SDL Trados Studio 2017 was released in November last year. Service Release 1 (SR1) has just appeared. It brings a few neat improvements and a couple of bigger surprises, which I’ll run through in this blog post.

Improvements to upLIFT fuzzy repair

upLIFT technology was introduced in Studio 2017. Read about what it is and how to use it in this blog post. Now, in SR1, when a fuzzy match is repaired, we can see where it comes from. Hover over the repaired fragment in the Translation Results window to see the details. The screenshot below shows that this repair came from a termbase called “Medical 2014”:

Sometimes, a fuzzy repair isn’t that good and it would be better to edit the segment manually. In SR1, there’s a new spanner icon with a red cross in the Translation Results window labelled “Apply Translation without upLIFT Repair”. So, to undo the repair and transfer the original fuzzy match to the active segment, simply click the icon or use the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+U:

If you change your mind, simply press Ctrl+T to apply the translation with the repair.

In SR1, fuzzy repair has also been enabled for AnyTM (TMs with different languages pairs from the project language) and for Chinese and Japanese target languages.

Error messages are more user friendly

Does your heart sink when you get a message saying, Object reference not set to an instance of an object? Do you worry about the missing child when Studio tells you, “The context list is null. Could not get the last child“?

At last these error messages come with a few clues. Click the KB (Knowledge Base) link to read about possible solutions, and if that doesn’t work, go the Community forum and ask for a solution there.

LookAhead

The most exciting new feature in SR1 is LookAhead. Now, when you move to the next segment, Studio performs a look-up on the following two segments while you’re working on the active segment.

The effect of LookAhead? Almost instantaneous results every time you change segments. This is particularly relevant for cloud-based resources (SDL Language Cloud and other MT providers) and also for local resources (Slate Desktop engine and big local TMs with fragment recall and fuzzy match repair enabled).

The LookAhead setting is in General Options, under File> Options> Editor> Automation:

Caveat: Bear in mind that LookAhead will stop you getting leverage from segments you’ve translated just one or two segments ago. In the screenshot below, when I move to segment 23, I’m not offered a fuzzy match from segment 21, because Studio performed the look-up for segment 23 while I was translating segment 21:

Not a problem: You can force a new look-up and the results will be refreshed in the Translation Results window. To do this, go to the Advanced tab on the ribbon and click Lookup Translations. Or, better still, use the Alt keytip shortcut: Alt, A, L.

NB. Alt keytips shortcuts work by pressing one key after the other, without holding them down.

Language Cloud Terminology

Studio SR1 brings easier terminology management and termbase sharing by introducing a brand new cloud-based tool. This feature doesn’t replace Multiterm, but offers another way to manage terminology with more flexible fuzzy searches (this is particularly good news for languages such as Polish and Finnish), and native support for Excel imports and exports.

Read how to set it up in the Studio help documentation.

I haven’t had time to test Language Cloud Terminology yet but will report back when I have. (This last month has been particularly busy as I’ve been testing another new program.)

Other small improvements

• In the Translation Results window, changes are highlighted with background colours as well as strikethrough and red font. (Trados Workbench fans will love this.) To customise the background and fonts, go to Files > Options > Editor > Translation Results Window and click Change…
• Google neural MT is offered by default in the Google Translate provider.
• SDL icons have been rebranded. The picture at the top of the post shows them on my desktop. I would have liked to see the SDL star in the icon, but the lopsided sea blue icon is quite fun.
• Language Cloud sign-in is now immediately accessible in the top right-hand corner, following MS Office style.
• At last, there’s a scrollbar in the Termbase Viewer list. Now, simply enter the first letter of a term and use the scrollbar to browse the list. 
• Filtering for segments with tags is now possible in the Advanced Display Filter. Simply enter <cf in the source field and press Ctrl+F6.
• Filtering for strings in the Translation Memories window is noticeably faster. A search for a term in a 100,000 unit TM now takes about 5 seconds on my machine. Before, it was almost unusable.
• TMs can be batch upgraded and re-indexed without needing a plug-in. Go to Translation Memories window>Upgrade Translation Memories.
• TMs that need re-indexing are marked in a project with a little orange triangle and an upgrade icon appears directly in project settings. (See the new flags too, showing TM language pair.)*

* Your current TMs will benefit from re-indexing (upgrading) now, but all the new SR1 features will work fine even if you don’t re-index them.

Some welcome fixes

• At last, dates are displayed correctly again for UK operating systems (dd/mm/yyyy) in the Translation Results window. After two years of the forced US date format, I almost got used to remembering that 06/01/2017 meant the 1st of June in Studio.
• The bug with AutoSuggest strings beginning with a number has been fixed. As a result, they’re also recognised again in Regex Match AutoSuggest Provider.

Conclusion

As always, these explanations and comments about the new features in SR1 are not exhaustive. For full details, check out the Release Notes.

Service Release 1 is free of charge for all Studio 2017 license holders. You’ll be prompted to update when you open Studio, or you can download it from your SDL account (Ribbon>Help>SDL Account). No need to uninstall manually: the old version will uninstall in the background as part of the SR1 installation process. Any current projects should simply reappear in SR1, but of course it’s safest to update when you’re not in the middle of a job. Wait for a quiet moment and update soon!