| 1. Failed Predictions | |
In the very first of my "GeekSpeak" columns for the ATA Chronicle three and a half years ago
(you can see an archive of all the "GeekSpeak" columns here), I talked about TM-based authoring. TM-based
authoring is the concept of authoring original content on the basis of existing
translation memories to
increase the consistency and quality of the source
text, significantly increase translation memory matches in
the later translation process, and lately, achieve a higher likelihood of fair
machine-translated segments.
I ended the column with this statement:
So what does this mean for us?
Incredible opportunities. Of all parties involved in the
documentation/translation processes, who best understands how to deal with
translation memories? Who has already experienced the pitfalls of introducing
this technology, with a result in forced changes to ingrained work habits? That
would be us, of course -- members of the language industry. This is our chance
to tear down the artificial divide between authoring and translation and expand
our service portfolio into writing source documents, thanks to this
sophisticated new approach to a technology that we have all (grudgingly) gotten
used to.
Man, this sounds good. And don't get me wrong: I still believe in its
validity, but I also think that we have not become the advocates and trainers
that I imagined us to become. TM-based authoring is still a foreign concept for
most translators, and the number of commercial products has stagnated (holding
steady with Sajan's Authoring Coach, Across' crossAuthor, and SDL's AuthorAssistant,
now Global Authoring Management System).
When SDL bundled a free version of AuthorAssistant with FrameMaker 18 months ago, I was optimistic that this
might be the beginning of a breakthrough with a TM-based authoring system
delivered directly to many authors and thus made more palatable. I think it's
fair to say it wasn't. Though according to SDL there has been a relatively high
number of downloads, common perception and mindsets have not changed.
Now SDL is launching another attempt, and there are two different
aspects that they think might help its adoption this time. The newly released
version -- now pushed under its management/marketing-gobbledygook name Global Authoring Management System --
has a couple of new features and a different "positioning" that might
make a difference.
First of all, it's now wrapped in a server-based version, so the
supporting materials (TMs, termbases, and rule sets) are stored centrally and
can be accessed by everyone on the network (note that the standalone version is
also still available and costs about 1000 Euro). This should make the product
more attractive for large customers. Secondly, a feature from Trados Studio was adopted that makes a
lot of sense in this product: AutoSuggest.
AutoSuggest is a real-time typing aid
based on content in databases that are created on the basis of your translation
memories and, in this case, entries from your current translation (this is
different from Trados Studio). There is no minimum TM size to create
"AutoSearch Lists" (also different than in Trados Studio), but there is no similar suggestion feature from
termbase content (unfortunately, also different than in Trados Studio).
My main previous frustration with AuthorAssistant
was that it was not interactively engaged in the authoring process; instead,
all checks and corrections had to be done once the document was finished. What
a waste of time and effort! The AutoSuggest
feature changes this for the better.
The last big change mentioned by the manager in charge at SDL is
positioning. I usually don't like the term "positioning" very much,
but here it might be adequately chosen. SDL has bought a number of authoring
technologies over the last few years (Xopus,
Tridion, XyEnterprise) and in the process has gained access to many
customers who use these technologies. Their hope is that with the new
corporately packaged and newly integrated Global
Authoring Management System they'll make headway in these markets. I would
welcome this because it can only help to push a technology whose time has long
come. And once there is more adoption, maybe more of us can take part in the
"incredible opportunities" that I've mentioned in the Chronicle.
And, just to make it complete, here is some more information on the SDL
tool. Aside from the SDL formats, it works as a plug-in for Word (not 2010!), Arbortext, XMetaL, and FrameMaker. Officially, only English is supported. Other languages,
including Italian, French, and German, are supported as far as the actual
TM-authoring is concerned; however, as far as the many rules for all kinds of
linguistic problems in a given text, only English is fully supported (with
German in the pipeline). The current free version that is offered with FrameMaker is still the old version --
the new one should come in that combination in a few weeks. The good news is
that for the upcoming FrameMaker 10, SDL and Adobe plan to continue
their partnership with FrameMaker and
AuthorAssistant (I will just use that
name -- I like it much better).
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2. And While We're Talking About Re-positioning Translation Technology . . . (Premium Edition)
| |
. . . Lingotek is working hard
to do that for their product.
I've been intrigued with Lingotek -- and puzzled! -- since the early beginnings
of their foray into the translation environment tool market. You might not have
heard about them (though you would if you had followed this newsletter), but
they actually were very important for the developmental stage of tools as we
know them today. They were the forerunner to the following:
- completely on-line based tools (today we
have a number of them),
- the concept of a universally shared
translation memory (today we have lots of contenders for that), and
- directly adding Google Translate right into the user interface (today we
hardly have any tool that does not do that).
