| 1.
Windows 7 Tidbits | |
Here are some tidbits of information about Windows 7 that you may
or may not already know. You'll all have read reviews of Windows 7 at
this point and have read that Windows 7 is certainly a better operating
system than Vista; most reviewers also compare it favorably to XP.
Here are some language-related pieces of information that you might not have
read about so far.
But before we come to this, the new glossary for Windows 7 is
available. You probably know some of the history of the so-called "Microsoft
glossaries." These were never really glossaries but large translation
memories with the translation data of the user interface for many of Microsoft's
software products. From 1994 through the summer of 2006 they were available for
free on one of Microsoft's FTP sites. In July 2006 the free offer was replaced
with a multilingual glossary, which now is gone as well. What still remains is
the Microsoft Language Portal at www.microsoft.com/language. The
interface of the portal is available in German, Spanish, French, Italian,
Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and of course English, but much
of the language content is available in many more languages. Aside from a very
fast glossary search from English into a very large list of target languages,
you can download style guides for the same large set of languages. Or you can
find links to Microsoft's attempt at crowdsourcing, the Microsoft
Terminology Community Forum, where users can comment on terms that are to
be included in future projects. The terminology search feature now includes the
terminology of Windows 7 -- important data for everyone who translates software
applications for the Windows operating system.
The translation memory files that were previously available for free can
also still be accessed, but not for free. However, they do of course contain
the updated Windows 7 and other current materials. What has recently
changed for the positive is the price tag. Previously you had to be a member of
MSDN for at least US$699 a year to access them, but now you can also
access them with a TechNet subscription for US$349. You can find links
to both subscription models right on the Language Portal.
Now on to Windows 7 itself.
Like its predecessor it comes in a variety of flavors and price tags.
With Vista, the purchase of either the Professional or the Ultimate
versions was a no-brainer for many because of the backup facilities it offered.
In Windows 7, these backup features are not only made better but are
also available in all other versions. So, is there a need to buy more than the Home
version? There is one really good reason left for language professionals to buy
the Ultimate version (especially project managers and other folks who
have to work in many languages): the availability of the client language packs
for that version. You are able to run your operating system in Arabic,
Bulgarian, various flavors of Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese,
Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese,
Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish,
and Ukrainian. Phew -- thank goodness for copying and pasting!
And the "running" of the operating system not only includes
dialog boxes in different languages but all other locale- and language-specific
settings as well, including the speech recognition engines. The much-praised
speech recognition engine of Vista is also available in Windows 7.
It is not available for all the languages listed above, but you can find it for
Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.
If you really have a hard time falling asleep
and want to read some technical information on foreign language versions of Windows,
check this site out.
|
| ADVERTISEMENT |
Transit NXT All the tools you need in one TEnT ! Flexible, easy-to-use, fast and
reliable Spanish Launch - Special offers!
|
2. THE NEW VERSION OF
THE TOOL BOX IS HERE
| |
With (hopefully) no undue measure of pride, I would like to announce the
publication of version 8 of The Translator's Tool Box: A Computer Primer for Translators. It's the first time that I have waited
a whole year for an update, but new things just kept on happening in our
industry. Whenever I had one part done, something else appeared that I wanted
to include, and so it went on and on. Things like new versions of Trados
and Transit, search engines, Windows, Google Translation
Toolkit, many of the tips and tricks from the newsletters, hot topics like
crowdsourcing and machine translation, a new organizational form based on your
helpful hints, and a lengthy review by the lovely Angelika Zarfass in Multilingual
Magazine (you can read it right here). I am glad to report that virtually everything she pointed out as
improvable has been improved in this latest version.
All in all, I think you'd be crazy (forgive my language) not to buy a
first copy or update your existing version! (If you bought version 7 in 2009,
you should already have received an email with download instructions for a free
copy. If not, let me know and I'll send it to you.) If I were to summarize the
370 pages of the Tool Box in one sentence, I would describe it as
exactly the kind of book I really wish I had owned when I started my career as
a translator (and computer user).
You can find all the necessary
information at www.internationalwriters.com/toolbox. As an
owner of the ebook, you will also receive the Premium edition of this
newsletter for free as well as an HTMLHelp file of all the contents of the book
for much faster access.
|
3. Ba-Bing! (Premium Content)
| |
I wrote previously about my frustration that it's hard to get away from
a certain tool once you get used to the tips and tricks that make it so much
easier to work in it. I found this especially true for browsing with Google.
There are a good number of things I've listed before that make it so much
easier to locate information quickly.
However, especially now that Bing
has partnered with super search engine Wolfram|Alpha, it seems a shame not to unleash the same kind
of query power to its data stores. So I searched again and I was finally able to
unearth something.
