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Yeah, I'm also not quite sure what to call it, but a
new age in translation technology has certainly crept over the horizon. It
seems to be moving away from the local desktop and toward server-based programs
and data storages and online access.
Juts consider how many programs like the following are
now available:
·
Lingotek
·
Google
Translator Toolkit
·
Lionbridge's Translation
Workspace
·
GlobalSight
·
Wordfast
Anywhere
·
Wordbee
·
Crowdin.net
·
XTM
Cloud
·
Boltran
Yes, it seems a little odd to throw all these
applications on one large pile -- they certainly differ in magnitude and
aspiration. And, again, yes, you might not have even heard of some of these
tools (such as XTM Cloud and Boltran -- but that's why you are
reading this article!). And, yes, once again, the gamble of the Lingotek
makers (and some prior and failed players, such as Uniscape) seems increasingly to be coming to fruition. The future
is up, up away in the "cloud," because that's where the data and
the applications that access it are. Gone are the days of having to worry about
our little hard-drive-based dominions. Well, it's not quite that extreme, but
we seem to be reaching that way.
Let's first throw in a few differentiators, though.
Some of these tools are truly cloud-based, while others offer a hybrid system,
such as Translation Workspace, which largely works with desktop
applications that connect to cloud-based data. Some applications, such as Google Translator Toolkit, don't aim exclusively
for the professional translator and really are not very interested in the translation
industry per se, but more in the data that we can offer. Some of these tools,
including Wordbee, Lingotek, Crowdin.net, and to a certain degree GlobalSight, are paying special attention to how they can be used
for crowdsourcing purposes. Some, such as GlobalSight,
are geared toward LSPs and translation enterprises; many are offering solutions
for all sectors of our industry; and yet others, such as Wordfast Anywhere, and
Boltran, primarily have the individual translator in mind.
But all this aside, what is happening? Well, first of
all, Lionbridge has raised a bit of awareness and at the same time painted a
large bullseye on its back by releasing and pushing its Workspace product. (When I talked to XTM's CEO last week, I found
it interesting that he was very eager to mention how unlike his product is to
Lionbridge's, but it was also obvious that much of the way he offers his
product, including the pricing structure, is geared to compete with Lionbridge.)
And times might indeed be ripe to finally take off and move into the cloud.
The product that I looked at this past week is called XTM
Cloud.
XTM International (formerly awkwardly named XML-INTL),
the maker of XTM Cloud, has been
around for quite some time. The few times I've written about its products, I've
always been really positive: I liked the online translation interface, the
heavy reliance on open standards, and the cautious product-driven rather than
marketing-driven approach. What I was never quite sure about was how a tool
like this would make it into the league of the "big players" and
compete. I did not quite see how to get freelance translators on-board and did
not see much impact on larger players either, aside from a few nice-sized
clients like the British LSP Lingo24 (whose CIO Andrzej Zydron is also co-CEO
and head developer of XTM).
This all may just have changed with the latest release
of XTM Cloud, a product that is geared toward translation agencies
and freelance translators alike.
One of the most striking things about this product,
which offers administration, bare-bones project management and translation
features, is the user manual, all 63 pages of it. That's it. And that's not
because it's so badly written or written in shorthand or anything like that; it's
because the product is very simple and straightforward. The interface is, well,
Spartan and highly functional. It's not always completely intuitive (I was
stymied with launching a project until I found a little "Start" button
way down at the bottom of the page), but it's well organized once you get the
hang of it.
At this point you may have realizedthat XTM Cloud is a SaaS, a
software-as-a-service product. There is no download or installation; everything,
including the files that need to be translated as well as the translation
memory and a (full-fledged) terminology database, sits on a server (which
happens to be in Germany). All the data can be imported and exported at any
stage in the process in the expected formats, including of course the three
main translation standards: XLIFF for the translation files, TMX for the
translation memory, and TBX for the termbase. (In addition, formats like CSV or
-- interestingly -- translation files can be downloaded as TMX, PDF, or
bilingual Trados documents independent of their original format.)
The way that XTM Cloud handles XLIFF is quite
remarkable. Every translation file is internally converted to XLIFF (just as in
Trados Studio, Heartsome, and Swordfish)
and at any stage of the translation process it's possible to export it out of
the system, process it on another XLIFF-supporting tool, and bring it back into
the XTM Cloud system. And even though
some tools have had problems with the version of XLIFF that Trados Studio chose, the developers have
tested the round-tripping of this to Trados
Studio and back to XTM (I have
not verified this independently).
Important question: What file types are supported? MS Office
of all versions (pre-2007 versions
are internally converted to the 2007/2010
format), XML and various formats based on XML (including the XML interchange
formats of Visio, InDesign -- both .inx and .idml -- SVG,
and various others), HTML, FrameMaker
.mif, PDF (converted internally to text), Java
.properties, Trados .ttx files, and
XLIFF.
But let's come back to the SaaS deal. This means that
you don't pay any software licensing fee but a monthly usage fee. As mentioned
above, the prices are
structured to beat out Lionbridge's Workspace
offering by between 20 and 50 percent. (As an example: for one user and 60,000
words/month you would pay 25 GBP. There are a number of other price plans,
including for small groups and LSPs.) Also like Lionbridge, you can upgrade and
downgrade your plan on a month-by-month basis (after an initial three-month
commitment). Some things in the pricing still need to be ironed out, though.
Asian-language source translators are charged for their monthly word allotment
according to character -- this clearly does not make sense and I'm sure will be
changed soon (Lionbridge has solved the same issue quite cleverly).
The translation interface is a lot of fun to work in.
If you have previously worked in a client's home-grown browser-based interface
and hated it: I hear you -- so have I. And for the longest time I felt hopeless
that we would ever have a truly clever browser-based interface. With XTM (and Wordbee -- see my review a few weeks ago) we now do. XTM's translation interface is extremely
uncluttered (and they're trying to make it even less so -- including making the
functions and differentiations of the few existing buttons more clear); translation
memory matches, (optional) Google Translate
machine translation, terminology matches, and various levels of warnings are
clearly displayed and highly accessible; and you can enter terminology entries
to your terminology database seamlessly and without much effort (if that is so
desired). I found the process of entering
inline codes (in this format: {1}) a bit clunky -- you need to use a
different keyboard shortcut for every one of them -- but what I really liked
was that the spell-checking does not rely only on the browser's spell-check but
has an internal spelling-engine as well.
I also like the version control feature. You can
follow a long trail of edits to individual segments and can indeed filter whole
projects for segments that have been changed -- which is a great way to review
edits or for an LSP to see how much the editor/reviewer had to change in the
original translation.
If you are an LSP or translation buyer who would like
to host everything on your own (by the way, all TM data is stored in one
database per user, which is then logically separated by client information,
etc.), you can still go for the large server-based solutions that XTM
International offers. But if you do, you should have a much easier time now to
find translators who already have some familiarity with the tool.
I also had a quick glance at the newly released Boltran this week, and while this tool certainly has none
of XTM's aspirations, it's
interesting. It's a slimmed-down version of OmegaT
as a web-based tool that the LSP ByteTranslation put up. You can upload any of the supported
file formats (OpenOffice, text, HTML,
Office 2007/2010, XLIFF, and the
various other formats that OmegaT
supports), assign a translation memory into which you can import TMX data, and
then translate by clicking from field to field in a very bare-bones interface. There's
no terminology data and really not much of anything else, but I still found it
worthwhile to mention as a sort of light-weight tool for the occasional
translator (rather than a serious, high-powered tool for the professional).
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