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| Those Were the Good Old
Days! | |
A local exhibit in nearby Eugene, Oregon (by the way, this is how you
pronounce it -- folks here feel rather particular about that!), contains a
Turner painting depicting the British poet Alexander Pope's villa in
Twickenham. A review in our local paper mentioned that "the writer used
money from a translation of Homer to create a grotto and gardens on the
riverside estate."
Not bad, I thought, so I did some more checking and I found this in
Wikipedia's entry on Pope:
Pope had been fascinated
by Homer since childhood. In 1713, he announced his plans to publish a
translation of the Iliad. The work would be available by subscription, with one
volume appearing every year over the course of six years. Pope secured a
revolutionary deal with the publisher Bernard Lintot, which brought him two
hundred guineas a volume, a very vast sum indeed [I checked and that's about
19000 GBP in today's money].
The money made from
the Homer translation allowed Pope to move to a villa at Twickenham in 1719,
where he created his now famous grotto and gardens. Pope decorated the grotto
with alabaster, marbles, and ores such as mundic and crystals. He also used
Cornish diamonds, stalactites, spars, snakestones and spongestone. A number of
mirrors, an expensive luxury in the Augustan age, were also placed around the
grotto. A camera obscura was installed to delight his visitors, of whom there
were many. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during its excavations
enabled the subterranean retreat to be filled with the relaxing sound of
trickling water, which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to
have remarked that: "Were it to have nymphs as well - it would be complete
in everything."
I especially like the idea of the alabaster, marble, and crystals. In
fact, I've started plans to build a number of those grottos from my next larger
translation job. . . .
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1. The Truth Is Out
There (Premium Edition)
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Thanks to you, I usually don't miss important happenings in our industry
for very long. My case in point: the release of Linguee.com/Linguee.de
earlier this month, to which I was alerted by reader Uwe Scholz (thanks, Uwe!).
What is Linguee? Since I am a man of few words, I will simply say
it's a quantum step in search technology for translators.
All right, next topic.
Just kidding.
Really, I think that Linguee may just change the way that many of
us look for information from now on. Here is what it is: It's a very large
corpus of English into German into English data (and, please, don't stop
reading if those are not your languages!) of web-based translated materials.
The two guys behind it have found ways to have web crawlers detect translated
content online and match that up with the help of a 50,000+ entry dictionary (which
can be downloaded right here -- but be forewarned not to just import it into your terminology
database -- there is some funky stuff in there) and other web-based
dictionaries. To look up a term or complete phrase, just enter it into the
search box; the matches that are displayed are complete segment matches with
the terms in question (both in source and target) highlighted. At first glance
the data contains no metadata (origin, subject matter, etc.), but at second
glance you will notice the little icons following the entries which actually
are links to the originating sites, giving you all the metadata you could want.
To search you don't have to register; as a registered user you can evaluate the
translations and correct them, or you can add entries to the dictionary, which
in turn are used to fine tune the matches.
Not too surprisingly, one of the two founders has worked for Google
for a while. To me this helps explain the massive structure (and vision) of
this project, the high degree of automation, and of course the fact that other
language combinations are planned in the near future. (See, I told you to keep
reading!)
This is a great tool for the professional translator as well as for the
casual translator. (Linguee primarily seems to address the latter in
their press releases -- this shouldn't be a shock, considering that there is an
almost infinite number of those compared to a very finite number of us . . . !)
Not only can I see the professional translator as a contributor for quality
purposes (see above), but the value to us is that this is an incredible
resource to very quickly locate bilingual resources elsewhere on the web. And I
can think of many ways to utilize those resources, starting from terminology
harvesting to alignment to great points of reference. Also, since the searches
are URL-based, it is very easy to use tools like IntelliWebSearch to quickly do
searches without having to open Linguee's search interface first. (Or you
could install the unobtrusive Linguee browser plugin for Firefox
or IE, which will just be listed as one of the available search engines
in the upper right search field.)
You should be aware, however, that Linguee is still a beta
version (though I am not even sure what this means anymore after Google
has misused that term to the nth
degree), and I did have a few hiccups when I played with it (server maintenance
messages, etc.)
