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1. Giving Thanks
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For the last few years during
(American) Thanksgiving -- a holiday that I've really grown to appreciate -- my
wife and I have asked our children to list things that they are thankful for.
(We might not do it this year -- our 13-year old puberty-ridden daughter may
not find anything to put down . . .).
Here is what I am
thankful for as a translator: software tools and the access they provide.
I know this sounds a
little precocious, but before you roll your eyes and close this newsletter,
hear me out: I have only been professionally translating since the mid-nineties,
so I don't even know what translation without software tools was really like.
But I was working on my dissertation before that, spending weeks and weeks in
dusty archives, working from painstakingly handwritten notes in an archaic
filing system and collecting many bookshelves worth of photocopied articles,
books, letters, photographs, diaries, and anything else that had to do with
what I was working on. Yes, it was all rather quaint and romantic, but, boy, I
don't want to go back to it!
Just take this example: This
morning I received a mid-size translation project on a subject area that is
part of my general field of expertise, but with a specific terminology I am not
familiar with. However, I knew that if I only searched hard and intelligently
enough on the Internet, I would eventually either find a glossary or an already
translated set of documents that I can make into an information source within
minutes and use over and over again as I work on the translation next week.
And it's not just on the
Internet -- it's also my own memory that I can surpass with the use of tools. How
would I know how I translated the software contract of company XYZ five years
ago? I call myself lucky if I remember that I worked on it to start with. But with
accessible data, whether in the form of termbases/glossaries, translation
memories or bitexts, or even just simple indexing or text search tools, the
data will be available -- not after hours of looking through dusty archives,
but within minutes or seconds.
What I have also
realized and am increasingly thankful for is that while certain aspects of
translation technology might seem threatening to the translator, they really do
something altogether different: They emphasize the value of a skilled translator.
Think of it. While I have talked about the selective use of machine translation
as a sensible and successful alternative to human translation, the results show
a) how much more quality we produce beyond the immediate usefulness that you
might find in Microsoft's machine-translated knowledge base or
Google-translated chat discussions and b) that we don't have to waste our time
on stuff that machines can do! I am also working on a project right now that
would be perfect for machine translation -- if the originating company had
invested in a custom-built MT engine. Instead, I now have to push myself
through thousands and thousands of words, most of which are in sentences that
are fuzzy translation memory matches, but I still have to spend hours and hours
staring at my screen hoping that I don't miss the slight change in wording that
might occur between sentences. A computer would truly be better suited for this
job, and I could have accepted some of the other more challenging jobs that I
had to decline.
So, there!
Oh, and here's one more
thing that I am (usually) thankful for: other translation professionals. It's
nice and helpful to communicate with each other electronically, but it is so
much more fun to meet in person. We are a weird and motley crew!
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| 2. Out of One Make Two,
Make Three (Premium Edition) | |
No, this is not about
cell division -- though it has that sort of a feel to it. It is about the
strange tale of one TEnT provider being one, then becoming two, and finally three.
I always knew that Heartsome's
technology somehow originated in Germany. But it was not until I stumbled on www.heartsome.de, which has a decidedly
different look and feel than www.heartsome.net,
let alone a different offering, that I wanted to explore it more deeply. So I
talked to Klemens Waldhör, the owner of Heartsome Europe, the company
behind heartsome.de -- and here's the scoop.
Waldhör, an employee of Alpnet,
co-founded Heartsome Singapore und Heartsome Europe together with
a fellow Alpnetian in 2002. This lasted until 2004 when the companies split
into, well, Heartsome Singapore und Heartsome Europe. Heartsome
Singapore started to market the Heartsome tool suite (that you can
see on TranslatorsTraining.com)
and Heartsome Europe's product was called Araya. Araya was
customized for corporate customers with XML- and server-based processes, and
the Heartsome tool suite was and is marketed to the whole range of
actors in the translation industry.
With its last release,
the interface of Heartsome has been completely overhauled. While some of
the underlying engine -- in particular its reliance on the XML-based exchange
standards TMX, TBX, and XLIFF -- may still be similar, the casual observer
would not necessarily notice that these tools spring from one root. This is
different for another tool, Swordfish, which earlier this year was spun
off from the Singaporean (by now Hong Kong) Heartsome tool by its head
developer and has now found a new home in Uruguay (you can also see this tool
on TranslatorsTraining.com).
No doubt that over time Swordfish and Heartsome will also develop
into more distinctly different tools.
I can't help myself, but
somehow this whole story reminds me of those dreaded statistics that suggest
that folks with divorced parents are more likely to get a divorce themselves. .
. .
(Before you go ballistic
on me for that last comment: I come from a divorced family myself and am committed
to defying the statistics for my own family.)
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3. Lots of Little Free Treasures
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SDL's David Pooley was
kind enough to look for tools that are free counterparts to the $7 PC
Magazine tools that I listed last time. Here they are (followed by
descriptions from their developers). I actually installed some of them and
think they are very cool:
- Taskbar Shuffle
-- "A simple, small, free utility that lets you drag and drop your Windows
taskbar buttons to rearrange them." The tool is available in the
very telling Nerd Cave, but I installed it and think it's very
useful.
- Scanner -- "This tool uses
a unique concentric pie chart to display the usage of your hard disk or
other media. The chart shows all major files and folders from all
directory levels at once." This looks super-handy, though I haven't
tried it myself.
- TaskSwitchXP --
"An advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard
Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same
functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it
by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched
to."
