Transit NXT’s Service Pack 8 is full of new exciting features and enhancements. As you know, Transit NXT supports a wide variety of file types (file formats), but SP8 supports even more, which means that you can now translate almost everything with Transit.

SP8 allows Transit to support the following new file types:

• Microsoft Office 2013 file format
• WebVTT file format for subtitles
• File type for SDLPPX files (translation packages in another format)
• Enhanced file types for InDesign and FrameMaker

Let’s look at how to use these new file types and the advantages of each one:

Microsoft Office 2013

Microsoft Office 2013 is the current version of the Microsoft Office Suite and is gradually replacing the previous versions. The previous Service Pack already supported various versions of Microsoft Office, from Microsoft Office 95 to 2010. With this Service Pack, you can directly import your MS Office 2013 files into Transit and translate without having to save them into previous MS Office versions. This helps you to maintain the formatting of the file, which sometimes varies between different versions of Microsoft Office.

As before, you can automatically generate PDFs to see what your translation looks like as you translate. You can also now preview your translated target language Word document directly in the Transit editor without having to wait until the end to see what the translated file looks like. This is especially useful for heavily formatted documents, as you can view your translations as you translate and make decisions about how your translated string will affect the format of the translated document. You can thus translate and preview at the same time while Transit takes care of the format for you.

In addition, you can translate all MS Office documents in one single project without having to create separate projects for MS Word, MS Excel, etc. You just select the MS Office 95-2013 file type when creating the project and then add any MS Office file to your project either before or during translation.

WebVTT file format for subtitles

Translating subtitles is a very common occurrence nowadays and poses a real challenge for the translator. However, Transit makes this task much easier because you can do everything in the Transit editor in one go without having to switch between the editor and the video clip. Moreover, SP8 provides support for the WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) file format, which is the current format for web subtitles and which continues to gain importance in terms of the new generation of HTML5 and of browsers. With SP8, you can translate WebVTT files directly in Transit.

As you know, the other subtitle file formats supported by Transit are SubRip and Text. Remember that you can see the audiovisual context for each subtitle directly in Transit’s integrated multimedia viewer and also automatically play the video clip for the active segment with the synchronised playback feature. This means that while translating subtitle files, you do not have to go back and forth between Transit and the video file in order to see the context, which saves you a lot of time as a translator or reviewer.

File type format for SDLPPX files (translation packages in another format)

As a translator, you may be working with various clients that require you to use different CAT tools, whereby they send project packages to you in different formats. Transit’s new Service Pack provides an excellent solution to this. You can now use Transit with SDLPPX project packages, i.e., you can unpack them in Transit, improve SDLPPX pre-translation segments using your own translation memory, use the very useful internal repetition mode in SDLPPX projects, as well as benefit from all the functions of Transit while working with these file types. Furthermore after translation, you can pack them as SDLRPX files from Transit itself and then return them to the client.

This makes Transit an ideal solution for translating not only a variety of file formats, but also different CAT tool project packages.

InDesign and FrameMaker

Transit already supports a wide variety of InDesign and FrameMaker formats (from InDesign CS2 and FrameMaker 4 onwards). With the latest plug-ins for these file types, you can now also translate InDesign CC 2014 and FrameMaker 12. Remember that these plug-ins are not included by default and are optional. These file types also give you an option of automatically generating PDFs for Transit's integrated PDF viewer.

For more information on how to get and use these plug-ins, please download the user guide for file types from the Downloads section of our website.

You can select these new file types from the corresponding drop-down menu in the File Type window when creating a project, as shown in the figure below:

Stay tuned for more posts on the new features of Transit's brand new Service Pack (SP8). Please do let us know your feedback on this blog post and also if you would like us to cover any other topic in particular.