Believe me, there is.

Here is a "rundown" of some of the smaller tools. (PLEASE don't make my life miserable because I said "small." I know that the user group of at least one of the following tools feels anything but small!)

Let's start with the most well-known and commonly used tool in this bouquet of tools: OmegaT, the flag-bearing and by far most actively developed open-source TEnT for translators at this point.

Last time I wrote about OmegaT, it was still at version 1.6 or maybe 1.8; now it's at 2.1.3 (Beta) and 2.0.5 as a stable build. Gone are the days when there were just a small handful of file formats that could be translated with this tool. It now supports the translation of Windows resource, text, HTML/XHTML, HTML Help, OpenDocument/OpenOffice.org, Java .properties, INI, PO, DocBook documentation, Microsoft OpenXML files (saved from Office 2007 documents), XLIFF, QuarkXPress CopyFlowGold, SRT subtitle, ResX, Android resource, and LaTeX files.

Furthermore, it now supports user-configurable keyboard shortcuts (very helpful to ease the transition from other tools), stemming in fuzzy and glossary matches through tokenizers, and the integration of Google Translate as well as other MT engines. And it has maintained its no-nonsense look and feel that is loved by some, though others say they miss the glory and shine they are used to from other TEnTs. I have personally not tested this latest version (though I downloaded and installed it today), but in many ways tools like OmegaT are one possible answer to the questions raised above about support or the lack of support of certain languages (or features). Here is your chance to very directly and actively participate in the development of one of the most beloved TEnTs for individual translators. The fact that OmegaT must be the most heavily localized TEnT with more than two dozen languages should be even more encouraging in that regard.

There are a number of reviews assembled on OmegaT's website, including a 2010 thesis by Sébastien Guillardeau, who wrote in great detail about OmegaT (note that this thesis is in German).

Another open-source tool (also covered extensively in Sébastien's thesis) is Anaphraseus, a tool that unashamedly modeled itself after Wordfast Classic. However, unlike Wordfast, it does not run within MS Word but -- fittingly -- in the open source OpenOffice.org. It looked for a while as though development had slowed down, but there was a release last week (version 2.01) with an overhauled user interface, localization into 14 languages, and various bug fixes, including one on the processing of OmegaT files. When I tested this tool a couple of years ago my computer did not like it, but I am positive that those problems are fixed now. The question that I would ask before using this tool would essentially be the same as for any tool that performs all translations in one specific environment -- here OpenOffice.org, which additionally means that MS Office files have to be converted -- and with other tools using Word as the main environment: Is it enough to have only those file formats supported that can be processed within that one environment?

Felix is another small tool, developed by Ryan Ginstrom, a Japanese-to-English translator with a knack for the technical and a passion to develop tools for translators. (On his personal website you can find a bunch of free translation-related utilities, including a word count tool and conversion tools for HTML and PowerPoint into Word and vice versa.) 

He describes Felix (which is not free -- it's $350) as

above all (...) easy to use. Computer aided translation (CAT) has a (somewhat deserved) reputation for being hard to use and not very user friendly. The developer of Felix is a professional translator, and developed Felix out of frustration with existing tools. Every feature of Felix is designed with the translator in mind, in order to make using translation memory as simple and intuitive as possible.

Felix interfaces with Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (it sits on top of the MS Office application windows and "calls" up individual strings) and, with the help of another utility, TagAssist, with HTML files.

I have not had time to test it, but it looks interesting, though it is limited in its support of file formats. Ryan seems very eager to provide support and is actively involved in his small discussion group on Google Groups.

He also offers something else, though, which will be interesting to some: a very large (150,000+ translation units) TMX corpus of English <> Japanese data. This data is based on the Tanaka corpus (see here for its history) and contains mostly textbook and everyday language, but I imagine that this would be helpful for machine translation developers, for instance.

I have mentioned CafeTran before, a no-nonsense, inexpensive Java-based tool (and therefore platform-independent) written by a Polish translator.