The timing of Linguee's release is very interesting as well, as
it appears concurrently with the TAUS Data Association release of the first version of its language corpus search
engine (I will report more on their engine in the next newsletter). What will
be different in the TDA solution is that it uses data for which there are still
strict ownership rules applied, whereas Linguee goes a step further by
just using what's out there anyway and at the same time employing a very good
dose of a Web 2.0 participatory model.
So, good news on the data accessibility front for
translators! (I'm not sure whether this will allow us to build fancy grottos,
but it should help us to deliver better products!)
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2. Much More than Only Swinging
New Looks
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TranslatorsTraining.com
not only has a whole new look and feel to it, but there is quite a bit of new
content to go around as well. And that has Jeromobot swinging, baby!
We have tried to make it a lot easier to communicate what we are about
-- a site that helps you understand and select translation technology -- to
sign up, and to find out whether a subscription is something that is relevant
to you. At the same time there is a great deal of new content, including videos
of the new Star Transit NXT (we left the one for Transit XV up as
well) and AnyMem, the translation tool from the Ukrainian translation
software maker AIT. These videos are now shown alongside the likes of Across, Déjà Vu, MemoQ, Similis, OmegaT, Wordfast, Lingotek, Trados, SDLX, Heartsome, Metatexis, Swordfish,
Publisher, Catalyst, Passolo, Cafetrans, and MultiTrans, making it oh-so-easy to pick the one translation environment or
localization tool that fits you best (or better than the one that you are
currently using).
Awhile back we also contacted universities and offered them free access
in exchange for materials that we deem interesting for our subscribers. Among
the things we've added from that source are for instance PDF files of a lot of
issues of the Localization Focus magazine from the University of
Limerick.
Things are slow for many of us right now, and
it's rather unlikely that we'll be building marble grottos anytime soon, but
equipping ourselves with the right kind of technology is not a matter of luxury
-- it's a matter of necessity, of survival. (Well, that might sound just a
little too Darwinian -- but there is some truth in it.) You can either spend
weeks testing out all the tools yourself, or you can just pick one in the hopes
that it will be the right one for you, OR you can make an intelligent decision
based on the very little effort required to watch our tutorials and have that
big, old light bulb come on almost on its own. |
3.
These Are My Places!
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Can't you just hear two three-year-olds fighting? These are My Places!
No, these are MY Places! You get the picture.
Maybe it was three-year-olds who developed the My Places feature
in MS Office applications; chances are, though, that they were a little
older, and the truth is that they did something very clever.
I know that I have written about this feature before, but again, keep reading:
There's new stuff coming as well.
If you often use or save documents in a specific location on your
network or hard drive, you can add a shortcut to that location in the Open and
Save As dialog boxes in Office XP and above. The left-hand section
of these dialog boxes contains some preconfigured shortcuts (My Documents,
Desktop, etc.), and you can add a shortcut here to the location of your
choice. Just go to the location that you would like to add, click on the Tools
command in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box, and select Add To
My Places. (In Office 2007 programs, you'll need to select the
drive, the folder, or the Internet location for which you want to create a
link, right-click in My Places, and click Add.) You can now see
that a new button was added to the My Places bar on the left side that
will now be available in all Office programs, and from now on you just
need to click on that button to open or save a file right there.
(And if you are still using Office 2000 you can use a little application
that Microsoft has developed to add these shortcuts.)
I find this little trick so helpful that I have very often missed it
when leaving the MS Office environment. But I was always too lazy to look
for a solution -- until this past week, that is, when I found how to do this
for any Windows program.
First, in Windows XP: I've mentioned the little devil TweakUI
before, but its versatility never ceases to amaze me. Microsoft describes the
tool in an unexpectedly humble way:
This PowerToy
gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default
user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings,
and more. It would have been OK to say "much more."
Once you have TweakUI installed (there are TweakUIs for
pre-XP versions of Windows, butthey were rather limited
so I kind of doubt that you can do this with a Windows 2000 computer),
start it (you can simply press the Winkey
+ R and enter tweakui) and then select Common
Dialogs> Places Bar. In the ensuing window on the right you can
now select Custom places bar and then enter the full path to each
directory that you want on your places bar. You can do this for up to five
folders.
When you are done, you'll have those links on the left of all the Save
As and Open dialogs in all apps (except the ones from Office
-- those have to be handled according to the procedure described above.)
