Office 2010 has been released and there probably is no other group of professionals for whom this is as important as it is for translators. Why is that?

Essentially, there are two answers to that, I think. First, we are in the service business, so we have to make sure that we can indeed serve the needs of our clients (I know that this might be a painful realization for some, but I'm afraid it's true). So if the clients demand a certain format with all its idiosyncrasies, we'd better be able to deliver that. The second answer is that our translation environment, particularly as represented in our TEnTs -- our translation environment tools -- is much less independent on Office than you might think. I'll discuss that more in this issue's Premium article on the support of Office 2010 in the available TEnTs.

Let's talk about Office 2010 first. There are plenty of reviews out there, so I'm not going to give you a full-fledged general review; instead, I would like to concentrate on the things that are important to us as translators.

Still, to give you just a first impression (those of you who have seen the new version will agree with this): Office 2010 in relation to Office 2007 is like Windows 7 is to Windows Vista. You see, Windows Vista was really quite good, but possibly not quite ready for show time. Quite a few aspects were a bit half-baked. You could see the good intentions behind many of the features, but they were either too hard to use and/or tedious or simply did not work quite right. Most of that was fixed in Windows 7, which turned out to be a stable and very workable operating system.

Office 2010 is the same in many ways. Remember the outcry about the "ribbons" for Office 2007 that replaced the menus? Well, they are still there, but they are now completely configurable (under File> Options> Customize Ribbon). And did you realize that I just mentioned "File"? The "Office button" in the upper left-hand corner is gone and has now been replaced with a File menu of sorts. Admittedly, this is not a "real" menu, but it offers you access to the Backstage view, a place to manage rather than edit and create your file. Here you have remarkable access to various previous versions of the file, all the file properties, all the print and save options, etc.

Also, there were a lot of complaints about Microsoft's inconsistent ribbon implementation in Office 2007. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint had ribbons, whereas Outlook and Publisher did not. Now they all have them, including the customizability, Backstage view, etc.

I've been using Office 2010 for about a week now and in general I really like it. (I did have some unexpected crashes in Outlook and Word, but I posted a fix for that on Jeromobot's Twitter stream.)

In the new Office I don't have to rely on the Quick Access toolbar as my only customizable place within Office applications anymore (though I still added a few icons under File> Options> Quick Access Toolbar, such as for Full Screen View or the Options dialog box); it's fast and responsive; and I've started to enjoy some of the newly added features, including the functionality to truly embed movies into PowerPoint presentation (there will be no PowerPoint presentation without a full-length Jeromobot movie from here on out!) and the Navigation bar in Word.

Speaking of the Navigation bar, let's talk about it briefly before we go on to more translator-specific areas. It's probably the one most obvious change in Word, and it's a good one. It's a three-tabbed pane to the left of your open document (of course, you can move it anywhere else inside or outside the Word window) that appears when selecting View> Navigation Pane or by hitting Ctrl+F. Yes, you read that right: Ctrl+F, the one shortcut that we all know to search for something within a document. The reason for that is that one of the tabs, and possibly the most helpful, is indeed a search tab in which you can search for text or other items. All occurrences of the searched item will be listed, and you can then jump to it by clicking on the listings -- very helpful and kind of a no-brainer. If you need to do some "advanced searching" with the traditional Find dialog, you can select Home> Find> Advanced Find or press Ctrl+H to open the Replace dialog. The other two tabs on the Navigation pane are the Heading and the Page view. The Heading view is kind of a fancy Outline View of earlier versions of Word where you can see the structure of your document by its headings and then rearrange or apply properties for whole sections. The Page view is very much like the Pages view in Acrobat or Adobe Reader where you have thumbnail views of each page that you can jump to by clicking on it.

Now let's talk about the features that are truly relevant to translators.

First of all, your language packs that you might still have from Office 2003 and/or 2007 don't apply anymore. Bummer! This is clearly frustrating and makes the Office 2010 package immediately more expensive (despite the fact that the basic pack is slightly less expensive than its previous reincarnation) if you have to buy one or several additional spelling and grammar checkers. Here you can check what kind of spelling checkers are included with what language version of Word.

Each additional language pack (which includes the ability to run Office in an additional language plus proofing for three or four languages) costs approximately USD 25. You can find a list of all the language packs right here, but I don't think all of them are available yet -- it looks like you can presently purchase only English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Italian.

If you are a user of a "minor" language, you might just be lucky enough to be able to download an LIP (Language Interface Pack) for your language that includes the ability to run Office in that language, use the spelling checker of that language, and sometimes even a help systems and templates in that language. You can find out right here which approximately 60 languages with what features are supported for that program.