It supports text, XML, HTML, MS Office XML formats (MS Office 2003 and above files that are saved as XML), OpenOffice.org formats, and with the latest version TTX files, InDesign .inx, and AutoCAD .dxf (!) files). It also has little productivity features that are quite attractive:

·         it provides an easy integration of queries to Internet-based resources;

·         it allows you to use images as references when translating (either when you need to translate them or when you need to refer to them as a resource, such as a scanned dictionary);

·         it has an auto-complete feature of already-typed text and matches and an auto-assemble feature;

·         it offers an extraction feature for frequent terms for glossary-building purposes;

·         it offers a remote memory connection; and

·         like so many other TEnTs these days it also offers a link-in to Google Translate.

Not bad for $100. But then, OmegaT users would say, why pay anything? And that would also be true for the next tool:

EsperantiloTM. Here is what its developer says:

EsperantiloTM estas programo por tradukistoj, kiu faciligas la tradukadon de dokumentoj helpe de tradukmemoro. La programo subtenas multajn formatojn kiel HTML, OpenOffice, XML, MS Word (parte) kaj povas uzi interŝanĝajn formatojn TMX kaj XLIFF. EsperantiloTM kuras sur Vindozo kaj Linukso estas facile instalebla kaj oferas facilan kaj riĉan uzulan interfacon. Ĝi estas libera programo lau GPL permesilo.

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that Esperanto didn't quite make it as the world's language. (I still feel for my foreign language students in China in the late 1980s who -- very unwillingly -- had to study Esperanto along with their other language!)

Anyway, here is the previous paragraph in English:

EsperantiloTM is a program for translators that facilitates the translation of documents by using translation memory. The program supports many formats such as HTML, OpenOffice, XML, and MS Word (partly) and can use exchange formats TMX and XLIFF. EsperantiloTM runs on Windows and Linux, is easily installable, and offers an easy and rich user interface. It is a free program with a GPL license.

Just this week I just found these very cool search (and replace) tips for Word (on The Editorium, a site that also hosts a variety of interesting macros and other programs for folks who work in MS Word.)

My two biggest frustrations with the search features in MS Word have been a) the fact that you cannot search for things like paragraph markers in Wildcard Mode and b) that it is possible to replace text but not use the text that is already there and alter it. (Confused? Don't worry. Read on.)

It turns out that in both cases I just didn't know enough about Word!

Here is the first one. All of you know that in MS Word you can expand the Find and Replace dialog box by clicking on the More button, which offers a variety of options, including the Special button that gives you quick access to the codes that allow you to search for things like paragraph markers, tab characters, fields, graphics, and so on. This is very helpful and necessary if, for instance, you copied some text from within a PDF file with many, many extra paragraph markers that you need to delete -- or many other scenarios.

The problem is, when you check the Use wildcards option (if you need to use placeholders to search for undefined text), the formatting search options are no longer available. And if you enter the codes manually, you will receive an error message. Darn it! Right when I had just concocted an ingenious little expression to find just what I was looking for!

Here is the answer:

Word's integrated codes (like ^p for a paragraph break) can be manually entered into the Find what box as numeric codes, and these don't have a problem with the Wildcard Mode. Here is a list of the numeric code substitutions:

·         ^1 instead of ^g for a graphic

·         ^2 instead of ^f for a footnote

·         ^9 instead of ^t for a tab character

·         ^11 instead of ^l for a manual line break

·         ^12 instead of ^m for a manual page break OR ^b for a section break

·         ^13 instead of ^p for a paragraph mark (carriage return)

·         ^14 instead of ^n for a column break

·         ^19 instead of ^d for the beginning of a field

·         ^21 instead of ^d for the end of a field

I know. It's helpful. But after all, that's why you pay your subscription to the Premium edition of this newsletter, right? Oh, you don't? Maybe you should!

Here is the other thing I never knew (and maybe I'm just embarrassing myself because y'all have known this for years): the "Find What Text."

Here is a scenario where I always felt Word was just not sophisticated enough: Imagine I have a text where something that follows a certain pattern needs to be put in quotes. Say, every URL in a text has to be found and preceded by www. and the URL names always follow the pattern "a number of characters, followed by a dot, followed by three characters." Like in atanet.org and internationalwriters.com.

If I

·         select the Use wildcards option in the Find and Replace dialog,

·         enter (<[a-z]@>).[a-z]{3,} as the regular expression à la Word in the Find what box,

·         enter www.^& for www.+"Find What Text" in the Replace with box and

·         select Replace all

the above sentence will look like this: Like in www.atanet.org and www.internationalwriters.com.

