Gabi Ortiz pointed me to a site -- www.textalyser.net -- that performs all kinds of text analysis. Like Gabi, I'm not sure how helpful this really is for translators -- but it's worth a glance anyway. The idea is that you can copy and paste text into a provided text field and then perform analyses that you did not even know were possible.

Here is a sampling of the kinds of numbers you can get:

·         Number of different words

·         Complexity factor (lexical density)

·         Readability (Gunning-Fog Index)

·         Total number of characters

·         Number of characters without spaces

·         Average syllables per word

·         Sentence count

·         Average sentence length (words)

·         Max/min sentence length (words)

·         Readability (100-easy, 20-hard, optimal 60-70)

I recently installed the dictionary application Babylon for testing purposes. Once I was done with my tests I immediately uninstalled it again, but to my great frustration the context menu items that were installed in many, many MS Word context menus (the menus that appear when you right-click on any item within the Word interface) were still there. Really annoying.

One way to deal with that would have been to delete the normal.dot template and let Word recreate one when it restarts. That's easy to do and the unnecessary menu items would have been gone, but all the other customizations to the way that Word behaves and looks that I have added over the years would have been gone, too. So, that's not good.

But then I remembered a trick I had used years before, and I thought it might be helpful to share: Most of you know that it's easy to alter the toolbars in Word 2003 and before (and most other programs). You just need to right-click on the toolbar area, select Customize, and then drag and drop commands from and to the toolbar. Again, these alterations are only stored in the normal.dot -- but if you are careful you can keep that for a long time.

Now, the same dialog also gives you access to the context menus ("shortcut menus" in MS speech). Once you are on the first tab of the Customize dialog (again, you'll need to select Customize after right-clicking on the toolbar area or you could also select Tools> Customize), the Toolbars tab, you can find the Shortcut Menu item. If you double-click on it, a new "toolbar"-sort-of-thing will show up on your screen with three menu items: Text, Table, and Draw. Clicking on each of those will reveal long lists of "situations" for which context menus might be displayed. If you select any of these, you can see what respective commands the context menus in these situations contain. You can change them by simply dragging new commands from the Commands tab of the Customize dialog to the list of commands, or by dragging them out of the lists if you want to delete them. Not bad, huh?

Of course it's rather involved, but it might be worth it if you are terribly annoyed by that one silly command that you find every time you right-click on something, or you always long for one command that's just not there.

Now, in Word 2007, the feature is gone. The only way to mess with the context menus there is through some heavy-duty programming, so you might be stuck with what you have. (Good thing the Babylon commands were not as nasty there as they were in Word 2003 when I tested it.)

Oh, and while we're at Word, I encountered a terrible nuisance with a copy of Word 2007 on Vista recently, and from what I've seen it looks like it's a rather common problem.

One day while I was doodling around in Word 2007 (you know how much time translators have to doodle around . . .) Word stopped responding to my mouse. I couldn't select text or open menus or anything like that with my mouse. And when I closed Word I received a message informing me that Word had just crashed.

Here is what I found for a fix:

The underlying problem is a damaged Word Data key in the Windows registry. You will need to open the Registry Editor by typing regedit into the Search field in the Windows Vista Button menu.

(Since the registry is the Achilles heel of Windows you should now, once the Registry Editor is open, make sure to back it up by selecting File> Export and selecting All under Export Range.)

Then you will need to navigate to

\\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Data

In the last issue of this newsletter I wrote about the alignment tool(s) offered by Terminotix. Every time I do that I hear from Ilia Kaufman or someone else from KCSL and NoBabel. But that's OK since this seems to be a good way of learning about the progress being made in terms of product development.

For those who don't remember: NoBabel is a company that offers a number of products for translation memory optimization and generation, among them AutoAligner. Unlike Terminotix's tools, AutoAligner is a SaaS (Software as a Service), meaning you don't have to install any software on your computer. Instead, you upload files that need to be aligned to an online server, and the software on the server does the alignment for you (and you pay for every matched sentence pair). In fact, you don't even have to "tell" the AutoAligner anything about the files, not even what language they are in. The files are analyzed on the server, the language is correctly recognized, and the file pairs are matched up on the basis of the actual content.