Now, if you are a language service provider who deals with many languages and you bought the Multi-Language Pack (which included dozens of languages) for the previous versions of Word, you might be out of luck this time. It looks as though this won't be available for this version. (If I get a chance to talk to somebody at Microsoft about this, I will do my best to plead with them to release it after all -- so cross your fingers.)

On the bright side, it is much easier to find, purchase, and install the language packs in Office. You will just need to select File> Options> Language in an Office program and there you'll find the respective links.

What you'll also find in that dialog is a link for a download to have the ScreenTips (previously called QuickInfo -- the tidbits of information that you get when you put your mouse cursor on any item in the user interface) in any language. Depending on your perspective, having this feature can fall anywhere on the spectrum between helpful and fun -- but either way I recommend that you download it in a language that is not covered by the user interface.

All of the translations of the ScreenTips (as well as many, many others) can be found on the Microsoft Language Portal, which was just updated last week with all the Office 2010 terminology.

The Mini Translator (accessible under Review> Translate> Mini Translator) gives you a translation of the term you are pointing to. It's not as bad as it sounds -- it actually includes some grammatical information in some cases as well as a number of options for the translation. Still, I don't see us using this option very much (but then I was wrong in assuming that professional translators wouldn't use generic machine translation engines).

These are the directly translation- and language-related features. Here are some other things that I looked at.

I had hoped that Publisher would now have a way to export to an interim format that could easily be processed in a TEnT -- nada. Fluency remains the only tool out there with which to directly translate MS Publisher files.

And then there is, of course, the much-discussed fact that Microsoft decided to allow us to store files online and use free online versions of the applicable Office programs to edit them. While this could be a major move for a lot of industries and/or users, I don't think it's very relevant to us yet. Google Docs is Microsoft's biggest competitor in the arena of online stored documents. However, in the past few years I had exactly one client who ever asked me to translate a Google Docs document online -- and the only reason he asked me was because he does not use any TEnT and that particular end client did not worry much about confidentiality. Since both of these characteristics are usually in place, we might just have to wait until TEnTs are able to work on those kinds of documents or clients' attitudes about content relax (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen anytime soon . . .).

How TEnTs are supporting Office 2010 in general can be found in the following article in the Premium Edition.

MT Postediting: Career growth opportunity? Or... not for me!

The Association for Machine Translation in Americas (AMTA) 9th biennial conference will be held in Denver, Colorado October 31 - November 5, 2010, immediately following ATA.

The ATA program on Saturday, October 30 will include 2 CAT sessions on MT by AMTA leaders.

Tutorials on postediting will be offered Sunday, October 31 at AMTA, Just 6 blocks from the ATA conference hotel.

AMTA Keynotes and tutorials will be announced July 5 at http://amta2010.amtaweb.org
or contact Laurie Gerber lgerber@amtaweb.orgfor more information.

There are two ways that a new release of Word affects translators who work with translation environment tools. The updated file format(s) that Word invariably produces with each new version has to be supported (true for a new release of any tool whose format is supported by TEnTs), but beyond that there are also other tangible and intangible ways that a new version of Word can affect translation environment tools. I asked all the tool vendors to respond to the first difficulty (more on that in the second part of the article), but for now let's talk about the other interdependencies.

To me it was a real achievement when both Trados and Wordfast departed from the "Word ways" with their latest versions (and to deflect an angry letter from Wordfast right away: I know that Wordfast Classic, which relies almost solely on Word, is also alive and well). Still, it was an important step for two reasons: first, for too long we had bought into the fallacy that everything that happened within Word had to be easier than anything outside that environment, and second, the fewer interdependencies with other programs, the easier it is for developers and, as an extension, for users.

I'm not going to get up on my virtual pedestal again and preach about why the first point is a fallacy (been there, done that), but as any power user of any translation environment tool that uses Word as its main translation interface could tell you, these tools are not easy tools to learn. Not impossible, mind you, just not any easier than other TEnTs that don't use Word as their translation interface. Just because you type something into Word and can use Word's editing capabilities that you might be familiar with, the handling of translation memories and terminology databases does not get any easier -- and that is very much at the core of the matter for most TEnTs.

There is an exception to this rule: The Word-based TEnT Snowball is indeed a relatively easy tool to learn, but -- and the developer would agree -- it does not have all the capabilities of the full-fledged tools.

