ApSIC Tools Weblog

When we did our Dutch Auction Promotion last year, there was a very close runner-up price, €39/year. So we’re happy to announce that we are now running a promotion at this exceptional price.

To buy one or more Xbench subscription years at €39/year until June 5, just place an order on our Web Store.

You can buy more than one year if you wish. For example, if you buy 5 subscription years, you can choose to grant a license for 1 user during 5 years, for 5 users during 1 year or even for 10 users during 6 months. It’s your call, really. And remember that you can also change the number of users any time during your subscription to match your needs at all times.

This promotion is available to both new and existing customers. If you already have an active subscription and you wish to extend it, please remember to place your order with the same email used in your previous purchase.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just released the Xbench Connector for Memsource. The beta is available to all Memsource Ultimate Admin and PM users.

Memsource has been quietly morphing from a cool cloud-based translation tool into a full-fledged translation platform with a powerful API. We thought it was a good idea to capitalize on this transformation into a platform and we figured out some ways to bring ApSIC Xbench integration with Memsource to a new level.

The Xbench Connector for Memsource is a Windows app that can be downloaded from our Downloads page.

The Xbench Connector for Memsource allows you to:

• Choose a project and target language on the Memsource platform and instantly start a QA session in Xbench 3.0 for that project and language (this is very similar to how the Xbench Plugin for Trados Studio works). Also, if your Memsource project has more than one workflow step, you can also choose the workflow step for the QA session.
• When you find a translation issue in a Memsource file in Xbench, instanly fix it with Memsource Editor right at the segment with Edit Source.
• Quickly keep an eye on the progress of your Memsource projects in the cloud.

The current requirements for the connector are:

• A Memsource user with Memsource API access (currently, Admin or PM in Memsource Ultimate Edition).
• ApSIC Xbench 3.0 build 1299 or later (available from here)
• Memsource Editor for Windows (available from here)

We hope you like the functionality brought by the Xbench Connector for Memsource. As usual, if you run into any issues running the connector, please let us know.

We’re happy to announce the new ApSIC Xbench 3.0 Academic Program.

This Academic Program is available for any University delivering translation courses, and its main benefit is a 50% reduction in Xbench 3.0 license cost on purchase plus additional discounts via the Whitelisted Domain License Mode.

These are the steps to set up your University license for the Academic Program:

1. Make a purchase of 10 or more subscription years in our web store using an email with the University domain in your purchase.
2. Contact us to let us know that you are a University buying under the Academic Program. We will then double the amount of time you purchased, which effectively acts as a 50% discount on purchase. In addition, we will also set up your account in Whitelisted Domain License Mode so that you can benefit from additional discounts when your teachers and students are not active for more than a week.
3. Enter the Xbench Control Panel and add your teachers and students. Remember that the Xbench license allows you to add and remove users whenever you need. Please note that with the Academic Program, only users with the University email domain are allowed in the Control Panel.

If you have any questions about this program, please do not hesitate to Contact Us.

We’ve just posted a new video on our YouTube Channel that shows how Xbench is integrated with Transifex, a Web-based service popular for translating software and websites with frequent updates.

This integration brings to new things to Xbench:

• It is the first time Xbench integrates with a web-based service. Until know all formats were classical offline formats. We’re looking forward to adding more web-based integrations in the future.
• It is the first time Xbench edits directly strings. Until now we always had the original application edit strings. This was a design decision in Xbench because data integrity is a priority for us and we believe that the best way to ensure data integrity is to outsource the editing task to the original application. This way if the original application decides to make subtle changes in their internal propietary formats, Xbench would not break anything. However, in this case, the clearly defined Transifex API make us to break our legendary design rule for once.

We hope that you like this integration. You can watch the video here (for best viewing experience, remember to choose the highest resolution and watch it full screen).

We’re happy to announce that now we have French versions of the Xbench 3.0 Quick Reference Card and of the Plugin for SDL Trados Studio User’s Guide.

As usual, they can be downloaded from the Documentation page.

Once more, a big thanks to Franck Charreire, also translator of the Xbench 3.0 User’s Guide, for his great effort in making Xbench documentation available for the French community.

We’re pleased to announce that the Xbench 3.0 manuals are now available in Czech! The new Czech manuals can be downloaded from our Documentation page.

The Czech version of the Xbench 3.0 User’s Guide, Xbench Plugin for Trados Studio, and the Quick Reference Card has been translated by Ivan Šimerka, an English to Czech technical translator, who also translates into Czech from German and Russian.

We are very thankful for Ivan’s great effort, which will ease the community Czech users to get up to speed with Xbench. With this addition, there are Xbench 3.0 manuals available in 5 languages: Czech, French, German, Polish, and Spanish.

We’re pleased to announce that Michał Tosza, English to Polish translator and CAT tools trainer, has translated the recently released ApSIC Xbench Quick Reference Card to Polish, which can be downloaded from our Documentation page.

Michał also translated the ApSIC Xbench User’s Guide four various releases since version 2.8, so we are very, very grateful for his efforts to making the docs available to Polish users on an ongoing basis.

We’re pleased to announce that we have posted samples for ApSIC Xbench QA plugins at GitHub.

The code is posted in two repositories, one for Visual Studio C++ and another one for Delphi. These samples are probably a good starting point to create 32-bit and 64-bit QA plugins for Xbench.

The QA plugin API is quite flexible: you can create from simple checks to sophisticate interactive features such as the Xbench spell-checker, which indeed is a QA plugin developed with this API.

Therefore, if you need to run more complex custom checks than those provided by checklists, these code samples will probably be very handy get as a starting point if you or someone in your team can code in C++ or Delphi.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Xbench 3.0 build 1299.

This new build has these new main features:

• Support for Transit NXT. Now you can choose a Transit NXT project directory and load it in Xbench for search or QA.
• Support for Transifex. This is our first integration with an online-only tool, Transifex. To use it, just choose Transifex Project as file type when adding files to the Project Properties. If you find a segment that you want to edit directly in the online project, you can do that directly in Xbench, with Edit Source.

As usual, you can see other additions and fixes in our change log.

To download the new build, just go to our Download page. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you run into any issue with the new build.

We’re happy to announce that we have just released Xbench 3.0 build 1274, which comes with these new features:

• Support for bidirectional languages, including new Arabic and Hebrew spell-checking dictionaries
• Support for the upcoming memoQ 2014 R2 (same workflow for QA as with memoQ 2014, shown in this video)
• Support for entry positioning in MultiTerm. Now when you choose Edit Source in Xbench with an .sdltb or a .mdb MultiTerm file, MultiTerm will open right at the entry selected in Xbench.

The new Xbench 3.0 build is available for download from our Downloads page.

As usual, if you run into any issue or have any suggestion, please contact us.