Quick Tips

This section focuses on the most important features of ApSIC Xbench and aims to be a quick view of what ApSIC Xbench can do.

We strongly recommend reading this chapter to get the most out of ApSIC Xbench with the minimum learning effort.

  • ApSIC Xbench is not an indexer. It reads the contents of the files each time you load a project and tries to respond to terminology queries very fast. Therefore, loading all of the Microsoft glossaries for a major language can take several minutes and will require a significant amount of memory. If you plan to load huge amounts of reference in the range of tens of millions of words, it is strongly recommended to have at least 1 GB of memory. If you don’t have a very powerful machine, we do not recommend loading all Microsoft glossaries but a more focused selection with the subject areas that pertain to your current translation project.
  • Once loaded, ApSIC Xbench stays active in the background until it is explicitly shut down. When ApSIC Xbench is active, a pink gem appears in the system tray. To unload ApSIC Xbench from memory, you must shut it down. For example, you can shut it down by right- clicking on the icon in the system tray and then choosing Shut Down Xbench.
  • While ApSIC Xbench is active, it can be called from any Windows application with the Ctrl+Alt+Insert key sequence. If there is text marked in the application, ApSIC Xbench searches automatically the text marked. The actual keystrokes are configurable.
  • In addition to the Microsoft software glossaries, ApSIC Xbench supports many input formats from a number of CAT applications, including Trados, memoQ, Wordfast, Memsource, Matecat, SDLX, Transit, and other industry-standard formats such as TMX, TBX, or XLIFF. You can combine the different formats into one Xbench Project by assigning priorities to each source to define the terminology decision process of your specific translation project. You can save each ApSIC Xbench project for later reuse.
  • You can copy the target text of the currently selected item into the clipboard by pressing Enter in the main window. The Enter key closes the window copying the text so that it is ready for pasting in the application where you edit your translation using Shift+Insert. This is very useful when translating the documentation of a software application whose software strings are loaded into an ApSIC Xbench project.
  • QA checks can be run using the QA tab. QA checks are run only against files defined as ongoing translation. A very powerful QA feature are checklists, which allow you to run in batch a number of predefined checks using the powerful ApSIC Xbench search capabilities.

After getting some familiarity with the basic capability of the product, we do encourage you to read the documentation with more detail to learn about many useful features that exist in the product.