On to interdependencies. Depending on how deeply a Word-based tool gets into the architecture of Word, the release of a new version of Word may make the tool all but unusable for that version of Word. Best case in point: Translation Workspace, Lionbridge's tool, not only does not work in the latest version of Word, but I was forced to uninstall it because it kept giving me error messages even in unrelated programs. On the other hand, another Word-based tool, Wordfast Classic, is "now 100% compatible with Word 2010 for Windows" and "also runs on the beta Word 2011 for the Mac that Microsoft offers at this time." (Quotes from the developer of Wordfast.)

This is the first and most obvious level where another tool depends on Word. But there are others, too. A good number of tools have thought it wise to access some of the editing facilities that Word offers , especially including Word's spelling-check engine (typically as an additional -- and better -- alternative to an existing spelling-check module). As noted above, the spelling-check module has changed in this last version of Word. So, not surprisingly, a number of tools are affected. I have found that SDLX, Déjà Vu X, and Idiom Workbench have problems (Déjà Vu X's problem will be fixed, but I doubt that SDLX or Idiom Workbench will see a correction). Others that also use the Word spelling-check engine, including Wordfast Pro, Trados TagEditor, and memoQ, seem to work fine -- but this is certainly something you will want to check with your tool. I was frustrated at not being able to use Déjà Vu's and Idiom's much better Word spelling checkers this week.

Now on to the support of the actual file formats. Let me quote the vendors who responded directly (so I won't run into any problems interpreting the sometimes very carefully worded statements):

Across: Yes, we can state compatibility of Across (Across v5 SP1) with Office 2010.

Alchemy Publisher: We support Office 2010 native formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Déjà Vu X: We have been trying Office 2010 since the first beta was developed and we have not detected any problem with the compatibility with Déjà Vu X. So, Déjà Vu X works properly with Office 2010 and it can manage Office 2010 documents as it did with previous Office versions.

Felix: I haven't completed testing Felix on Office 2010. I plan to have a full compatibility report with the release of version 1.6 in the upcoming weeks.

Fluency: To the best of our knowledge we are fully compatible with Office 2010, though we have not been able to test Publisher 2010 yet.

Fortis: We have unfortunately not yet attacked Office 2010 compatibility as of yet.

Fusion: Office 2010 support (32k and 64k) is part of Fusion version 5.1 which will be released in August 2010.

Lingotek: Lingotek will support Office 2010 in our September release.

LogiTerm: All our products, namely LogiTerm Pro, LogiTermWeb, AlignFactoryLight, AlignFactory, AlignRobot, SynchroTerm, SynchroTermLight and YouAlign are Office 2010 compatible.

memoQ: We do support PowerPoint 2010 (.pptx) and Word 2010 (.docx) -- Excel 2010 (.xlsx) is something to come.

MetaTexis: MetaTexis for Word runs under Office 2010 just like under Office 2007. At least I have not received any error reports from any users so far.

MultiTrans: MultiTrans 4.4 and 4.4 R2 are immediately fully compatible with Office 2010 32 bit version from both its XLIFF Editor reading of office formats and direct office integration points. 

Similis: We downloaded the beta-version from the Microsoft site and tested it on Similis, everything works just fine: alignment, terminology extraction, pre-translation, translation, final check, final target document delivery and feeding the memory with the translated job.

Snowball: Snowball works with Office 2010. There appear to have been some issues with Office 2010 beta, but not with the current version of Office 2010.

Star Transit: Our development team is currently analyzing the details (underlying structures) of the Office 2010 document formats and hope to have file filters available for use with Transit NXT by the August / September 2010 timeframe.

Swordfish: Office 2010 is fully supported by Swordfish & Stingray.

Trados Studio: We have 'beta' compatibility at the moment but we will release compatibility with an upcoming service pack which will be released soon. Should be in the next two months.

Translation Workspace: We are in the early stages of Office 2010 compatibility testing, and will be starting to introduce format and environment support in late 2010 or early 2011.

Wordbee: Wordbee can read and write Office 2010 documents, including those containing new Office 2010 features. This is true for .doc, .xls, .ppt, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and related formats. The new Excel .xslb binary format is not supported. However, at this point in time, we do not guarantee that all text coming from new Office 2010 features (such as the Wordart replacement) are consistently extracted for translation. A series of tests is planned over the summer and we will release a "full compatibility" statement then.

Wordfast: Wordfast Classic is now 100% compatible with Word 2010 for Windows. The Word-2010-compatible build of Wordfast will be available from July 1, 2010.

XTM: I am glad to confirm that we fully support Office 2010.

So, there you have it. Google did not respond -- but Google Translator Toolkit doesn't even support Office 2007 so there's no big surprise there.

All this means that you should make a careful decision whether to upgrade to Office 2010. However, even if you have upgraded (or have to upgrade with a new computer), it's always possible to downsave an Office file to a version that is supported by your tool of choice.

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