Despite all this, however, they have strangely not been particularly
successful with the common translator -- even though they offered their tool
for free. They have sold some installations to government clients (by whom they
are also partially funded) and lately to clients such as Adobe. The likes of
Adobe were particularly interested in Lingotek's
crowdsourcing abilities for their community translation projects, and this is
exactly where the new push is now going. The latest incarnation is therefore called
"Collaborative Translation Platform." Talk about anonymous-sounding corporate-speak.
. . .
When I asked Lingotek's
management whether this was simply a name change or something more, this is
what they told me:
It is a new term to
better mesh with our marketing message; however substantial enhancements have
been made in the different releases this year.
I looked through the change log of the last couple of years and there
indeed have been some changes. The most glaring had to be the crowdsourcing-related
like a voting system for translations and translation memory records
("community scores"), as well as new user roles such as the community
manager. Other changes include support for Office
2007/2010, the open-source format gettext
PO, the terminology exchange format TBX, and the addition of the Microsoft/Bing machine translation
engine (additional to Google Translate).
But there is more than just those changes. While the tool was originally
geared toward the freelance community (first as a paid-for service and then for
free) and then government agencies, it is now directed at translation buyers
and LSPs. The free freelance edition is still available, but it's not the focus
anymore. (Here is the official wording -- save this in case you need to quote
it later to them: "We do not market the product to freelance translators
but make unrestricted 'trial' access available for freelance translators who
contact us. We also have not cut off any freelance translators already using
the product for free and we have no intent to do that in the future.")
The tool is now sold as a SaaS -- software as a service -- product to
companies that are particularly interested in the crowdsourcing aspect of
translation. To those entities the tool is sold for a minimum of $1500 per
month, a price that includes 10 concurrent users.
Speaking as a translator, is this tool a great tool for translation
purposes? It think it's OK, especially for getting your feet wet with
translation technology. I've had a chance to work on a number of decent-sized
projects in it and there were a few things I liked (such as the ability to see
the machine translation of Microsoft and Google at the same time and find out
that in some cases Google is not the best) and a number of things I really did
not like (like the lack of good documentation or irrelevant matches). However, for
companies looking for a translation environment tool that offers many of the
features one expects plus the support of crowdsourcing, this might be a good
choice.
(While we're talking about crowdsourcing, many
of you will have heard about the latest Facebook
crowdsourcing highjack attempts into Spanish and Turkish, but also check out this blog posting, which felt like a breath of fresh air to me.)
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| 3. MT in the Limelight | |
Many of you will have read in this newsletter and
elsewhere that the conference of the American Translators Association, the ATA, will take place in
Denver, Colorado, and will be directly followed by the AMTA, the conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. (Please forgive me, but I've got to say it: the association's name
sounds very machine-translated to me!)
This co-location and
successive timing is no accident, of course. In fact, I think it's a tremendous
opportunity that hopefully will help both sides -- translators on the one and
machine translation developers and proponents on the other -- to gain some
appreciation and understanding of each other. Maybe this all sounds a little
politically correct to you, but I'm quite serious about it. All of us would
agree that there is a chasm between these groups, and all of us know that there
has been very little or no respect for each other ("machine translation
can only produce laughable/unusable/terrible garbage" vs.
"translators are too expensive/ignorant/arrogant").
So where to start
rebuilding bridges? The conferences are organized so that there actually are
going to be bridges to each other('s conferences). On Saturday, the last day of
the ATA conference, the last three session slots each have an interesting session on MT (the Man
vs. Machine panel at 4 pm on Saturday is not on the website yet for some
reason). The first official day of the AMTA, Monday,
November 1, will be specifically devoted to topics that are relevant for
translators. And a pre-conference workshop on Sunday, Collaborative Translation: Technology, Crowdsourcing, and the Translator Perspective, obviously will be relevant to many of us
also.
Together with Nick
Hartmann, ATA's president, I was honored to be asked to open the AMTA
conference by explaining the translator's perspective to the machine
translation world. If you have any input on what you'd like me to say, let me
know. One thing I will definitely show them is the human side of Jeromobot --
just as I show many of you his technological side.
Someone asked me last
week what other conferences I will be attending this fall. There won't be many,
but I'm looking forward to going to the Translation Forum Russia in Ekaterinburg in September (Jeromobot and I will
most certainly visit this famous monument), and I
will be teaching a workshop for the Northern Californian translators in San Francisco in October.
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| 4. A Shadow of His Former Self | |
Fortunately, this headline applies only to people, not to shadow copies in Windows 7 (only in the Professional
and Ultimate Editions).
