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1. Alles neu macht der
Mai (Premium Edition)
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. . . is a German saying
alluding to the renewal of all good things in the month of May (I still insist
that this saying came about because I was born in May). It just goes to show
that the rule proves the exception, however, because translation environment
tool (TEnT) makers certainly don't follow it. Instead, their rule of thumb is
that it's a good idea to come out with a big splash for the large conferences
in the fall, in particular the ATA and Localization World conferences
in the U.S. and the tekom in Germany.
And so this year again
we have a whole range of updated TEnTs.
Here is a sampling:
- MultiTrans -- New features: increased alignment capabilities
(I'm interested in looking at this and writing about it, but I'm still
waiting for a copy of the program I was promised . . . ).
- Similis -- New features: improved alignment and a
German and Spanish interface option.
- Star Transit -- New features: overhauled user
interface and a number of features that allow for greater interactivity
with the reference materials. I'm looking forward to reviewing this in one
of the upcoming editions of the newsletter.
- Trados -- New features: machine translation
component, some new filters, and bundling with Passolo (for more,
see below).
- Wordfast -- New features: here's a better question:
where are the old features? Wordfast has completely overhauled the
program, abandoned the Word interface, and provided support for many
more file formats. I had a quick look at a beta version, but I'll write
more about it in the newsletter to be released after the ATA next
week.
Other new or renewed
tools that I've already mentioned in the last few newsletters include MemoQ,
Heartsome, Alchemy Publisher, and AnyMem.
So, there's no shortage of
new toys tools to look at, some with features that,
while not providing a breakthrough, could be a worthwhile improvement.
And, while we're looking
at large fall updates, my Translator's Tool Box
ebook has just been published in a major update, and there is a lot of good new
activity at TranslatorsTraining.com
(more on that below).
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| ADVERTISEMENT |
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Announcing SDL
Trados 2007 Suite! The latest version of the leading translation memory
software. Click here for a special
offer for Tool Kit readers or visit www.sdl.com/toolkit1108
Amongst other
enhancements SDL Trados 2007 Suite delivers:
- Speed through
Automated translation (beta) integrated into your translation software
environment
- Innovation by
incorporating technology for visual translation of software user
interfaces
- Extended
support for the latest file types, including Office 2007 & QuickSilver
3.0
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2. Measurement
Conversion Utilities
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While some TEnTs provide
for automatic conversions between certain measurements, there are naturally
restrictions to their abilities.
And though there are
many websites that perform all kinds of conversions, it's still helpful to have
a little program on your computer that converts all kinds of possible and
impossible measurements for you. There are a ton of programs out there, but my hand-down
favorite is Convert. Convert
even allows you to define your own parameters for your personal conversions. For
instance, how would light years convert into kilograms? (Let me know if you
ever figure that one out.)
It truly is a very
helpful tool for translators, plus it's free, plus the developer is about the
geekiest guy you could imagine. I really like his fortune cookie statistics. Or
how about his dating site? ("Josh is very selective about the women he
dates. The below application will help weed out the 'non-desirables' so that
Josh does not waste his time." You just gotta say it the way it is, Josh!)
What Convert does
not do is perform conversions directly within documents, which is something
that T4T-CNV does
(within Microsoft Word). An added benefit to this terribly named program
is that you can choose whether you simply want to have your data converted
(i.e., 1" to 2.54 cm) or appended (i.e., 1" to 1" (2.54 cm)).
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3. (HTML)Help!
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After switching lots of
license files back and forth with the representatives at Alchemy, I finally got
my version of Publisher
up and running. And I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw.
Anyone who has ever
worked with a recent version of the localization tool Alchemy Catalyst will
recognize the interface as being from the same maker -- it looks very, very
similar, but the functions are not. While Catalyst is primarily a
development tool with some translation abilities, with Publisher the
translation abilities stand in the foreground. It supports a number of
text-based software file formats (rc, resx, Java formats, etc.), some compiled
software formats (exe, dll), HTML, XML, Word, Excel, FrameMaker
(as original fm files -- no need to save them to the mif format, but you do
need an installed version of FrameMaker for this), InDesign and Quark
(if saved with the CopyFlow plug-in).