Once the files are matched up, the actual segment matching is performed on the basis of a linguistic analysis. This means that not every possible pairing will end up in the translation memory, but only those that are deemed appropriate (typically up to 5% are ignored). But this also means that you can upload a list of terms in two different languages, both sorted according to the language-specific sort order, and you will still have the correct alignment.

So far so good, and the match accuracy is amazingly high. But, again, if you are bound to get every possible segment pair out of the alignment, this might not be the right tool (the same, by the way, is true for Terminotix's products).

In the last newsletter I reported on the clever EuroTermBank Terminology Add-In for Microsoft Word which brings the content of that helpful termbase right into MS Word. I also mentioned that, while it's extremely helpful, it would be nicer to have the possibility of having the terminology in all kinds of applications and not just Word through a tool like IntelliWebSearch.

Mike Farrell, IWS's creator, was kind enough to write the search mask for it. Here it is:

Label=EuroTermBank
Start=http://www.eurotermbank.com/Search.aspx?text=
Finish=&langfrom=en&langto=it&subject=
Notes=Change ISO codes in Finish string according to your languages
Quotes Off=No
Pluses Off=No
Encoding=UTF-8
Case=1

All you need to do is change the third line to the language combination of your desire, copy the above code to your clipboard, open IWS's Search Settings and select Share> Import from clipboard. This will produce an already filled-out Import dialog that you can then edit if you need to and save. From then on out, you can search the EuroTermBank from anywhere in Windows.

When I was 12, I brought home that (admittedly dreadful) Status Quo single "Rocking All Over the World" and put it on my newly acquired turntable. My dad just looked at me and then uttered the hurtful (and what seemed to me very ignorant) words: "Oh, this isn't music! All I hear is that monotonous beat!"

I mentioned in my last newsletter the following in regard to Microsoft Word and its usefulness as a translation interface: "Even the last two big tool vendors who swore by that environment -- Wordfast and Trados -- have gotten away from it."

Well, Monsieur Champollion, the maker of Wordfast, was not happy about that comment, and rightly so. I was glad he contacted me because it gave me a chance to spend a little time talking with him (in the past, Wordfast had not been particularly conversational).

So, Wordfast has released Wordfast 6 (see, I almost said it myself!). They have, of course, released Wordfast Pro, which -- and this is the message that Yves would like to convey -- is not an update of Wordfast 5.5 (darn it, again!) Wordfast Classic, but a separate version that eventually might or might not be accepted as the standard Wordfast version. While Yves is convinced that this will happen at some point, he is committed to fully supporting the Word-based Wordfast Classic until, well, until forever. It no longer works on Macs with the latest version of MS Office, but it does work (according to some preliminary tests) on the upcoming Word 2010 for Windows,so there can be some continuity there.

I find this whole story quite fascinating and something that could serve as a great lesson to other tool vendors as well. Wordfast has been a very popular tool among translators for a number of years now. It was a lot cheaper than most of its competitors, particularly Trados, and while it may seem a bit small, many have found that there is surprising power under its hood. It was the first TEnT to introduce the QA concept, it has offered the Very Large Translation Memory (VLTM), an online shared translation memory for many language pairs, and has maintained a very loyal user base through outstanding support by Yves. The limitations had been clear for a while, though: Because Wordfast (now Wordfast Classic) is Word-based, it could process only those files that are either directly or indirectly processable in Word, which is great for folks who mostly work in these file formats, but not so great for others.

So it was clear at some point that the development of an independent interface not bound to any third-party tool or format would be extremely desirable, and this was the Java-based Wordfast Pro (which, to Yves's great regret, was first called Wordfast 6). Alas, it turned out that it's a formidable task to create a TEnT from scratch, considering the many formats that it should be supporting (presently MS Office formats, HTML, and InDesign are supported) and considering how conservative translators are! Yes, I said it! Translators are a slow-moving, conservative bunch, hard to convince to move away from something that, well, sort of worked.

I'm glad that Yves sounded upbeat about the new version of Wordfast Pro and its good chances of being simply Wordfast again at some point. But I'm afraid that many, many of his customers have yet to be convinced.

