gathered by now, I use a translation tool called memoQ to help me with most of my translation work. MemoQ comes with an interesting dictionary plug-in linking it to a huge external terminology database called the EuroTermBank, and if it is activated (which it is by default in version 6.0 and 6.2), then memoQ constantly looks up expressions that appear in my source texts in the database and "suggests" any English translations of them to me that it finds there.

The terms that are "recognised", i.e. correspond to the source words in appearance, are displayed in a window to the right of the translation area in memoQ so you can see them easily while you translate and decide whether or not to pick them (sometimes they match the context, sometimes they don't). You can insert them manually or by using a combination of keys on your keyboard. The ETB entries have a special symbol next to them in the results list, as you can see from this screen shot showing a German source text and matching term-base results (the empty space in the middle is for the translation that is about to be done):

Fig. 1: The translations found in the ETB term base are conveniently shown to the right of the translation grid. Those from my own term bases are directly above them.

Now, you won't find everything in the ETB term base, of course, but you will find a lot of material in a large number of European languages (currently 33, in fact), including those used in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States (Lithuania and Latvia, for example). That's because the ETB is actually a terminology project involving a large number of countries from the European Union.

The EuroTermBank was set up by a consortium of organisations specifically with Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in mind, but other new EU member states and interested countries and organizations outside the EU are invited to get involved in the project as well. The idea, they say, is to "exchange terminology data with existing national and EU terminology databases by establishing cooperative relationships, aligning methodologies and standards, [and] designing and implementing data-exchange mechanisms and procedures".

According to the ETB website, www.eurotermbank.com, the project focuses on harmonisation and consolidation of terminology work in new EU member states, "transferring experience from other European Union terminology networks and accumulating competencies and efforts of the accessed countries". The aim of the project is to provide a source of "consistent, harmonised and easily accessible terminology" in the European Union, a "centralized online terminology bank for languages of new EU member countries interlinked to other terminology banks and resources".

The terminology the ETB draws upon is taken from public-sector terminology resources, so it's obviously of particular value if you translate texts concerned with any of these (widely varying) areas. Business, finance and institutions are covered, for example.

There's a quick summary of what the database covers on the left (as of 14 Nov. 2013). As you can see, the EuroTermBank is a big, ongoing multilingual project. What I find particularly useful about it is the fact that source terms are not just listed in the target language you pick, but some of them also come with a definition, giving you some background information that can come in handy as you translate.

To access the ETB, you don't have to have memoQ (even though Kilgray is its first technology partner); you can access it from your own web browser by calling up its URL, http://www.eurotermbank.com/, in which case you'll see something like this at the top of the page:

Fig. 2: The ETB on the internet (showing a window for an advanced search with several options, including definitions)

The subject areas that are covered are displayed in the "domain" field, which is shown on the left when you do an advanced search (click on "Show advanced options" next to the orange search button). If you click on the little arrow there, a drop-down list will appear. Here you can see that the ETB covers a wide range of areas: politics, international relations, European Community law, trade, social issues, education, employment, energy, transport and more... Amazing!

Incidentally, you can also download a special plug-in for Microsoft Word® that will help you with dictionary look-ups while you use that program. This enhancement can help you understand a text better, particularly one in a foreign language – mark a tricky word and then call up the ETB by right-clicking your mouse. Go to "Terminology..." and then a special pane will open listing possible equivalents in various languages.

If you fail to find any terms you look up, the portal enables you to build up a personalised list of such words (in "My ETB"), which you can share with other users from the ETB community if you'd like to.

This is a great resource for translators!

Regards,

Carl

images: ETB website and my own screen shots from memoQ

Well, the build-up to its appearance on the translation stage was big, as you might expect from SDL Trados! Have you heard the news yet? If you're also a translator and use translation software to help you with your daily work, then you may already be aware that the largest maker of computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools recently launched the latest version of its key product (on 30 September).

It almost seems to have been a little early in arriving on the market, actually, as it's known as "Studio 2014" ... but then again, I expect they wanted to get a competitive edge over one of their main competitors, the Hungarian firm Kilgray (the makers of memoQ 2013 and other state-of-the-art tools for translators, translation agencies and terminologists).

The previous version of SDL Trados's tool, Studio 2011, has been around for a while and become widely used among freelance translators and agencies alike, partly because it supports bilingual file formats created by its much earlier predecessor, Trados 2007, which many agencies once invested in and weren't prepared to drop when Studio first came out.

Studio 2014 is based on the 2011 version, but the interface has been enhanced to make it easier to use. One of the main changes you'll notice is that a ribbon-based interface has now been adopted, organising related functions in tabs in a similar way to the programs that come with Microsoft Office 2007/2010. So if you're used to working with the latter, you ought to find it relatively easy to get to grips with Studio 2014. In addition to that, new areas have been added to the interface for training purposes – you can now access training videos directly from the program, for example – and you can access additional "apps" for Studio from here, too, by following an internal link to SDL's OpenExchange platform rather than having to call up the page separately in your web browser. So users can get information faster and more conveniently, which is great.

Apart from this, the sales people at SDL Trados have been listening to user feedback and passing it on to the developers, who have consequently come up with a number of "new" features such as AutoSave (to save your work automatically), Track Changes, Real-time Preview, a fast alignment tool (to replace WinAlign), QuickMerge (for combining individual files to speed up translation) and a customisable editing environment with user-defined short cuts for specific functions. (These are certainly enhancements in Studio, but they have actually been around in memoQ for a while.)

