My name is not a particularly common one, even in my home country of Germany. In fact, I have never personally met anyone else called Jost (except one who also had my middle name, Jost Oliver -- what are the odds?), so it should not surprise anyone that I keep on stumbling over JoST or JoSTrans -- the Journal of Specialised Translation. Every time I see the name I have to think of the scene in LA Story where Steve Martin's character meets SanDeE*.

There are a couple of reviews in the works for various translation environment tools. I have a long overdue one for MultiTrans in the works, and the new version 5 of Across will also be reviewed in one of the upcoming issues of this newsletter.

Other vendors have released point releases (=minor releases) of their tools in the last couple of weeks. Among them are the newly decapitalized memoQ (version 3.6) and the first commercial release of Snowball (version 1.4), the Danish application that, while probably not a full-fledged TEnT since it provides only the translation memory feature, is arguably the easiest-to-learn tool out there.

As you enter text in Word, Snowball'sonly translation interface, Snowball suggests translations to you based on your earlier translations of full segments and parts of segments that you are encouraged to submit as you translate. As I mentioned in my first review awhile back, Snowball is probably not a tool for the high-powered professional translator (not enough supported file formats, no support of formatting, no terminology database, etc.), but may very well be something for the semi-professional or occasional translator. The price (99 Euro) and the ease of use certainly seem to justify that impression. (By the way, I just prepared my talk for the Berlin show next week, where among other things I am going to talk about "our" relationship with the semi-professional or occasional translator. I think that this is a very important and relevant topic -- expect more about this in later editions of this newsletter.)

Back to Snowball. The new version has a couple of helpful additional features, including customizable hotkeys, the option to add machine translation from Google Translate, and other customization options.

Now to memoQ (remember: It's /memoQueue/), a tool that certainly is geared toward the high-powered professional translator.

The major new features are the new Word 2007 filter (!), the ability to align PDFs (I am eager to test that feature when I find the time), and support for 64-Bit Windows platforms. Obviously the Word 2007 filter was long overdue, but I am once again impressed with the Kilgray team for saying they would publish it and then actually doing it.

Other changes mostly include productivity enhancements like automatic insertion of matches, customizable ways to display termbase matches, etc.

True to Kilgray's upgrade policy, the upgrade is free for everyone with a current contract or for anyone who purchased memoQ within the last year.

Or rather helps you reach out. The American Translators Association has just released the ATA Client Outreach Kit, which might be very helpful to some. It essentially equips you with tools to find direct clients in your local market. This is what the introduction says:

Reaching the direct client market requires a different marketing strategy. If your résumé is designed primarily for working with agencies, it probably details your experience with translation tools, daily capacity, education, and references from other agencies. The fact is, most of this will be of no interest to direct clients. Their focus is on sales. They want to know what you can do, not how you can do it. What's even more important in marketing to this clientele? You have to go to them instead of waiting for them to come to you. You need to position yourself as a "go-to" resource for translation buyers and users in your community.

The ATA Client Outreach Kit has been developed to assist you in restructuring your approach to this area of the market. Through a set of skill modules, the kit will teach you how to effectively refocus your message for direct clients.

While the PowerPoint files and other components are available only to ATA members, there is quite a bit of information that is accessible to everyone and that I think would be quite helpful to many. These are the individual modules that are covered:

• Getting invited to speak
• Preparing your presentation
• Writing your introduction
• Promoting your presentation
• Writing and delivering an elevator speech
• Using examples effectively
• Building strong speaking skills
• Handling Q&A
• Managing nerves
• Preparing handouts

You will find that most of the tips are just common sense, but I found it very helpful to have them assembled this way.

Reader Eñaut Urrestarazu Aizpurua asked this:

I have a question regarding a special format: MARTIF. You never talk about it and there's no valuable info on the Net. I've seen Across and Transit use it and that's why I would like to learn a bit more about it. I would like to export a glossary from Termbase to MultiTerm and the only good solution could be to go through MARTIF but then I don't know how to convert MARTIF to a usual format supported by Trados.

So, I thought to myself, why not ask Alan Melby, who has been deeply involved with both MARTIF (Machine-Readable Terminology Interchange Format) and TBX (TermBase eXchange), to give a non-technical explanation of the relationship between the two terminology exchange standards. Here is what he said:

MARTIF is the father of TBX.