Here in the U.S. we certainly see a lot of lobbying activities -- especially now in the midst of the ugly discussions on health care reform. But lobbying is not inherently ugly. You see, I'm lucky to work in a language combination that is beautifully supported by every tool out there, but there are only about a dozen other languages with the same kind of support. And there are many levels of support: some languages may lack a spell-checker but everything else works fine, while for some the bare necessities (such as straightforward entering of text) might be difficult or impossible.

In my recent visit with the Israeli Translation Association, I was reminded that many tool vendors might have adopted the complacent attitude that "since my tools support Unicode, all languages are supported." Well, that's just not quite true, as any translator of a bi-di (bi-directional) language -- I think that ib-di or bi-id would be much cleverer, by the way -- would tell you. And these languages are not alone.

Some of the languages with unique challenges had an inherent lobby (=buying power), so tool developers worked hard to solve the conundrum with the East Asian double-byte languages and, lately, with Indic languages. But for Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and other bi-di languages, Trados (bless their hearts!) is the only relatively widely used TEnT with good support; most others have haphazard implementation at best.

Now, here's the deal: It's entirely possible that "inherent lobbying" is not as obvious in these markets, so it's up to the affected translators to directly lobby the tool vendors and show them that there is indeed buying power (at the recent ITA conference there were 300 attendees) as well as a willingness to support them in the development process. I have specifically written to one tool vendor and challenged its developers to seize this opportunity, but I hope that they will not be the only ones.

Having project management and tools interoperability in focus, memoQ 4.0 is just the perfect tool for language service providers.

Find out more on our new website at kilgray.com

The good news is that only a minority of relatively current programs developed during the heyday of Windows XP can't be installed and run on Windows Vista and 7. The bad news is that no matter how small the minority, if I can't install it, I'm unhappy -- and rightly so. In addition, there is also a problem with the legacy programs, the ones that were already slightly outdated with Windows XP but ran just fine, but because they were high-cost programs or because we just liked them in that particular edition we had not upgraded (plus, there may not even be an upgrade eligibility anymore as I just found out with my venerable FrameMaker 6.0).

So what do we do -- aside from staying with Windows XP? Well, Windows Vista and 7 both have a feature called the Compatibility Mode, and this just might buy us some time.

You can get to that mode in two ways. You can run the Program Compatibility Assistant (under Start> Settings> Programs> Use an older program with this version of Windows in Vista or by right-clicking on the .exe file for the setup and selecting Troubleshoot Compatibility in Windows 7). This will tweak the settings so that the installation will work after all. OR you can right-click on the relevant .exe file (neither of these processes work with an .msi file) and select Properties> Compatibility. On this dialog tab you can run the program in compatibility mode (with a bunch of different choices of past Windows edition flavors). You're also given the option to tweak some other settings that might prevent a program from installing, but since most of us aren't experts about these settings I would not recommend changing them. Naturally you will need to be logged on as an administrator to be able to do any of these manipulations.

If everything goes well, you might end up with a copy of that desired program on your Windows Vista or 7 machine and live happily ever after (that is, until the next version of Windows is published). Case in point: I had to work on a project with Idiom Desktop Workbench last week while traveling. Since I really did not want to schlep my old notebook around with me (it might fall apart at any point now), I needed to install the program on my new machine. But alas, it kept telling me that the installation had failed. Long story short: I ended up installing it with the Compatibility Mode, and my new notebook and I happily flew off.

(Albeit to a sad occasion -- the memorial service of MultiLingual magazine editor Laurel Wagers, who passed away February 13. In addition to being a good friend, she was one of the many who make things happen in our industry without always being in the public eye. I always admired her and she will be greatly missed, both personally and professionally.)

To come back to the compatibility issue: If you really need to make sure that a number of XP applications run faultlessly on Windows 7 (not Vista in this case, and Windows 7 only if you have either the Professional or Ultimate versions), you can also install a virtual copy of Windows XP (for that you need to own a license to a copy of XP) on top of Windows 7 and run the "Windows XP Mode." Even if I owned all the required versions and licenses plus the necessary hard-drive space, I would go through this hassle only if my non-compatible application is really worth it and does not run with the earlier options. Still, for some of you this might be the saving grace. You can find more information and all the necessary downloads on Microsoft's website.

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