I spent the weekend at my Mothers house the week before last and was digging around looking for photographs of myself when I was the same age as my son.  I found a few… a few I wouldn’t share with anyone else but my son!  What was I thinking with the baggy trousers and platform shoes…!

I also found some old Army pictures including these two taken during my basic training, which did an excellent job of shaking me out of my baggy trousers and platform shoes!  Also provided me with the most tenuous link yet into the translation environment because I wanted to write about clean and unclean files.  I don’t know who came up with this terminology, but if I think about it, the description probably fits quite well.  But the first time I heard it I’m sure something like these photos would have been closer to mind!

So let’s define an unclean file first of all.  In our world this would be a file that contained the source text and the target translation… so essentially what we call a bilingual file.  In the olden days, not quite as old as my pictures, this would have been Bilingual DOC or TTX and today it’s more likely to be XLIFF.  However, we still see questions being asked because a translator has been asked to provide the unclean file for their customer and they’re not sure how to do this.  The task can become more confusing because technically an XLIFF is also an unclean file but this term generally refers to Bilingual DOC rather than XLIFF, and probably rather than TTX as well.  This of course poses a problem if you have a modern translation environment because even if the tools you use are capable of creating an unclean file like this, the only real guarantee that the file will be suitable for your customer is if it is created using the same tools they are using.  So this means you need to be translating the unclean file in the first place and not a clean, or monolingual file.

SDL LEGIT!

I’m going to talk about Trados unclean files, and if you have just purchased Studio 2014 then you may not have a copy of SDL Trados Translators Workbench which did create what we think about when we refer to unclean files…

Read more | multifarious.filkin.com

Photo credit | Unclean Windows by Kevin Steinhardt on Flickr