That was admittedly very untechnical. But he expanded just a bit more:

MARTIF is an SGML-based markup language for exchanging information in termbases. TBX is an XML-based markup language that looks a lot like MARTIF. One difference (besides being XML-based rather than SGML-based) is that the constraints on a particular dialect of TBX can be represented in a machine-processable file, while in MARTIF, those constraints are expressed in prose and cannot be machine processed. Now that TBX is an ISO standard, MARTIF will probably be discontinued as an ISO standard. Does that help?

It does. And almost as a verification of what Alan said, the header of this article is also in the header in TBX files (with some variables of course) to further show the close relationship between MARTIF and TBX.

Let's talk first about Eñaut's question, though. As he says, MARTIF is currently directly supported by only a small handful of TEnTs. In fact, I know of only one other TEnT aside from Across and TermStar (Transit's termbase applications) that supports it: XTM. However, there is one tool that I am aware of that allows for a direct conversion between TBX and MARTIF: the MARTIF to TBX Converter from Heartsome, which comes with some editions of that product. It's a very handy tool, and if you are only interested in a conversion routine, this should be the first thing to try for using MARTIF files in other tools.

But, wait. TBX is complex. Very complex. While it's easy to exchange pure source and target language glossaries in the form of Excel or .csv fomats, TBX tries to cover the whole range -- from "only" glossaries to the fiercest terminologist's dream of a large variety of fields and the ability to relate between entries. Covering all these different goals has not been easy and has led to different forms of TBX (Alan calls them "dialects"). The most complex is TBX Default, which takes care of about 100 different fields. This turned out to be way more than the typical language professional needs, so TBX Basic (formerly TBX Lite) came about. This standard takes care of only 15 different fields and is therefore much easier to process. Still, this seems to be too complicated (and you and I as translators might actually agree with that), so right now there is discussion on a third, yet easier form of TBX for the exchange of glossaries.

All this to say that some tools do support TBX (Across, Star Transit, SDL Trados Studio, Heartsome, Swordfish, XTM, ApSIC Xbench -- I hope that I didn't forget any). However, there are different forms of TBX (or dialects or flavors) and different versions (in fact, the Heartsome MARTIF to TBX Converter does not produce the most current version of TBX), and the implementation of TBX support may not be as comprehensive as hoped for in these tools. All these factors combine to make an actual exchange between different tools at this point problematic. Theoretically the different versions and forms of TBX are compatible, but in practice things just might look a little different. . . .

So, if you just need to exchange glossary-like data between tools, you still might want to try the Excel/.csv route. And yet, if there ever will be an exchange standard to truly exchange terminology between terminologists, corporate clients, LSPs and freelance translators, it will be TBX -- we might just need to be a little patient until it is as easy to use as, say, TMX for translation memories.

John Yunker's blog had an interesting post about a tool called Maxitweet. It is essentially a way to extend your 140-character tweet limit in Twitter by using other characters from other languages or code sets that sort of look like two or more Latin characters.

So, the Arabic character ێ stands for "is," the Chinese 计 for "it," and so on. For instance, Jeromobot was recently able to limit the (admittedly not particularly intelligent) 163-character tweet

This is an example of a tweet that was just a little long so I decided to go to maxitweet.com to make it shorter. This is a very clever and creative use of Unicode

to 140 characters by having it processed through Maxitweet. You can see for yourselves on Jeromobot's twitter page. This tool is certainly not the answer to everything, and its results are not particularly aesthetically pleasing, but I marvel at the ingenuity of the tool's makers to come up with something like this. Very clever, I think, and not possible with Unicode.

And speaking of Unicode . . .

The Tool Kit newsletter presents an intermittent series about characters I really like. This is an expression of my passion for different writing systems, character sets, and fonts.

This latest in the series is so different, both in the way it developed and in how it looks -- simultaneously confusing and beautiful. Unless you are very familiar with Cherokee and Sequoyah, you'll need to check this one out.

If you would like to promote this newsletter by placing a link on your website, I will in turn mention your website in a future edition of the Tool Kit. Just paste the code you find here into the HTML code of your webpage, and the little icon that is displayed on that page with a link to my website will be displayed.

Last week this reader added a link:

www.learn-with-youtube.blogspot.com

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