And, to my great delight, it also includes the Catalyst ability to
translate HTMLHelp files (thus the heading of this article) without having to
decompile and later recompile them (it actually does that for you in the
background). This is a very helpful feature that could even be used to make a
quick mono-lingual change to a help file (like "these instructions are
stupid!") rather than going through the tedious "engineering
processes."
Just like its big
brother Catalyst, Publisher can directly connect to Trados
and Wordfast translation memories. So in the case of Trados, you
don't have to export into some kind of an interchange text format -- just
connect to your original TM. You can use TMX translation memories as well. Its
own translation memories are simple text files.
The import process of
the supported files is seamless (it just requires a File> Open
command) and the files are displayed in a table format with a separate
translation field below. The WYSIWYG -- what-you-see-is-what-you-get -- format
that has made Catalyst what it is today is available only for certain
file types, including software and HTML files. It is not available for documentation
formats, but you can easily save the target file at any point during the
translation process in its original file format to see whether the translation
fits or simply for testing purposes.
The two major weaknesses
that I spotted were a very manual way of working with inline codes (tags or
other formatting marks that occur in the middle of a segment) and the treatment
of FrameMaker index markers. Inline codes are not stored in the
translation memory so they are not transferred from one segment to the next. That's
no problem if you have a text with hardly any formatting, but it's a real
nuisance otherwise. And index markers in FrameMaker are simply not
extracted (as far as I could tell); considering how relevant these often are in
manuals written in FrameMaker, this is a problem that needs to be fixed.
For anyone interested in seeing Publisher
in action, there's a Flash video of the translation of a Word file on TranslatorsTraining.com.
Check it out and compare it with other tools that all translate the same file!
|
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- the most customizable CAT tool in the market
- gives you the choice to deliver in XLIFF and TMX or tagged RTF and TXT
TM formats
And as Jost puts it in the Tool Kit: "There are many obvious benefits to
Heartsome -- platform-independence, a fairly small footprint on your
system, a good choice of underlying database servers . . . and a very pleasant
'feel.' . . . It is certainly an interesting and powerful
tool."
Enjoy the spirit of freedom. Make today your
independence day! Buy now at www.heartsome.net. |
| 4. MTrados | |
I spent some time last
week looking at the new version of Trados Suite 2007 with the
"beta" machine translation option that I mentioned in the last
newsletter.
Apart from the machine
translation feature, there is nothing much new in the core Trados
Workbench/TagEditor applications unless you are into translating QuickSilver
files (if you don't know what those are -- no need to worry). One interesting additional
feature is the inclusion of the Essential Edition of SDL Passolo,
though. Passolo is the localization tool that SDL bought awhile back and
is the most formidable contender to Catalyst. While the Essential
Edition is really only a teaser edition that comes without most of the
engineering and automated features, it still offers some functionality that
could make it interesting for a freelance translator (not for an LSP since only
one target language is supported per project). As far as file format support,
it supports the translation of Win32 and .NET programs (which includes dll,
exe, and resx files) in WYSIWYG format and allows you to resize dialogs and
other functions as you translate. Most of us will not use this often, but it's
interesting for those who do.
Passolo is a very powerful tool that I always found
not quite as easy to use as Catalyst, but if you give yourself half an
hour or so you will understand the essentials (and, after all, it is the Essential
edition!).
Now,
on to the machine translation feature. This is a connection to SDL's freetranslation.com freetranslation.com. There you'll
also find out whether your language combination is supported. I ran a few tests
and -- not too surprisingly -- was not too impressed.
However, I still think
it might prove to be helpful in some situations. In the Automated
Translation (Beta) tab (located in the Translation Memory Options
dialog), you can choose to connect to the "default connection
settings" (freetranslation.com) or you can select another connection. Of
course, you can do that only if your client has provided you with an alternate
connection; if that's the case, then you should be able to assume that the
client uses a much better-trained engine for machine translation that should
supply you with much better results.