I regret that I haven't written more often about OmegaT, the open-source TEnT out there with the greatest following. It's not that I don't want to; it's more that I just don't hear it when something new happens. I do receive mailings from OmegaT's alive and active mailing list, but then I receive many other lists' mailings as well.

I just finished a very smooth and fun project in Déjà Vu, and here are some more of the things that I appreciate about that tool.

Last time I did this I mentioned interesting uses of the "lexicon":

The lexicon, that ominous third project-internal database, is good for many things -- as the preferred terminology container, as a temporary holding place for data that still needs to be verified before being sent to the terminology database, or as a means to extract terminology before starting a project to get some terminology research out of the way before diving into the midst of things. But aside from that, I use it increasingly often as a means to import data quickly into the translation memory or terminology database. Most (advanced) Déjà Vu users are familiar with the slow performance when it comes to database maintenance. It can take hours to import large external databases into an existing database (and just as long to export it again). Amazingly, importing into the simple lexicon (via File> Import> Lexicon) is done in a snap, and sending the lexicon to either a translation memory or a terminology database (via Lexicon> Send Lexicon to ...) is also done in a heartbeat. Once you are done you can delete your provisional lexicon from your project by simply right-clicking on it and selecting Delete. The additional benefit of this is that even the project-specific data on subject and client are sent as well, which means you don't have to fiddle with SQL commands to add that retrospectively.

I also spoke of surprisingly easy ways to use SQL (Structured Query Language) with Déjà Vu, good ways of sorting and filtering data in translation projects, and the fact that it also supports SDLX .itd projects (by the way, since then I have run into a good number of .itd files where an import into Déjà Vu was not possible).

Here are some other things that I really like. The feature that I probably have used most frequently is the Filter on Selection function. This allows you to highlight any term or phrase in the source or target column, right-click, select Filter on Selection, and only rows that contain that very term or phrase will be displayed. This is a very cool feature to quickly check consistency, and it's much faster than scanning for a specific entry in the translation memory of something you have translated before. The only two caveats to this feature are that it's easy to forget you filtered your project and erroneously think you are done (you need to right-click again and select Unfilter to reset the filter), and there are no keyboard shortcuts assigned to it. The latter problem is easily solved, though. Just like in the Word article above, right-click on the toolbar section, select Customize, click on Keyboard,and locate the three respective commands under View (the first occurrence of Filter on Selection is for the source, the second for target). Assign keyboard shortcuts (I have Alt+Ctrl+F for filter on source, Alt+Ctrl+G for filter on target, and Alt+Ctrl+U for unfilter), and you are good to go. As far as I am aware, MemoQ is the only other tool that offers filtering features as powerful as this.

Another very helpful feature is the External View feature. Under File> Export> External View you can create an RTF or HTML document in a multi-column format or a bilingual Trados document (the latter only in the Déjà Vu X Workgroup version) that contains all of the text that needs to be translated, edited, proofread, or just gawked at outside the Déjà Vu environment. The External View document can easily be reimported into Déjà Vu once the translation / editing / proofreading / gawking is done. In my humble opinion, this feature is one of the most generous of any tool since it allows for working with any number of third-party tools within a production chain.

One more tip: HTML is a very easy language. In fact, it is so easy that it's a snap to create a filter that accounts the very limited number of formatting and coding rules that HTML provides. Of course, this is one of the reasons that HTML is almost always among the first couple of formats that new tools support. The problem is that an HTML file is never only HTML. There is almost always another kind of coding present, whether JavaScript, XML, or some other kind of non-HTML entity. And that is where all of the preconfigured HTML filters typically fall short and import and/or don't protect text that should be left alone or protected. The solution that the makers of Déjà Vu have found for this is not particularly user-friendly but, if used right, nonetheless powerful. You can create a little text file, name it HTMHide.txt,and save it in the same directory that your project file is located in. You can then enter regular expressions into that file (the help system gives you a lot of support for this) which exactly govern what kind of text should be translated and what not. Again, this gets pretty technical, but for a project with many hundreds or thousands of HTML files it's well worth the effort.

Oh, and one more thing: Déjà Vu crashes sometimes. But you know what? You never lose information because everything is saved automatically every time you enter it.

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