If you carry the office title agent provocateur like our good friend Renato Beninatto, it's your job to say things that are, well, provocative. Everyone would be really disappointed if you didn't, plus this is one of the reasons why we love our agent in the first place.

But here's the thing: The title of agent provocateur has already been assigned, and there really is no reason why so many others are trying to jump on the bandwagon these days or are forgetting to put things into context.

What am I talking about? Well, there's a new corollary to the five-year rule being bandied about. The old one, of course, goes back to the 1950s. From then on it was predicted in regular five-year intervals that machine translation was going to "get there" in just another five years. The new corollary claims that translation memory technology will be gone within five years.

Really?

Umm, no!

In fact, I would contend just the opposite: Translation memory technology had been dormant for many years, but in the past two or so years it's woken up with exciting new developments that will in turn spawn yet more developments and accordingly different usage cases.

So, where do these different kinds of evaluations come from? There are certainly agendas that might be motivating some (such as pushing other technologies), but I think much of it is about vantage points. Folks who write about our industry have a tendency to write about the very large translation buyers, and especially those in the technology sector: the Microsofts, Adobes, and Oracles. These translation buyers (along with their peers) are very technology-driven and typically highly involved in language technology initiatives (look, for instance, at the founding members of TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society). These are great drivers for our industry and they're fun to follow. But how much of your work comes from these guys? Some of you will certainly work for some of them, but I think it's fair to say that these companies don't make up the majority of our business. ((I've tried to find some hard numbers on how the industry is split up between the spending by very large clients and others, and I found to my surprise that there are no such numbers, even from our industry's premier research group Common Sense Advisory. So you'll need to put up with my best guess, and that would be a ratio of 20:80 -- 20 being the very large clients and 80 being the smaller and typically more profitable ones.)

What kind of technology are these very large translation buyers currently investing in? Alongside the "good old" translation memory technology, they are looking for ways to optimize translation workflows, reuse and manage content, and of course improve and use machine translation. Now some of these goals are shared by smaller clients, but typically with much less emphasis overall and much greater emphasis on translation memory. (As a side note about (statistical) machine translation engines: They exist because they are fed with translation memories, along with other bilingual data, and this will continue to be the case.)

The tool kit of the translator in the foreseeable future will contain terminology tools, quality assurance tools, and translation memory tools -- these three typically packaged into a translation environment tool -- and for some of us a machine translation component. But even for those who will use a machine translation component, will it ever be preferable to use a match from the MT engine to that of a match from a well-maintained TM? Absolutely not. In fact, most machine translation engines use a first translation memory pass before the segment is sent to the MT engine.

True, the appearance of TEnTs will change. Most TEnTs will be sold as a Software-as-a-Service offering where you won't pay for an unlimited license but instead will pay something on a monthly or annual basis; most TEnTs will have most or all of their work done in a browser-based interface; most or all of our data will be stored in the cloud; and there will accordingly be more sharing of data and resources.

Still, if you are completely adamant about not wanting to go that route, there still will be the "traditional" way as well (after all, good old MS-Word-bound Wordfast Classic is also still more popular than the more powerful Wordfast Pro).

Maybe it also helps to remind ourselves how translation memory technology has evolved just in the last few years after essentially lying dormant for 10 or 15 years:

• Transit has introduced target segment matching (if no source match is found)
• Trados, memoQ, Lingotek, and Multitrans now support subsegment matching (the latter two already for some time)
• memoQ and Multitrans support both translation memories and corpora
• Text United now has term extraction integrated into the very creation of a project by default
• Déjà Vu has the terminology database and translation memory cooperate with each other to turn fuzzy matches into perfect ones

These are just some examples that show that translation memory technology has not reached the end of its line of development. It's only too obvious that those tools that don't offer one or several of the features mentioned above will look to adopt those at some point and fine-tune them in the process.

(Plus, I can think of a few other features that I think would help us all, and I would be quite happy to consult with some of the technology vendors on those. . . . )

So, is there a new five-year rule concerning the death of translation memory technology? Absolutely. And just like the original one concerning machine translation, it's going to go on and on. And on.