Just as in Google, you can use the search box for mathematical queries,
conversions of units, or currency conversion. (You can use natural language-"how
much is 5 dollars in euro" and "what is 6 divided by 2" -- or
you can use more formulaic language.) You can also use the search field to
track packages from UPS or FedEx by just entering the tracking
number (same in Google). More importantly, though, there are some specific
features that are particularly interesting to translators.
For instance, if you want to look for something in only a certain kind
of document (such as a PDF file) and not in any other, type filetype:pdf
"translation memory".
The result will be all PDFs that are registered with Bing and contain
the phrase "translation memory." If you would like to specifically
exclude PDFs, you can type -filetype:pdf "translation
memory" (both Google
and Bing).
If you want to return webpages for a specific language, you will just
need to specify the language code directly after the keyword language:. For example, if you are searching for your
name on Chinese-language websites, you will need to enter John
Doe language:zh (Bing
only).
To return webpages from a specific country or region, you can specify
the country or region code directly after the keyword loc: (or location:). You can even combine this with an OR search.
For example, to see webpages about machine translation from the U.S. or Great
Britain, enter "machine translation" (loc:US OR loc:GB) (Bing only).
Unfortunately, I still haven't discovered how to locate definitions only
(like the define:
tag in Google), but I will let you know as soon as I find it or Bing implements
it.
|
| 4. Shails | |
Have you ever played "I'm thinking of a word that rhymes with . . .
" -- a great game for long car rides with kids or for dreary long winter
evenings in unheated Chinese dormitories. It was there that I once played the
game with friends, including an American college student from North Carolina.
Now, the fact that she was from North Carolina was important, more important
than we were aware of at the time. We must have spent an hour trying to guess
what word she had in mind that rhymed with "sail." "Is it stones
of ice that fall from the sky?" No, it was not hail. "Is it what the
postman brings?" No, it was not mail. And on and on. Finally after an hour
of exasperation her friend from Tennessee groaned: "Oh, you don't mean
'shell,' do you?" Well, yes, it was "shell," and I had learned a
valuable lesson on American accents.
This is kind of a long introduction for a little command, accessible in
all current versions of Windows,that allows you to jump quickly to
often-used folders within Windows Explorer.
Imagine you want to go to your Fonts folder to manage your fonts. Of course, you could
painfully navigate to that folder (if you remember where it's located) or you
could also press the Winkey + R and
enter shell:fonts.
Tada! Cool, huh? Windows Explorer opens right there! (In Windows
Vista and 7 you can also just use the search bar in the Windows
menu to enter that command.)
This little time saver does not work with every kind of folder, but it
does with virtually any of the common Windows folders. Here are some
examples and their "shell command":
- Documents/My
Documents (shell:Personal)
- Your music
folder (shell:My Music)
- Everyone's
music folder (shell:CommonMusic)
- Your pictures
folder (shell:My Pictures)
- Everyone's
music folder (shell:CommonPictures) -- and the same principle counts for
most of the other "My" folders
- Printers (shell:PrintersFolder)
- Program Files (shell:ProgramFiles)
- Recycle Bin (shell:RecycleBinFolder)
- Folder with files
are stored before being burned to disc (shell:CD Burning)
- Desktop folder (shell:Desktop)
- Send To folder
(shell:SendTo)
- Templates
folder (shell:Templates)
- Internet
Explorer temporary Internet files (shell:Cache)
- Start Internet
Explorer (shell:InternetFolder)
And so on and so forth. Happy shailing!
|
| ADVERTISEMENT |
Why pay a high price for a CAT tool and keep fighting with it every
day? Make your life simpler and easier by making the right choice!
Heartsome Translation Studio is what you need and deserve:
·
based on open standards and
cross-platform
·
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.
|
| 5. AutoShareSuggest | |
SDL is offering a number of AutoSuggest
dictionaries (between English and the FIGS languages) for free download. AutoSuggest is the new subsegment feature in Trados
Studio; it generates a separate database of subsegments on the basis of
existing translation memories and then gives you AutoComplete tips (for lack of
a better term) as you type. It's a very innovative and cool feature, but the
problem is that many have not been able to really test it since you have to
have very large translation memories to make this work properly. With the AutoSuggest
dictionaries that are now offered, more users should be able to see this
feature work (whether the suggestions from "foreign" databases will
be relevant is another question).
It's kind of interesting that on the
same page you can also find a call for donations of AutoSuggest
dictionaries. Let's see whether they get many takers. |
The Last Word on the Tool Kit
|
|
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. © 2009 International
Writers' Group
| |
