I want to try my handing at building a plug-in for SDL Trados Studio 2017. I have read that it is fairly straightforward to integrate an MT engine into SDL Trados Studio. This software is used by human translators to translate documents in various formats (e.g. Microsoft Word) with support from translation memories, dictionaries, MT engines, etc.

Since the initial configuration of the SDL SDK is a bit complicated, I am going to record some of the details here in case I need to backtrack.

  • Step 1: Install Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.

    This step was not too hard once I figured out that the SDL advice to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 was severely outdated. Visual Studio 2017 takes up 12 GB of disk space, which is a little hard to fathom after working mostly with Linux tools in recent times. I also had to figure out that Avast was blocking the installation process.

    Just a couple of notes:

    1. Download Visual Studio here.

    2. See what software Microsoft has available here (log-in required).

  • Step 2: Install the SDL SDK.

    In principle, this is just a matter of downloading the file SDLTradosStudio2017SDK.exe and running the installer. Unfortunately, the SDL templates were not available in Visual Studio 2017 after I ran the SDL SDK installer and it finished running without any output (usually a bad sign). A search of the SDL SDK forum found this link as well as another relevant link.

    Thus, I had to change the User Projects Template location from (default location) C:\Users\garchik2\Documents\Visual Studio 2017\Templates\ProjectTemplates to (SDL SDK location) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 15.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\SDL\SDLAppStore2017\5.0\ProjectTemplates.

    Here are some notes:

    1. The directory C:\ProgramData\SDL\SDK 5.0 also seems to be important. I think it contains sample projects.

    2. The most relevant SDL forum is here (“Language Developers”).

    3. One of the main SDL SDK developers has a very useful series of blog posts here.

    4. SDL also has (outdated?) online help.