I talked to some folks
from SDL about it, and they pointed out that "some of this desirable [i.e.,
user-definable] functionality will be implemented as we move forward but is not
in the initial beta release, so by calling this beta we set expectations
accordingly." Fair enough.
Interestingly, reader
Spiros Doikas pointed out that the little but powerful Metatexis has supported machine
translation for about two years now, and with a much larger number of
languages: all the language combinations that either Babelfish or Google
Translate support (it would go beyond the format of the newsletter to list
them all, but let me just say that "Croatian> Hindi" is one of
them . . .). It might be a matter of taste whether those results will be any
better than the ones from Trados, and they certainly will not be
user-definable at any foreseeable point in the future, but the functionality is
essentially the same as in Trados: If no match is found in the translation
memory, the machine translation is queried and delivers some result that you
then will have to work on.
Spiros actually wrote a
little tutorial for using this feature in Metatexis that you can find at
http://www.translatum.gr/forum/index.php/topic,28776.0.html.
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| 5. Open Wordfast | |
A long time ago I
mentioned a tool called OpenWordfast, essentially a tool that was
modeled along the lines of Wordfast to be used with OpenOffice.org.
I tried it and it didn't work too well back then, but now it's presumably out
of beta, might work better (I'll let you know in a later edition of the
newsletter), and is no longer called OpenWordfast: meet Anaphraseus. What has not
changed is that it's still an open-source tool, so it's free.
Let me know if you have
had some experiences with it.
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| 6. Too Good to Be True? | |
You betcha (to quote our
newly famous governor of Alaska).
I don't even know where
to start. . . .
I spent pretty much all
of last week working through my Tool Box for Translator's
ebook, not only to update all the links, graphics, and (of course) information,
but also to include some new sections, including one on standalone terminology
tools, translation memory maintenance, dealing with graphics, a new categorization
of computer-assisted translation tools, all the latest TEnTs and other tools
that are relevant to translators, AND a free $500 gift certificate to Amazon.
Just kidding! (About the gift certificate -- the rest is true.) All in all the
new version has about 30 more pages than its predecessor (not counting quite a
few pages that were deleted because they had become obsolete). I know I've said
this before, but this is still the best way I can think of to describe this book:
It's exactly the kind of technical information that I LONGED for when I joined
this industry and that would have saved me countless hours of research and
trial-by-error. As before, this edition (which happens to be version 7) comes
as a 360-page PDF and an HTMLHelp file that contains the same information but
allows for quicker access.
For all owners of
previous versions of the Tool Box it is only $15 at www.internationalwriters.com/toolbox
(if you just purchased version 6.1 in the month of October, drop me a note and
I will send you a free copy), and for new owners it's $50. However, if you buy
it before November 15, it is only $40 -- and that also includes a free
subscription to the Premium edition of the Tool Kit newsletter.
Now, I mentioned above
that TranslatorsTraining.com,
our site to present the 16 (!) most important translation environment tools,
has also added some cool new content, including videos of the new versions of Heartsome
and Publisher (see above). The normal annual subscription prize for that
is 35 Euro, which these days is approximately $45. So to buy the ebook plus the
TranslatorsTraining.com
subscription, it would normally cost you $95. But if you buy the ebook plus the
subscription to TranslatorsTraining.com it's only $70 -- this also is valid only
until November 15. And you can just enter the correct amount at http://www.internationalwriters.com/toolbox/.
Phew, lots of numbers! Just
to make sure, here are the offers (valid until November 15):
Update to version 7 of
the Tool Box ebook: $15
New version of the Tool Box ebook: $50 $40
Update of the Tool Box ebook plus a subscription to
TranslatorsTraining.com: $60
$50
New version of the Tool Box ebook plus a subscription to
TranslatorsTraining.com: $95
$70
You're welcome.
Oh, did I mention the
cool new cover of the book? Check out the new logo at http://www.internationalwriters.com/toolbox/.
And if you come to the ATA this year, stop by and say hello to Jeromobot and me
in the exhibition hall.
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| The Last Word on the Tool Kit |
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