When my favorite basketball team, the Portland Trailblazers, had to play the EVIL Los Angeles Lakers in the playoffs a few years ago, the only way that our coach figured we could be successful at crunch time was to continuously foul Shaquille O'Neal, the Lakers' ever-dominating center who did pretty much everything well -- except shoot free throws. When he missed one or both of his free throws, the ball was returned to the good guys with a chance to score two or three points. Even though I was as passionate a fan as I am now, I did not really like this tactic, but I REALLY liked the term they came up with: Hack-a-Shaq. Very funny. (Less humorous was the fact that we lost the playoffs anyway.)

In the last couple of weeks, an appealing Windows hack has made the rounds on the Internet. The only downer is its name: GodMode. At least, that is the term that was used by the many blogs and tweets that went on about it. Here is what I suggest as an alternative: Why don't we call it JeromobotMode instead?

Confused? Well, here is what it is: it's a Microsoft developer-internal string that can be used to name a folder within Windows 7 or Vista (only the 32-bit version of Vista!), which then will automatically provide access to all the many different settings that the Control Panel gives you access to as well -- only much more directly. So, rather than hiding everything in categories, all the individual options are listed in humanly understandable language (such as "Find and fix problems with transparency and other visual settings" or "Adjust the appearance or performance of Windows") in nice little groups and neatly alphabetized. On my computer I have about 300 of those options -- but the number should differ between different setups.

To enable this, simply create a new folder anywhere in Windows Explorer and call it:

JeromobotMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

(Admittedly you could also call it pretty much anything else before the period, but let's just pretend that we are one big family of language professionals and all call it JeromobotMode.)

Once you hit Enter, the folder will display a new icon and the aforementioned list of options will be displayed on the right pane of Windows Explorer.

There is a plethora of other super access modes (see this article which also shows a little video on how to do the whole thing), but these are just single groups of options rather than the whole shebang, so they might not be as interesting.

And while we are talking about hacks, here is a very cool one (actually this is a so-called Easter egg -- a surprise that software developers build into a tool to be discovered by one or many lucky users). Open Firefox and type about:robots in the address field and hit Enter.

N-o-w  c-l-i-c-k  t-h-e  b-u-t-t-o-n .  D-o-n-t  c-l-i-c-k  i-t  a-g-a-i-n !  Y-o-u  d-i-d  a-n-y-w-a-y ?  S-h-a-m-e  o-n  y-o-u!

(In case you wondered, this is robot language.)

You won't be awfully surprised to hear that Jeromobot had to check it out as well. Here are his slightly grainy results.

One of these things is not like the others (it's OK to hum the Sesame Street tune as you read this): swordfish, stingray, and anchovy.

Correct. It's "swordfish," which can be both plural and singular, just like "fish," whereas "stingray" and "anchovy" are among the few kinds of fish (or: are among the fishes -- that's certainly the way that Gollum would prefer it) that have distinct plural forms (and you thought you weren't going to learn anything new in this newsletter!).

There is something that all three do have in common, however: they are all names of products of Maxprograms, the Uruguayan company that has developed a TEnT and other tools for translators.

Swordfish is the translation environment tool, Stingray is an alignment tool, and the newly released Anchovy is "a cross-platform glossary editor, based on the open GlossML (Glossary Markup Language) format."

No, you say, not yet another acronym and/or terminology exchange format! 

You may be right, but at least take a look at where this is coming from. The guy behind Maxprograms, Rodolfo Raya, was closely associated with the development of TBX, the termbase exchange standard developed under the auspices of LISA, until he felt that the complexity of the standard got out of hand. So he started his own standard proposal, called GlossML, a very simple XML-based format that can be used to exchange simple glossaries -- which are, as he rightly says, the more typical kinds of terminology repositories that translators use -- between different tools. So far this is not possible, since, to my knowledge, no other tool supports this format (and, unless an association like LISA adopts this format, it will not be possible in the foreseeable future), but still, here it is and you can read all about it in this article.

Aside from allowing you to edit your glossaries in the GlossML format, Anchovy also supports the import and export of TBX and CSV and does a term extraction from source documents that can be used as the basis of glossaries (a feature that is very similar to Déjà Vu's Lexicon feature).

Anchovy is part of the deliverables of Swordfish II, which has just been released in a preview version. As you might have guessed, it is the next incarnation of Swordfish, which in itself stems from an earlier version of Heartsome, the company for which Rodolfo used to work.

In my book and this newsletter I have commented previously on the similarities between Heartsome and Swordfish, and these are still there, but there is a clear move toward a more distinctive look and feel between the tools, and the feature set also increasingly separates them.