A few of the new features really are novel, however:

• enhanced concordance search, i.e. terms are looked up automatically in your translation memory (TM) if a search at segment level fails to find anything there, and partial matches are shown, which can help you come up with an appropriate translation
  
   


• InQuote, which is a new OpenExchange app that can be installed in Studio 2014 to generate quotations from project statistics. These stats can be output in Word or Excel or copied into another application or e-mail from your Clipboard to send to a customer, for example.

Well, that's the rundown so far. I'll learn more about it once I've tried it out myself. Hope it's not too buggy, being a new release...

To find out about the software suite yourself, you can watch various short videos that SDL Trados has produced. Click here, for instance: SDL Trados Product Tutorial Video. (N.B.: there's no sound in the video.)

The presentation below is also informative and it's spoken at a reasonable speed (unlike various other videos they've made, which are too short to be of much value and are narrated much too fast for non-English speakers):

• Studio 2014 - Getting started; a quick tour, by Daniel Brockmann, SDL Trados (lasts approx. 15 mins.).

This video is actually one of those that are accessible from the training tab in Studio 2014. Dominique Pivard has been kind enough to provide the individual links on his own blog, CATguru's vlog, so anyone can watch them in a browser and get an idea about using the CAT tool that way.

In sum, I'd say Studio 2014 looks like a very promising, mature tool, even if many of its new features aren't pioneering ones. That said, I'm keen to see what the forthcoming version of memoQ 2013 ("R2" aka "6.8") will be like, which is due out at the end of October and is said to include several new features that will make our work more convenient – like the ability to incorporate final changes made to translations into your translation memory once the texts have been exported (e.g. customer changes). Studio can already do this to a degree if the translation is converted from SDLXLIFF to Word beforehand, but this new solution may go much further. And be a real time-saver!

Best,

Carl

images: spotlights © Rainer Sturm/pixelio.de, memoQ logo © Kilgray Translation Technologies, Studio 2014 logo © SDL plc

• Related posts: Useful extensions for Studio on SDL OpenExchange
  
   


• multifarious, SDL's blog on its CAT products, written by Paul Filken. Click here to view a recent post on customising Studio 2014 using OpenExchange apps
  
   


• Emma Goldsmith's blog post on features of Studio 2014 for "beginners" (she was a beta tester)
  
   


• To sign up for a free 30-day trial of Studio 2014, go to the online form here. (Update: although the form's available online now, I've just been told by a sales rep here in Germany that the trial version hasn't come out yet [it's 15 October now!], so we'll just have to wait for it a bit longer, I guess. Maybe until 2014 after all...!)

Adobe is well-known for its free PDF readers, software that enables you to open, view and print out “portable document format” files on any software platform whatsoever, not just on Windows. In their current reader, Adobe® Reader® XI, it’s also possible for users to highlight words, phrases or whole passages and add annotations, all of which are important functions for reviewers of texts.



If you want to create a Word®, Excel® or RTF file from a PDF document you’ve received from a customer, for example, Adobe® Reader® XI will also allow you to do this automatically, albeit at a charge:

This is achieved by using Adobe’s Web-based services, which you need to sign up for beforehand (the lowest rate was $19.99 per year at the time of writing, which seems quite reasonable). Once you’ve registered and bought a suitable subscription, you can export your PDFs conveniently from inside Reader® and the document you want to export it to will be sent to you soon after by Adobe.



Another way of doing it is to buy Acrobat® XI Pro from Adobe, which is basically Reader® XI’s big brother. Acrobat® allows you to export the PDF file you’ve opened to other formats using its own resources and do so at no extra charge. It costs a lot more, mind you, so you ought to weigh up the pros and cons of a purchase first of all. If you already have an old copy of Adobe® Acrobat®, you can upgrade to version XI at a special reduced rate until the end of May, I was recently informed.



Acrobat® is nonetheless an interesting proposition for translators and reviewers (aka “proof-readers” and “copy-editors”). First and foremost, it can generate various kinds of Microsoft® Office® documents from PDF files:



- Word® 2003/2010

- Excel® 2003/2010

- PowerPoint® 2003/2010

   as well as

- HTML

- RTF and

- TXT (which is obviously only text-based).



When I recently upgraded from Acrobat® 8 to Acrobat® XI, I was amazed to see how much the PDF > Word export had improved. The optical character recognition (OCR) worked very well on my documents and the page layout in Word® was also excellent, which meant I was able to import and start translating it very quickly.



Besides producing high-quality exports, Acrobat® also makes reviewing PDF documents relatively easy: just click on the word “Comment” on the far right and a panel of editing features (“annotations”) will appear:

Here are some of the options that a reviewer is likely to need:



- add sticky note

- highlight text

- add note to replace text

- strike through.



If you click on “Tools” in the same menu, this will open another panel that allows you to edit the text and images in the PDF file:

Select “Edit Text and Images” and then the text will be divided into sections with a line around them, each of which can be edited directly – no annotations this time, but direct changes. Admittedly, this option isn’t one that I’ve needed yet, but if a customer ever wants a PDF brochure to be checked and edited particularly quickly, skipping the DTP edits, then this would be a way of doing it.

In part 2 of this post, I'll take a closer look at the OCR feature in Reader® and Acrobat®.

Carl

images: my own screen shots