I got a really good laugh last week at an online poll that was conducted on the home page of the translator site Trally.com: "Which is the best C.A.T. tool?" Choices included TransSuite2000, Uniscape CAT, and IBM CAT among others, and "IBM CAT" was the winner. Don't worry if you're not sure what these tools are -- they're all long gone. (Incidentally, the poll was taken down after I mentioned it in Twitter.)

SDL's technology landscape has changed. At this point, its portfolio not only includes the language products that are well known to us -- the Trados and SDLX product families -- but it also includes content management systems, e-commerce applications, and structured data systems. One direct result of these changes can be seen in the marketing difference: existing customers are potential new customers for other products (and services!) as well.

We've touched on a number of "deaths" in this issue of the newsletter, and SDL had almost managed to talk one of its products to death in the past couple of years: the large-scale translation management system SDL (formerly Idiom) WorldServer. But since a number of attractive, high-powered clients (like those we spoke of elsewhere) use the old Idiom WorldServer and were less than pleased about the virtual death threats that SDL's leadership offered at regular intervals, things were reconsidered and, wouldn't you know, last week a new version of WorldServer (2011) was unearthed.

I had a chance to sit down with one of its managers and have a look at what the new system does and does not do.

I have always been kind of partial to WorldServer. I really liked Idiom and I helped its developers create some of the documentation for the Desktop Workbench product, the Windows-based translation client, so I was naturally pleased about a new version of the complete product. Not surprisingly, the first question that I asked Andrew was about the whereabouts of Desktop Workbench. (One of my clients uses it, so I get to work with it regularly and have certainly not seen any changes or improvements in the last few years.) Well, nil return on that front. While projects that are created in the new version of WorldServer can still be processed in the old version of Desktop Workbench, it is not officially supported anymore; in fact, you'll need to go on a round-about if you just want to install it on Windows 7 (search for article 3378 in SDL's knowledgebase for instructions on how to do that).

That old desktop client is actually the very opposite of what SDL is trying to push with the new WorldServer version: The very idea is to tie the Trados Studio and WorldServer communities closer together. The really new thing about WorldServer is that you can export translation packages that can be processed in Studio. Just like the normal Studio translation package, the .wsxz package that comes from WorldServer contains the TM and termbase data (the terminology is interestingly not in MultiTerm format but in another simple termbase that is processed within Trados Studio), and of course the translation data itself.

The process of opening the package works seamlessly as expected, but compared to the old Desktop Workbench interface, single files have to be worked on individually and cannot be easily combined unless the project manager on the other side has done that. There is also no way to use the online concordance feature that Workbench offered.

On the other hand, of course, the benefit is that if you're already used to working in Studio, there is nothing new to learn or download, plus it's easy to connect your own TM  and MultiTerm data to the existing package project.

What about folks who don't use or have Trados Studio? At the present time they will have to purchase at least the Trados Starter Edition if their clients don't want them to use the free Desktop Workbench product -- but I would not be surprised to see a lower-priced (maybe free?) version that can only be used to work on pre-existing packages.

And what's new for the user of the main application, the actual server component? Aside from the Trados integration mentioned, there are a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. And the integration with Trados Studio goes a lot deeper than exchanging project packages. There is an aligned scoping/statistics model with the Studio engine (so that matching numbers are identical), plus it's now possible to use all the Trados Studio filters for all the file formats in WorldServer. This is great for new users, since there won't be any discrepancies between WorldServer and Trados Studio that way, but old users will likely still use the old filters (which are still available but might not be maintained for much longer) so as not to lose any advantage in leveraging of data. 

In the last newsletter I tried to get the six-word memoir for translators going on Twitter (#6wordsxl8). While I was surprised at the relatively low participation (maybe we are not "wordsmiths" after all?), there were some clever entries. Here is a sampling:

• I forbid you using my language
• What's the temperature in Hawaii today?
• I sculpt words; therefore, I am.
• Must . . . have . . . coffee . . . must . . . have . . . coffee . . .
• Two CATs are better than one
• Freelancer's life on Saturday. Computer's on.
• Recipe for success: butt to chair.
• There's cat hair in my keyboard.
• Trash girl in specialty, not quality. (from a translator specializing in waste management)
• Language is my life blood. Yours?
• Done at midnight. Dreaming of errors.
• Why am I working so late?
• Creative wordsmithing, regular backups. Chocolate reward.
• Ambiguity in source gives me headaches.
• Mind the gap, mind the gap.
• To language or not to language.