For Windows Vista there is no TweakUI; still it's very
easy to create these shortcuts here as well. This is how you do it: Open Explorer
(press Winkey + E) and navigate to
the folder C:\Users\<Owner>\Links. Right-click in the right
window pane and select New>
Shortcut. Enter or paste the path of the folder to which you want a
shortcut in the Open and Save As dialogs, select Next,
enter a name for the shortcut, and click on Finish. From now on, this
will be listed in the Places Bar in all Open and Save As
dialogs (even including the ones from Office 2007).
Of course, in the Vista dialogs you will have to select the Browse
Folders down-arrow to see the links in the first place.
Speaking of Windows Explorer in Vista: I was working on an
update to my book last
week and spent some more time reviewing Explorer in Vista, and I
need to tell you that I found some things I really liked.
One is the preview feature that allows you to automatically preview
HTML, MS Office, PDF, and text files within the Explorer (you
need to enable this by selecting Organize> Layout> Preview Pane).
Admittedly, this takes a bit of processing power, so I would not have it
enabled all the time, but for certain tasks it's a lot faster to quickly look
at a lot of files in a preview feature than to open them one by one. (And,
please, don't tell me that Total Commander or other supercharged Explorers
have done this for a long time -- I know!)
Another feature of the Vista Explorer that
might be confusing at first but also might become one of your favorite features
is the address bar. The path to the selected file is no longer displayed in the
usual manner with backslashes, etc. (such as C:\Windows\Fonts); instead, it is
provided through a "breadcrumb trail." This is sort of an interactive
address which, in the case of very long addresses, is shortened and is provided
with little right-arrows between the different locations on the path. Clicking
on any of those arrows displays all other possible branches that go off from
that point so that you can much more quickly navigate there. And if you prefer
the old-fashioned way of displaying addresses, you need only right-click the
address bar and select Edit Address.
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4.
Acrobatic Searches
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This past week I realized that Adobe Acrobat (Professional)
has a feature that I have simply overlooked in the past -- the indexing
feature. I was working on a job with a couple hundred PDF files as reference
material. While it's possible to search through all the PDFs in a full-text
search, it's both time-consuming and heavy on your processing power. What I had
never realized is that it's very easy to create an index for any number of PDFs
on your hard drive or network that you can easily delete after you are done
with the task.
Here is how you do it: Select Advanced >
Document Processing > Full Text Index With Catalog in Acrobat (please
note that you need the Professional edition for that) and then click New
Index. Under Index Title, type a name for the index file.
Optionally, you can also enter a description of the index and look through the advanced
options under Options (where you could exclude certain words, for
instance), and then you will have to select which directories and
sub-directories the PDFs that are going to be indexed are contained in. Once
you are done with all of that, click Build, and then specify the
location for the index file. The initial building process may take a few moments,
but any subsequent searches (you can perform those through the advanced options
under Edit> Search or by simply opening the resulting .pdx file) are
blazingly fast and give you very quick access to the respective location within
the PDF files.
Once you have an index built, you can also use
the Adobe Reader or the Acrobat Standard edition to look through
it.
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5.
Rogue Codes
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Some TEnTs have
problems distinguishing between "good" (necessary) and
"bad" (unnecessary) codes within some Word files. This can
lead to an overabundance of internal codes in imported files. Déjà
Vu X has had particularly many issues with that in recent versions, so
DVX user David Turner developed a set of macros to essentially delete
these internal codes. Here is what he wrote to me this week:
If you have a free
slot somewhere in one of your upcoming excellent Tool Kit newsletters, I
was wondering whether you might consider giving a short mention to my CodeZapper
macro template (providing you like it of course). It was originally designed to
tackle the Word "rogue code" soup syndrome in DVX (Word
files strewn with invisible "smart" tags, language/keyboard tags,
spellcheck tags, editing tags, sca{1}ling/spacing {2}tags, e{3}tc.) but (. . .)
users of other TEn tools might also possibly benefit from it. At present, it can be
downloaded from the Déjà Vu user group files' sections.
If you have encountered problems with rogue
codes and want to use the template, I would strongly encourage you to read the
associated Readme file to get an idea of what the different features are and
which ones would be useful to your particular problem. I personally have never
had to use this macro, but I know that many have and really swear by it.
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The Last Word on the Tool Kit
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