I had a great talk this past week with some folks from MadCap. MadCap is the company that split off from Adobe after some of MadCap's current owners felt that Adobe was treating the help authoring product RoboHelp, which it purchased as part of a larger acquisition, too shabbily (the German stiefmütterlich -- "stepmotherly" -- would be a much more colorful term!). So they started their own company and have since given Adobe a run for its money (once they were gone, of course, Adobe resumed work on RoboHelp). MadCap's main product is the help authoring product Flare.

Early on, the people in charge at MadCap recognized that there was a strong link between the language and technical writing industries. (This may have rather a "duh effect" on most of us, but for many in the technical authoring world this discovery has yet to be made.) So they spent quite a bit of early effort to become more visible to us, partly by showing up at industry events but also by providing useful features such as full Unicode support and outstanding double-byte support for East Asian languages (the latest version of RoboHelp has now caught up on that). Finally, and this is the point I've been trying to make all along, MadCap released Lingo, an integrated translation environment tool.

Before last week I had never actually taken the time to look at Lingo, but I was always very impressed with the fact that "our technology" had been picked up and integrated into a tool that does not primarily define itself as a computer-aided translation tool.

With its latest release, Lingo is now both a tool that easily integrates into the authoring/translation environment of Flare but can also be used as a standalone TEnT for file formats such as MS Word and PowerPoint (all versions), HTML, XML, DITA, and .resx files.

Here are my impressions of the tool: it's a solid, nuts-and-bolts sort of tool that performs very well, certainly and particularly with Flare projects, but may not have some of the bells and whistles of the more well-known competitors.

The translation memories and (full-fledged) terminology databases are maintained in Microsoft SQL Express -- which you'll need to download from MS's website. Both TMs and termbases can be multilingual. The preferred exchange format between Lingo and other tools is TMX; for termbases it's CSV or TBX. I was impressed with the ease of adding terms to the terminology database while at the same time providing the user with the full range of fields and relations that could be entered for each entry if needed. Looking at the way translation memory data is processed, it seemed to me that the development team still needs to implement some structural changes to how the TM maintains different versions of translation of segments: rather than overwrite an old entry with an edited version, it keeps both (or all three or four or however many are being entered). While it is possible to delete the "incorrect" occurrences manually, this seems tedious and unnecessary. Also on the minus side: bi-directional languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, etc.) are not supported in Lingo.

On the positive side, the tool is very user-friendly and self-explanatory -- important if you consider that it's not only to be used by language specialists but also by managers of technical writing crews. It provides a full-fledged preview feature for HTML files, real-time (squiggle underline) spell-check, and the way that translation teams are involved is very interesting. Translation projects are packaged up in a .zip file that contains TMX data for the translation memory and XLIFF files for all files except HTML and XML (which are presented unconverted as HTML and XML). All this is very apparent and open, there is no need to "hack" the .zip file that contains the translation data (as some competitors require), and it's up to the translator to use either Lingo or another tool to translate these files, zip them up again, and send them back to the project manager.

If you choose to use Lingo, you can either purchase a moderately priced license outright or you can buy a time-limited license for 3, 6, or 12 months, which might make a lot of sense for projects in which you'll have to temporarily work on Flare files but otherwise choose to use another tool.

In the last newsletter I mentioned that I would write about Kazuraki, a new Japanese font created by Adobe. Just interesting for Japanese translators? Boring? I don't think so!

East Asian calligraphy has very little to do with Western calligraphy, which is primarily decorative and sometimes very beautiful writing. The works of East Asian calligraphers have a life far beyond the characters that are depicted. The characters interact with each other. They breathe (quite literally if you watch for the deep black of the first character written with a brush full of ink that slowly fades out until the black is renewed with new ink only to fade out again). They express not only the personality and relevance of the calligrapher but also give testimony to his or her knowledge of and deference to the calligraphers who have gone before and the main schools of calligraphy.

Yeah, I know, this sounds a little like a description of Asian culture from a cheap paperback, but it's true. And I could go on and on about it.

Look at this image of a beautiful calligraphy by Fujiwara-no Teika, a famed 12^th-century Japanese calligrapher:

Computerized Chinese and Japanese writing has always been the antithesis to this. Each mono-spaced character has had its own designed and delimited space, and while they may have had an attractive appearance individually, there was nothing akin to the interaction between characters in a calligraphy. Enter Kazuraki, the world's first fully proportional Japanese font.

Adobe's website calls it

". . . a proportional Japanese typeface, in which each glyph has its own optimized width for horizontal and vertical writing directions. The OpenType font format allows ligatures to be included that provide effective visual flows for some character sequences. This provides a completely new kind of visual dynamic. Kazuraki represents an epoch-making challenge in Japanese typography, which is released as a new Adobe Originals Japanese typeface, after Ryoko's [Ryoko Nishizuka is its original developer] long search for a new form of digital typography in which the traditional style of Japanese kana calligraphy could be revived."

The Kazuraki font's design is based on the work of the calligrapher who created the image above. Though a font is not able to replace a calligraphy, Kazuraki truly does display some of the characteristics of the flowing script of Fujiwara-no Teika's writing, including the ability to form ligatures from various characters (essentially "flowing" them together) or having different displays of characters depending on whether the text is written vertically or horizontally.

Now, Kazuraki is not a production font for Japanese translators. Its purpose is not to serve as a font for general texts, but as a strikingly beautiful medium for display purposes (such as ad copy or book titles). It contains only a very limited number of kanjis (1483 to be exact) aside from all Katakana and Hiragana characters as well as Latin characters, punctuation marks, and so forth.

 

Ken Lunde, who is in charge of this font at Adobe, gave a presentation (from which I also borrowed the idea for this example) last week in San Jose. You can download his presentation right here.

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