- Stickies -- "Stickies
is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of Post-It
notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerized version of
those notes."
- KeePass -- "KeePass is a free
open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in
a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is
locked with one master key or a key file, so you only have to remember one
single master password or select the key file to unlock the whole
database."
David also pointed out
that "many of these kinds of utilities can be installed on a USB flash drive
and made portable. I have a 4GB drive for just this purpose crammed with useful
software that I can take with me wherever I go."
Since there is nothing
more frustrating than getting stuck at a "foreign" computer without
the tools that you like, this is indeed helpful. Here are some sites that offer
downloads of these portable tools: PortableApps,
winPenPack,
and Portable Freeware.
On the last of those sites you can even find an
entry for the TEnT OmegaT as a portable application.
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| 4. Sandboxies and
Clipmates | |
I love good names for good tools and
these two have chosen well.
The first one was recommended by Gert
van Assche. He wrote:
One VERY useful thing for translators: Sandboxie. Many translators find tools
on the web and to know what they are worth, they just install it on their own
PC. Until I had Sandboxie, I installed these little tools on a PC of my
kids. If the tool was crap, I did not install it on my own professional PC. If
the tool destroyed the PC of my kids, no harm was done, and I could prove
myself to be a loving and caring father by reinstalling their game PC ;-)
Sandboxie is a small tool that allows you to
execute an unknown program in a safe way: the Windows registry is not changed
at any time, and the files are saved to a disk in a safe place. Only a real
virtual machine is more safe, but that's a lot more work to setup and to
maintain as well.
One last warning though: if a program that runs in the
sandbox is touching files on the hard disk, they are really touched. So one should
always use new software on copies of important files, until you know the
program is safe and it is doing what you expect it to do.
Earlier today the Sandboxie website was unbearably slow,
so you might want to try again if you meet the same fate, but it indeed looks
like a very helpful (and well-named) tool.
Now to the other mate:
Recent versions of Microsoft
Office include the Office Clipboard (in Office 2000
applications this is available as a toolbar under View> Toolbars>
Clipboard, and in Office XP and above a slightly more usable
application available under Edit (Home)> (Office) Clipboard), which
allows you to collect up to 12 (2000) or 24 (XP, 2007)
different clipboard items from anywhere on your computer and paste them
individually or all at once into any Office document.
If you don't limit yourself to Microsoft
Office programs, though, this is not very helpful, and has very limited
functionality.
What I really needed, especially for
editing tasks, was a program that would not only collect clipboard entries
between all possible programs, but would also make it possible to directly
print from my clipboard or store clipboard entries between different computer
sessions (i.e., after I switched the computer on and off). I finally found this
little helper in ClipMate.
ClipMate
collects an unlimited amount of clipboard content containing anything from text
to graphics to complete files or folders. It is displayed as a little icon on
your task bar and you can open the ClipMate Explorer by simply double-clicking
that icon. Once you have some content copied into ClipMate, you can even
edit it or combine numerous clipboard snippets into one.
Here are the two three drawbacks that I am aware of: ClipMate
is a fairly massive application that not only can be a drain on your computer's
resources but can also cause conflicts with other applications that make use of
the clipboard, including Trados. Plus, it costs a bit.
And this is where Ilya Vassilevsky's
query came in. He says:
I work in a tech support department and so I have to
type a lot of answers to customers' questions. Sometimes the questions are very
similar and it would be just great to press some hotkey and insert a piece of
text at the cursor position that I have already typed before (possibly several
pieces). The only software I tried that worked this way was ClipMate.
But it's commercial, and a bit overweight. Could you suggest a free, light and
good-looking alternative?
I did not take the time to go through the tools listed here, but most of them are free and I am sure that the majority will not be
as massive as ClipMate is. However, I would expect most if not all of
them to interfere with some translation environment tools. |
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| 5. A New Kind of
Standards | |
Whenever I talk about standards I
see a glassy look appearing in the eyes of my audience. And I know what
everyone is thinking: "We've all heard this and we all know that exchange
standards work -- to a certain degree." And that's true: Exchange standards
are not perfect. In the case of data exchange standards, when you exchange your
translation memory as TMX, your termbase as TBX, or your translation file as
XLIFF, there are two problems: the tools have to support it -- which often is
not the case (particularly when it comes to TBX and XLIFF) -- and even if they
do support it, there is always a certain loss, and this is particularly true with
TMX. But that's not what I want to talk about here.
There are the above-mentioned data
standards (and there are a couple of additional ones), and then there are process
standards that are specific to the translation industry, such as ASTM F2575
or EN 15038. You can find great information about the concept of process-related
standards at http://atanet.org/docs/translation_buying_guide.pdf.
At the ATA conference, we talked
about a third kind of standard that I already discussed awhile back: user
interface standards. This standard would define a number of common processes
that all translation environment tools have (such as "go to next
segment" or "search in terminology database" or "join segments")
and strongly encourage tool vendors to employ a method with which they
could easily share the standards with a competing tool. This would let you as a
user save the keyboard shortcuts of one tool and import it to another one so
your "finger memory" can work just the same way as before. We should
be starting to compile a list of processes soon and we'll be asking for your
help.
That doesn't sound so glassy-eyed,
does it?
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6. A Love Story (continued)
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Here
is my next very remarkable character. I don't even know what to say about this one
except that it's so beautiful.
If you have a Javascript-enabled browser, hold
your cursor over the character for a definition.
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| The Last Word on the Tool Kit |
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© 2008 International Writers' Group | |
