There are a couple of accounting/project management applications for freelance translators (including some that keep spamming my -- and probably your -- inbox), and there is also a market leader with Translation Office 3000 (TO3000). Readers of this newsletter or my ebook know of my hard-fought conversion from using a tool combination of Excel, Outlook, and MS Project to a single product that keeps track of my project, invoices, payments, etc. Since my conversion I have been evangelically trying to convert others as well.

The version of TO3000 that I still use is the version (7) of a few years ago. Although version 8 has been around for a couple of years, I never made the switch because its different workflow seemed too hard to get used to (remember, I was a difficult convert in the first place). Now version 9 has been released and I took some time to talk with the folks from AIT and play around with it.

I asked AIT's Vladimir to give me reasons why someone should upgrade if he or she is happy with good old version 7. He said -- and I can attest to this after having played with it for a bit -- if you only need a tool to write and track invoices and payments and not for file or project management or FTP integration (to download files directly into TO3000's file management system from your client's FTP server), you may be just as happy with version 7.

While version 7 was also a file management tool, most translators used it primarily for accounting and billing processes. With version 8, AIT made the file and project management features much more prominent, leaving many of the old users confused. New users, however, loved it -- they learned the new system from scratch and ended up with a tool that did much more for them than version 7. The brand new version 9 is like a highly polished improvement of version 8, with some additional features such as the above-mentioned FTP integration, the ability to create custom fields, easier access to files and invoices, and improved (and very slick, I might add) reporting capabilities.

If you still do your accounting and project management the Stone Age way (and have some extra cash on hand), you should definitely buy the new version of TO3000. If you use version 8 you should also upgrade, since things only get easier and better with the new version. If you are a committed user of version 7, you should follow Vladimir's advice.

One -- or maybe the major -- reason for the path of  TO3000's development is its corporate sibling product, Projetex. This server-based management tool for agencies was released a few years ago, following the success that TO3000 had in the freelance market. While the first edition of Projetex was still more or less styled according to the specs of the freelance product (with additional server support, vendor management, etc.), it has now taken the driver's seat, and TO3000 is following its development. So you won't be surprised to hear that many of the new features of TO3000 are also part of the newly released version of Projetex.

Projetex is a very solid tool based on the Firebird database engine (as is TO3000). It has multi-user server-based access and file and project management capabilities that include all those of the freelance product along with roles-based access, vendor management, and various other features. What is sorely missing is the online or even web-based component that is so central to tools like Worx or Plunet. This feature seems to be rather crucial to international organizations with project managers all over the world, or with the need to have freelance translators (or project managers) and clients log in and download or upload files, view reports, write invoices, etc. Projetex is presently a good solution for small agencies that do most or all of their project management inhouse and that prefer to communicate with translators and clients via the traditional channels -- email, FTP, etc. Still, Projetex has the potential to grow into a "bigger" tool if AIT finds the right approach to online/sharing capabilities -- and they are working on it.

You think they named OmegaTas they did to appease both little- and big-endians? Be that as it may, there is a nice and interesting article on OmegaT on Corinne McKay's blog. Many of you know that Corinne is an avid Linux user, and in her quest for TEnTs that support the Linux environment she stumbled on OmegaT (again) after she had issues with Wordfast and Heartsome. Now she raves about the simplicity and speed of OmegaT. And for the few that do not know: OmegaT is probably the best-known open-source TEnT that runs on Java, i.e., is supported by Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

I mentioned that developers can be poetic. One of the more poetic terms that they have come up with must be "magic numbers." And surprisingly, these little ministers of magic can be quite helpful. Most of us have received files of indeterminate type -- we either don't know the extension (and even sites like www.filext.com can't help) or the extension is gone or corrupt.

Here is a quick and dirty way to help with that. You can open the file in question in Notepad (the Windows text editor) or another text editor. If everything is "humanly" readable, the file is in a text-based format and can be translated in an appropriate text, HTML, or XML editor. If the file opens with a lot of strange characters, it is some kind of binary file (a file that can be read only by computers) that cannot be edited (or saved!) in a text editor.

The good thing is that many of these files have a "magic number" (that's what it's really called!), i.e., a clue to their identity in the first line (the "header line"). Here is a list of the more common ones:

• GIF image files have "GIF89a" or "GIF87a" in their header.
• JPEG image files begin with "0xFFD8" or with "JFIF" or "Exif".
• PNG images contain "PNG" or "P N G" in their header. 
• TIF/TIFF graphic files begin with either "II" (II for Intel, or little-endian -- see above) or "MM" (MM for Motorola, or big-endian).
• PDF files start with "%PDF".
• PostScript files and programs start with "%!".
• Many EXE or DLL files start with "MZ" or "ZM" (after the developer Mark Zbikowski).
• MIDI music files have "MThd".
• ZIP files begin with "PK" (for Phil Katz, author of the compression utility PKZIP).

This last magic number is particularly helpful because there are many file formats that pretend to be something very fancy and unique when in reality they are "only" ZIP files with a new and different extension (think of packaged Transit, Déjà Vu, or Trados files, for instance, or Office 2007 or OpenOffice files). Finding out that these are ZIP files allows us to change the extension to .zip and unzip them with the compression utility of your choice. This in turn can sometimes give you access to data you would not have access to because you might not have the appropriate application. (Awhile back I mentioned a case where I had been able to process Microsoft InfoPath .xsn files, which turned out to be a different kind of compressed format containing XML files that could be processed in a TEnT and later compressed into valid InfoPath files again.)

What's extremely important to remember is this: NEVER save non-text-based files in a text editor. If you need to give it a different extension, do that in Windows Explorer.