What is it? A super-helpful system for the rest of us, those who may have
forgotten to make a backup yesterday and then messed up or even corrupted a
file and now want to go back to the earlier version. Happened to you, too?
Well, it's happened to me countless times.
In the above-mentioned versions of Windows
(also available in Windows Vista, by
the way), you'll have the option Previous
Version when you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer. While that might not sound quite as ominous as "shadow
copy," it's your entrance to the shadow copy system. Once you select it,
you are presented with a dialog that will list (after a little while) all the
previous versions that are available of the file in question. There are two
different places where those could be retrieved from: Backup (if you use the Windows Backup system) and restore
points (the almost magical solution under Start>
Accessories> System Tools> System Restore that lets you restore your
system in case you really messed something up). All of the listed files have a
date associated with them, so all you need to do now is double-click the
desired version or highlight it and select Restore.
But, wait!
Once you do that, there is no undo: your current version of the file in
question is gone and has been replaced. This might work out in almost all cases,
but in the few cases where this makes things even worse (there is typically
only one previous version per day so you might not get the version you want),
there is also the option to highlight one of the files and select Open or Copy to check whether it's the correct version. Once you know it
is, go ahead and save it over your existing file.
(For the few who dual-boot between Windows
7 and Windows XP, here is a
little damper: starting up in Windows XP
deletes all your shadow copies and restore points. Sorry.)
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| 5. From Here to There and Back (Premium Edition) | |
When I started working in our industry, I was fortunate enough to work
for a language service provider for the first two years. (Mind you, I sure
wouldn't have called myself lucky during those two years; neither would my
family, who didn't see much of me during that time.) It was a great
opportunity, though, to be introduced to translation technology in its infancy.
Better yet, I was put in charge of choosing the technology that our LSP would
use. Naturally it was much easier for me to choose my own technology when I graduated
to being a freelance translator! However, I can definitely sympathize with the
many thousands of translators who don't have that opportunity and who now have
so many more tools and technologies to choose from. It's for those folks
exactly that we created TranslatorsTraining.com,
a single site where you can watch videos of 20+ translation environment tools
all doing the very same thing so all you need to do is lean back and select
what you think fits you (the image of a chameleon with its prey on the tongue
comes to mind). It's all for free, and the most popular tools are even offered
with a special discount. So lean back and shoot out that tongue.
On to other things . . .
Faithful reader Terry Oliver recommended a tool he used to convert his AOL (also works for Compuserve) mail to Outlook
(or Outlook Express). It's called ePreserver and
it takes about half
a dozen clicks to tell it what to do, then in less than half an hour (in my
case) it transported the folder structure and address book and converted and
transferred all emails. The only slight glitch was the handling of Umlaut
characters in a few mails, but this probably isn't the fault of ePreserver --
and it doesn't stop you reading them, just makes it more difficult. I had been
dreading the prospect of getting away from the proprietary format of AOL and possibly losing a lot of
correspondence and information in the process, but this was, as we Brits say --
a doddle. As far as I can see, the program works on all systems from Win95 through Windows 7, but it does not go beyond Outlook 2003, so anyone thinking of converting should lose no time
about it before upgrading to Outlook
2007/2010.
Good doddle advice. For those who have not switched from the old,
old AOL and Compuserve formats -- and since I know your email addresses, I know
there are quite a few -- it's about time.
In the last newsletter I mentioned that Xbench is a great tool for reading TBX files -- in
particular the Microsoft glossaries in TBX format -- and converting them so other tools that
might not support that format will be able to read them. The only problem was
that the MS TBX glossaries have a valuable "Definition" field that
contains, well, a definition of the term pair. Xbench was not able to handle that properly. I mentioned that to
the person who is responsible for Xbench's
development, and, believe it or not, there was a fix for it less than an hour
later. You can download that version here, but please do this only if you really need the Definition field -- it's a beta version and therefore not
supported.
(Should you happen to download and use it and still not be able to
export the Definition field, here is
the fix: Select Project>
Properties> Settings in Xbench
and enter 3 into the Columns
in List field. You asked for it!)
Very kind, by the way, that this newsletter and Jeromobot's Twitter stream got a nice mention in a Microsoft blog.
Awhile back I wrote about the multilingual search engine 2Lingual. It was nothing
earth-shattering, but it was helpful. If you entered a term in the first search
box, Google Translate produced the translation in the search box for the
other language and at the same time executed a search for both. Some
translators found it quite helpful for quickly locating websites on a certain
topic across languages. If you go there today, though, you will find it has now
become a multilingual search through Twitter's archives. Also helpful, but
probably not for translators. It turns out that the old site had simply been
renamed and moved to Babelplex.com.
Change your bookmarks!
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| The Last Word on the Tool Kit | |
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© 2010 International Writers' Group
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