I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Farrell, the developer of IntelliWebSearch, at the BP15 Conference in Zagreb this week and was able to have an interesting chat about the IntelliWebSearch application and the similarities to the new Web Lookup! application that was released onto the OpenExchange last week. IntelliWebSearch allows you to do your lookups from any application and in any browser, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own. The Web Lookup! application for Studio 2014 allows you to do your lookups inside a window within Studio as you work, it comes preconfigured with a bunch of search sites and you can add your own. Sounds similar doesn’t it?
Actually it’s very similar and after discussing with Michael a little I came to the conclusion the tools do a similar job. The one big difference I can see is that the Web Lookup! plugin is language sensitive. So if the search site is multilingual in the first place then the Studio app takes the languages from your bilingual file and automatically searches in the appropriate language… useful for a translator I think.
The app installs into the Studio environment and can be run in three ways:
So as you’re translating you select a word or a phrase in the source or the target column and either right-click on the highlighted letters and select Web Lookup; use the ribbon in the View menu and select Web Lookup; or use a keyboard shortcut customisable as you see fit. The results are displayed in a new window in Studio that can be placed anywhere you like – see Moving Windows…
I’ve displayed mine inside Studio and positioned on the left so I can see it properly… the results below are based on searching in the German source and using Linguee… this nicely gives me German to English results similar to a concordance search with my search terms highlighted as you can see below:
There are 40 search engines configured out of the box and this is likely to be very useful for many translators as it is. Once you run a search you can click on each link to see the results for the search in each engine respectively. However, you can edit this list and reduce it to only the ones you’re interested in or add your own. The developer came up with a very neat way to facilitate this, although it may require you to use a text editor.
The process is this… scroll down to the bottom of the list of search facilities you can see above. At the bottom there are two links Settings and Community. The Community link takes you to the SDL Community forum specifically for OpenExchange applications, so you can ask any qestions you have for support in there. The Settings link takes you to the page where you can change the way the application works:
You can remove search engines in here by pressing the delete key in each of the cells within a row and then moving the others up to replace the space. You can restore to default if you mess it up… useful! You can also change the order of the engines using the little up down arrows on the left. However, by far the easiest way to delete things is to use the Export… button at the bottom. This will create a text file saved to a location of your choice and you can edit this with a decent text editor. Each search engines sits on one line so you just remove the lines you don’t want as well as any empty lines and then import it back in again. Straightforward.
But it’s the adding search engines I find most interesting. You can either export the file as above and then add the new ones into the text file after getting the commands with a little help from the Guide… link in the image above; or just enter the results from the Guide directly into the settings window to fill an empty space. Both ways are simple. Clicking on the Guide… opens a new window and this contains a series of instructions you follow. I’m going to do this by adding the Dogpile image search engine as an example.
Step 1.
The instructions are simple. First you copy the phrase web lookup into the search engine.
Step 2.
Next you copy the URL generated by the search engine after running the search and paste it into the space provided.
Step 3.
After pasting the URL in you’ll see that several URLs are generated in the form below. You take this information and put it into the text file exported from the first settings page:
Before we do this note the small blue question marks against each instruction. If you click on these there are some pretty decent instructions that provide additional information to help customise the lookup URL that is generated in Step 3. You can also look at the ones already created in the text file you exported and this also helps to fashion the search you want. For this exercise I’m just running with the results provided to show how this works. So, the results in this case are all exactly the same and in the text file I just create a new entry with one of them below Dilbert as shown below:
I then import the text file back in again and when I run the search I can see it worked like this successfully looking up in the Dogpile image search engine and presenting the information into Studio:
To do the same thing in the settings pane I just add the entry in the space below Dilbert like this:
Both ways are simple enough… I just like to fiddle around in text files!
Since we released this application I have seen at least one request to search local and online dictionaries, such as Langenscheidt for example. This may not be possible at the moment since some of these don’t return the search term in the URL that is generated. The developer is considering extending the application to cover these scenarios if there are enough users who want it, although this may add a little complexity to the configuration. So if you read this and would like to be able to use a tool like this to search online dictionaries you use with a username and password perhaps, then drop a note below or even better post into the SDL Community for app support and comment there.
Have fun… the OpenExchange puts a lot of fun into working with Studio!
Post post addition!
After having confused a few people with my poor instructions I created a short video to show you how you could add a search engine to this plugin. This time using a different engine again so you have a couple of examples. I hope it’s a better job this time around!
