ApSIC Tools Weblog

We’re happy to announce that we just released build 6 of ApSIC Xbench 3.0 spell-checking dictionaries. With this build, we are also introducing a new concept: Fusion Spell-checking.

Fusion Spell-checking is indeed a very simple, yet powerful concept: Hunspell dictionaries are very, very fast, but sometimes they wrongly flag a few words as misspellings. For some languages, they can even issue a large number of false positives if that particular dictionary is of lower quality.

And here is where Microsoft Word enters the stage: Whenever Hunspell thinks that a word is a misspelling, it will check Microsoft Word if it also agrees. The offending word will appear on Xbench spell-checking reports only if they both agree.

This collaborative work of Hunspell and Microsoft Word effectively means that there are fewer false positives in the spell-checking report.

Please note that Fusion Spell-checking requires that Microsoft Word and the relevant language dictionary are installed on the machine.

You can turn on and off Fusion-Spell-checking by choosing Settings->Use Microsoft Word Dictionary in the window that appears when you run a spell-check pass.

To download the latest spell-checking dictionary, open Xbench, choose Tools->Spell-checking Dictionaries, choose your language and then click Update (or Install if you do not have it yet installed).

We hope you enjoy using this new feature! Please check it out and do not hesitate to contact us if you find any issues.

If you still have not tried out Xbench 3.0 yet, simply download it and start a free trial!

We are pleased to announce that Fernando Streckwall has translated the ApSIC Xbench 3.0 User’s Guide into Spanish. The new Spanish guide is now available for ApSIC Xbench 3.0 from the Documentation page on our website.

We are very grateful to Fernando — who also translated the User’s Guide for ApSIC Xbench 2.9 — for his continued commitment to make a Spanish version of the User’s Guide available to the community of users!

We’ve just posted build 7 of the ApSIC Xbench Plugin for SDL Trados Studio 2014.

This new build opens files in the most logical editing mode (i.e., Translation, Review, Sign-Off) based on the confirmation status of segments in the file.

It also fixes some issues with non-translatable files added to a Studio project and with finalized files for which a target file was already generated.

You can download the new build for the Studio plugin from our Download page.

If you find issues or have suggestions, please let us know!

We’re pleased to announce that the ApSIC Xbench Plugin for SDL Trados Studio 2014 is now available for public beta testing.

This plugin has been built on top of the newly released Integration API for SDL Trados Studio 2014, so you need to install the latest release and cumulative update of SDL Trados Studio for the plugin to load. A big thanks to SDL for having put the Integration API in place. We’re sure that it will allow third-party applications to seamlessly integrate with the Studio UI at a level that was not possible before.

This plugin will mostly allow you do two simple, yet very useful, things:

• From Studio, automatically create an Xbench project with the relevant sdlxliff files for QA with the termbase and the translation memory as reference and also automatically launch Xbench to run the QA.
• From Xbench, open in Studio the sdlxliff file with the Edit Source command right at the segment select and with the context of the project

We hope that you find the plugin useful. We’re encouraged by early comments of users in the private beta, such as this recent comment by medical translator Emma Goldsmith in ProZ: “I’m beta testing it at the moment, and it’s changing the way I work!”.

To use the plugin, you need to have installed:

• SDL Trados Studio 2014 with Cumulative Update 2 (CU2). Help->About in Studio should show 11.0.3688.
• ApSIC Xbench 3.0 build 1186

For more detailed information on the ApSIC Xbench Plugin for SDL Trados Studio, you can check out the User’s Guide.

You can download the plugin in the Download section of our web page.

We are happy to announce that ApSIC Xbench 3.0 Build 1186 is now available for download at www.xbench.net.

This build adds support for SDL Trados Multiterm .sdltb files, which share the same file type in Project Properties as the already existing support for MultiTerm .xml file.

The MultiTerm file type in Xbench that supports both formats (.sdltb and .xml) has been renamed to Trados MultiTerm Glossary.

A detailed list of changes and additions in this build can be found in the change log.

Also, in the next few days we will be releasing a public beta of an ApSIC Xbench plugin for Trados Studio 2014. It will allow you to do the following:

• From Studio, launch a QA session in Xbench with all or part of the sdlxliff files in the current project.
• From Xbench, use Edit Source on the current segment to open Studio at the segment in question, with all project context (TMs, TBs, etc) in place.

