|
This story may sound unreal to you cynics out there who feel that we end-users
are at the cruel mercy of software developers. Yet, it's true.
About three weeks ago, some folks from Western Standard contacted me to
look at their newly released translation environment tool Fluency. I downloaded (HUGE download!), installed, and
tested it for a couple of hours and gave them fairly extensive feedback.
Because I found a good number of shortcomings the list was rather extensive, so
I followed up in a phone call with an apology of sorts, promising them that I could
see some potential if they could only fix some of the problems that I
mentioned.
Two and a half weeks later they got back to me. They had not fixed some
of those problems; they had fixed them all. And, mind you, those
problems were not minor bugs but rather fundamental architectural concepts. It
still blows my mind when I think about it.
And all that makes now a good time to write about Fluency.
As I said above, Fluency is a translation environment tool, and it
may truly earn that name more than any of its competitors. The developers have
collected all kinds of processes and third-party utilities that they felt would
be helpful in the process of translation, integrated them into their tool and
its workflow, and left it up to us whether to use them. I am talking about features
like PDF conversion (from and to PDF), optical character recognition
(OCR), an interface for manual transcription of items that can't be processed
with optical character recognition, extensive language-specific glossaries, direct
links to any number of web-based resources, and audio recognition (this last
feature is still under development).
But let's start from the beginning. The translation interface is a
multi-pane interface with access to a number of the linguistic resources
mentioned above, including of course a pane for translation memory matches, a
source and a target, and a target preview pane.
As you read that description you might think that it has virtually the
same look as most of its competitors these days: source and target text in a
table-like format with source on the left and target on the right. Not at all.
The developers have made a conscious decision not to use the traditional format;
instead, you'll see a source pane that displays the text with all its context
(sort of) and the target pane that displays segment by segment independently (the
current segment is highlighted in the source pane). I've always been a friend
of the table-like display -- which in my opinion gives plenty of context -- but
I know that there are some who don't like it and they will welcome Fluency's
approach.
Fluency's developers
will have to do some more work on the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get)
display of their source and target texts, in particular on HTML and PowerPoint
files, which are displayed in a less than helpful manner, but on other formats,
including all the MS Word files, there are some WYSIWYG elements (bold,
italics, etc.) displayed in the source pane and the target preview. (Unfortunately,
the bold and italics buttons in the target pane don't seem to work at the
moment, but I'm sure that will be fixed in the next build.)
The supported file formats include the expected formats -- Excel,
Word, and PowerPoint in all versions, RTF, text, HTML, XML, FrameMaker,
Trados TagEditor, and InDesign in .inx format -- but also some
surprising ones, including Microsoft Publisher files and, as mentioned
above, PDF. I can see some of you cringe when you read "MS Publisher"
-- yes, I know, it sort of has the reputation of a desktop-publishing program
for dummies, but who wants to say no to a well-paying client with Publisher
files to translate? And to my knowledge, Fluency is the only tool on the
market that supports Publisher files.
The PDF support, as with any of its competitors, is done through a
third-party plugin (TX TextControl in this case) for a conversion into a
Word-based document. The advantage that I see with Fluency's
approach is that you are offered the chance to edit the resulting Word
document before you import it into the translation interface.
As I said, the HTML support is still not great, so if that is one of your
major file formats, you might want to wait a bit before looking at Fluency
more closely. Presently Fluency also supports the translation of only one
file at a time (the plan is to change that in later versions), and this is also
a problem if you work in a lot of HTML projects.
Let's talk a bit about the utilities and resources that are included
with the tool.
It's important to remember that most of these are language-specific. So
you will have to verify that your language or language combination is supported
before you do some extensive testing. In fact, when you test or purchase Fluency,
you do that in language-combination-specific editions; except for its present
offer, editions that support more or all supported languages cost more (and are
even larger downloads!).
The OCR engine (it uses the open-source Tesseract, which was
originally developed at Hewlett Packard) to convert .bmp and .jpg images into
text presently supports English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Dutch,
Portuguese, and Vietnamese (and I believe that it should also be able to work
on Indic scripts, but that is not listed as officially supported).
The dictionary support includes these languages (note that you can
translate other languages as well, you just don't get the data with it): Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech,
Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi,
Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish,
Portuguese, Pashto, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai,
Turkish, Urdu, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. For these languages, monolingual and
bilingual resources are included (between English and the respective language).
Unfortunately, the developers are not particularly clear about the sources for
those dictionaries -- I assume it's open-source material -- and in the language
combination that I looked at (EN>DE) the quality is OK but not overwhelming.
Still, in some cases it's helpful to have some generic translations for terms
displayed to you, if only to spur your creativity a little more. For
specialized dictionaries, you have to use your own termbases, which you can
import in comma- or tab-delimited formats or add during the translation.
A feature that I found unique in regard to terminology is called Track
Term. This allows you to mark a term in your current document, determine a
translation for it, and force the program to warn you every time you choose not
to use that.
The panes to access Internet resources are fantastic. They are
completely customizable, of course, and you only have to highlight a term or
phrase and it automatically looks that up on the desired sites. If you feel
that you need a more comprehensive view of the webpage, the Expand Browser
buttons expand the webpage to the full size of the Fluency window.
Though this is rather common these days, real-time spell-checks are
available with the squiggly underline, and keyboard shortcuts are available to
move between the different parts of the program (although I wish that the
shortcuts would be more clearly documented and customizable).
All in all, Fluency is a tool that has a
lot to offer, supported by a development team that "aims to please"
and responds to requests incredibly fast and conscientiously. Plus it presently
comes with an extremely attractive price tag.
|