As far as the new look and feel, Swordfish's interface is more integrated now (gone are the days of trying to juggle four independent panes within a larger window -- they are part of a single window now) and the icons and the presentation of the translatables have received some overhaul. Regarding the more important new and distinctive functional features (aside from the inclusion of Anchovy), the internal database for TMs has been changed (and is presumably faster) and good support for the Trados XLIFF format has now joined Swordfish's unique support of TXML, Wordfast Pro's and Globalsight's internal translation format (see the ad in this newsletter for Wordfast Classic and the announcement of its upcoming support for TXML)

Now may be a good time to start talking about Swordfish without always feeling the need to have to mention Heartsome and vice versa, and to start viewing them as truly separate applications that both look and function differently.

Here is something I have been fascinated with for years: in letter-based languages, especially if we are native speakers of that language, we don't read by looking at letters the way a computer does. Instead, we look at images. Deciphering words by their letters would take way too much time and effort. Don't believe me? Why don't you read "anopisthograph" out aloud. And now "qualifications." Which one went faster? Same here. That's because you knew the image for "qualifications" but (probably) not the one for "anapisthograph," so you had to decipher the latter but not the former. (By the way, anapisthograph is a manuscript, parchment, or book having writing on only one side of the leaves.)

Or here is another way to prove my point: put something in a very strange font, one that does not call up existing images in your head but where you have to build up images from scratch. It takes a lot longer to read.

Many of you expressed appreciation for the last newsletter that posed a number of questions to TEnT vendors. Some of you marveled at the direct answers of some, while others were disgusted by the wishy-washiness of other vendors' answers. But that's just how it goes, I guess.

Anyway, I had promised to pick up some of the questions that I did not forward to the tool makers and talk about them in this newsletter.

How about this question:

Why is XML important? Why should translators care?

There are a number of levels on which this can be answered. First of all, most of the internal formats and virtually all of the exchange formats that TEnTs use are XML-based. In fact, the power of XML is its exchangeability and describability (which in turn makes it so easy to exchange). So the first answer is, as TEnT users we use XML all the time (knowingly or not).

And, by the way, almost every application, whether for translators or not, makes use of XML, including the latest versions of Office and of course most web-based formats.

And this really is the second reason why it's a good idea to know some things about XML: because of the pervasiveness of XML in virtually all common applications. Think of this example: Desktop publishing applications were always so hard to translate because of their proprietary formats (and because of the way text was organized in DTP documents). Now, with tools like InDesign supporting an XML-based interim format for their files, InDesign is a commonly supported file format by most TEnTs. The same is true for many other formats, whether they are common or not.

So, how can you find out whether a file is an XML file (assuming that it does not have the .xml extension)? You can open it in a text editor (Notepad would do) and look at the very first line. If that starts with <?xml you're in the clear.

Once you know that it is an XML file, you can use the preconfigured XML filter which comes with any TEnT that supports XML. It's possible that all text that needs to be translated will be extracted and everything else protected. If that's not the case (and you can find that out by opening the XML file again in a text editor and checking whether all translatables are extracted), you can use the wizard or other means that your tool of choice provides to build an XML filter from scratch. Since most tools do indeed use a wizard, it is not as difficult as it sounds, but it still might require some patient finagling. And if you don't have that patience, you can often find the necessary filters in the files sections of the user group of your TEnT.

So, do you have to understand all the ins and outs of XML as a 21^st century translator?  No, but you should have an appreciation of its usefulness and the opportunities it presents and a rough idea of its structure.

Here was another question:

Would it make sense to add target language speech recognition capabilities or source language OCR capabilities to your TEnT?

You want my short answer? I hope they won't. Yes, those are very helpful features. And that's why we already have them in the form of third-party tools that are often completely compatible with TEnTs. For TEnT developers to develop optical-character recognition (OCR) or speech recognition on their own would be nothing short of foolish because they won't do as good a job with that as the companies that focus on it. And the other option, to partner with a third-party company (like SDL did for the PDF processing ability in Trados Studio), only makes sense if virtually everyone needs that additional tool because it makes the TEnT a) more expensive and b) even larger and harder to handle.

Here is what I think: Let the TEnT developers work on the things they have a proven track record in -- that is, all things translation-related -- and open up their tools enough for third-party tools to easily hook into the existing infrastructure. That way those who really need those features can choose to have the most excellent tool available do its thing for this (and other) uses.

My 16-year-old tells me that this is how you would text "See you there?" Let's just choose to believe him and see where I could meet some of you in the next few months. I will be in Jerusalem for the conference of the Israel Translators Association in February, in March for the Translation Company Division of the ATA in Arizona, and in May I will be in Buenos Aires at a conference of the Colegio de Traductores Públicos de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. It's a different travel schedule this year, but I am looking forward to it and hope to see some of you there.

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