If you are familiar with Xbench, this plugin brings support that is similar to the support that Xbench currently has for TagEditor but with some additional advantages, such as opening the file not only at the exact segment but in the project context and also with the ability to start (and iterate) the QA process from Studio, where normally the need to QA occurs.

To use the Xbench plugin for Studio, you will need:

• SDL Trados Studio 2014 with Cumulative Update 2 (the About box needs to be 3.0.3688; earlier Studio versions cannot load the plugin)
• Xbench 3.0 build 1186

If you are interested in taking an early peek at the plugin (and help us with early feedback) before the public beta is available, please contact us letting us know your environment (Edition of Trados Studio 2014, and operating system).

Xbench users have spoken, and have spoken very clearly about the pricing they prefer. In just one week, we’ve increased our customer base by more than a 15%, and a good part of sales during last week were renewals of existing customers quite ahead of time, indeed.

On the other side, we’ve also had cases of users willing to send Xbench subscriptions as Christmas gifts (which required a bit of manual hacking to set up with this promotion) and also users that were returning from a vacation last week and were concerned that they missed the promotion.

So the good news is that we’ve mixed all these facts together and we decided to also include Christmas as part of this Black Friday Promotion. This effectively means that the Xbench 3.0 pricing of €49/year will be available at www.xbench.net until January 10.

Frankly speaking, we do not think that we will be able to grow our customer base a 15% every week, but we are confident that we will be a good candidate to enter the Guinness World Records as the longest-running Black Friday Promotion ever.

If €49/year is a price for Xbench 3.0 that suits your budget, you can place your order today at www.xbench.net.

We’re happy to announce that you are now able to buy Xbench 3.0 at €49/year, a 50% of discount on the regular price until the end of this week.

We sort of planned a nice end of year promotion week but, since last year’s Christmas was already pretty hectic with the launch of the Xbench 3.0 beta, we decided to take it easy this year and piggyback on American traditions for once.

So if you were thinking about buying your first Xbench 3.0 subscription year or extending your current subscription, this week only you can do it at half the price at www.xbench.net.

We’ve just published build 1174 of ApSIC Xbench 3.0, available for download at http://www.xbench.net/index.php/download.

This build adds a new built-in check, Alphanumeric Mismatches. This check tries to catch those sequences of letters and digits such in part numbers, that sometimes are inadvertently modified in a fuzzy match.

If you do not have a large display or simply prefer to see as many search results as possible in the body of Xbench, now you can hide the tool bar or arrange the Source Term and Target Term fields next to each other (instead of one on top of the other). To put the Target Term field next to the Source Term field, simply pull up the bottom edge of the Search/Target pane, that now has a size control. To return to the classic layout, simply pull it down.

For more details about the changes in this build, please check the change log.

Xbench has had a very useful feature called PowerSearch for a few years now. It uses Google search grammar to define conditional searches, with the logical AND, OR and NOT operators. In the Search tab, you can call PowerSearch by pressing Ctrl+P. PowerSearch is also available in Xbench checklists, as a check box.

We’ve created this video in our YouTube channel to see it in action (remember to choose HD definition for the best viewing experience).

In a nutshell, this is how it works:

The AND Operator: The following search expression returns all segments that contain String 1, String 2, and String 3:

"String 1" "String 2" "String 3"

The OR Operator: The following search expression returns all segments that contain String 1, String 2, or String 3:

"String 1" or "String 2" or "String 3"

The NOT Operator: The following search expression returns all segments that contain “String 1” but do not contain “String 2” (please note the minus sign in front of “String 2”):

"String 1" -"String 2"

PowerSearch is available both in the freeware version Xbench 2.9 and in Xbench 3.0. To try it out, you can download Xbench from www.xbench.net.

Every once in a while, we receive feedback from users asking us to implement a blacklist feature in Xbench. The idea of a blacklist is to find translations which contain certain terms that a client does not want or terms which would cause a lot of trouble to the translator if they inadvertently sneak in.

Well, it turns out that the blacklist feature has always been there!

To create your own blacklist, simply go to the Checklist Manager, create a new checklist and add your blacklisted terms in there.

If you are not familiar with checklists, you may want to watch these videos to get up to speed with this very powerful feature:

• Using ApSIC Xbench 3.0 Checklists for QA (Part 1)
• Using ApSIC Xbench 3.0 Checklists for QA (Part 2)
• How to Get a Photographic Memory for Client Feedback with Xbench