In the last newsletter I praised Yves Savourel as the sole developer of Rainbow, the localization gap filler tool. Of course, this is not correct, as Yves rightly mentions, since Rainbow is the product of a team of developers. But in issuing that correction, Yves gave me a good opening to praise him as a poet as well:

From the castles of Bohemia to the deep snows of Norway, from the dry salted plains of Utah to the golden beaches of Queensland, and from the blossoming orchards of California to the bustling streets of Germany, there are a bit more than half a dozen developers who are working hard to make all this possible. Months after months and years after years, they keep showing up at each weekly teleconference (often before dawn or late after sunset for some of them) and they keep on designing, coding and testing. Quite a few end-users have also been key in getting the tools where they are today. So, Rainbow and all the Okapi tools are very much their creation.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of "meeting" any of the tools from this excellent workshop, another that I'm often thankful for -- though it is no longer being actively developed -- is the translation memory editor Olifant. Olifant allows you to import, export, and modify translation memories in various formats, a must-have for any translator working with sometimes more than one translation environment tool.

Unlike the other "dead rumor" found in this newsletter, this one seems to be true: The Localisation Industry Standard Association, or LISA, has shut its doors. LISA was the first of the now many industry associations, going back "all the way" to 1990. The LISA name was supposed to be its program: the development and maintenance of industry standards. It was partially successful in reaching its goal, most notably with TMX, TBX, and SRX, the exchange standards for translation memories, termbases and segmentation rules. It also offered other services, including very commercially driven conferences. I have great respect and even admiration for some of the people who were involved with LISA and the development of its standards, but I'm not particularly sad to see LISA's demise as an association.

In its non-standards-related work, LISA seemed to exude an aura of commercialism and exclusivity, inspiring the rise of competitors (Localization World, GALA, and others) that will do a good job of carrying on those activities, possibly even in a better, less-diluted way.

And as far as the standards go? Well, there are many ongoing talks about what will happen to those, and particularly who is going to maintain them. I will let you know once things are decided. It will also be interesting to see what happens to the OpenTM2 project that LISA recently initiated. My best guess is not particularly much. But I might be wrong.

Oh, and if you are thinking of going to an industry conference this year, Ultan Ó Broin has some excellent advice. 

A good year and a half ago, I wrote about the termbase exchange standard MARTIF (Premium subscribers have access to the archive: it's the September 5, 2009 issue).

Just to recap the situation: MARTIF is the precursor to TBX, the current termbase exchange standard that was developed under the auspices of the late LISA. The fundamental differences between the standards are that TBX is XML-based whereas MARTIF is SGML-based, and TBX is potentially easier to process. Still, they are so closely related that the XML header in a TBX file actually declares it to be a "martif type."

Now, MARTIF is currently supported by only a small handful of translation environment tools. In fact, I know of only three TEnTs that directly support it: Across, XTM, and Star Transit -- and I think it would not be an exaggeration to say that the first two support it only because the latter does. There is one more tool, Heartsome, that offers some support by providing a conversion routine between TBX and MARTIF with the MARTIF to TBX Converter (this utility comes packaged with some versions of Heartsome and is unfortunately not available on its own). This would be the first place to look if you have to deal with a MARTIF file (which typically comes with the extension .mtf) and you don't use any of the three tools mentioned above (and your current tool supports TBX).

But what if you need to simply convert a MARTIF file into a bilingual glossary as a reference or to send something to someone who really does not use any fancy tool at all?

Right here you can find an Excel macro that will convert your MARTIF file to a simple two-column, source-target-language Excel glossary. While you will lose a lot of the more advanced information that might be contained in the MARTIF file (such as relationships between terms, synonyms, antonyms, definitions, etc.), sometimes, as you and I well know, it's the bare-bones glossary data that counts, and that you will get.

And how to use the macro? Open the Macro dialog in Excel (earlier versions: Tools> Macro; current versions: select Macro on the View or Developer ribbon), enter mtf2xls, select Create, paste the macro and save it, run the macro, select the MARTIF file, convert, and voilà. You might run into problems with some broken special characters, but those should be an easy fix with a couple of quick search-and-replace actions.

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