In the last newsletter, I mentioned that LISA had announced its own demise at a meeting near Boston. I explained that I felt hard pressed to express sadness about its death, but I mentioned that the future of its most important products, the translation data exchange standards TMX, SRX, and TBX, was somewhat vague. Well, it didn't take very long for organizations to pop up and register as, shall we say, "interested parties" in these standards.

TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society, announced on March 17 that it was taking on the role of an "industry watchdog for interoperability" by funding both a "dashboard" that will track compliance of the various tools, particularly to TMX, the translation memory exchange format, and XLIFF, the translation file exchange format, and a representative who will collect and present these findings and promote them.

Not surprisingly, there was a bit of heated discussion on Twitter (Jeromobot just reached his 1000^th follower yesterday!), LinkedIn, and elsewhere about whether this was an appropriate announcement, whether it makes sense for TAUS or another organization to step into this role, and, if another organization, which organization that should be.

It took just one more week, in fact it was just yesterday, before GALA, the Globalization and Localization Association, announced at its conference in Lisbon, Portugal, that it also would start a standards initiative in response to the current situation which will "seek input from localization buyers and suppliers, tool developers, and various partner localization and standards organizations." Arle Lommel, the former director of standards at LISA who was put in charge of this new program, "will [also] explore funding options for a long-term, stable standards program that is available to all in the industry."

Both GALA and TAUS are very eager to communicate that this is not a competitive but a complementary situation where neither of them will "own" the standards (they will most likely be owned by a proper standards body) and where they essentially will cooperate on furthering and defining the standards.

Sounds great -- sort of. Here's what concerns me: While TAUS is theoretically open to anyone in the language industry, in reality it represents mainly very large translation buyers; in fact, as far as I am aware, it is the only organization that has been able to bring so many powerful translation buyers under one roof. It's great that such an organization exists and -- looking at the goals of TAUS and its sister organization TDA to assemble large amounts of translation memory data for the purpose of training statistical machine translation engines -- it only makes sense that it's that slice of the industry that is represented here.

GALA is the largest organization of its kind representing translation companies. Just like TAUS, it serves a good purpose and is presently led by very capable leadership. So, for these two segments of the industry -- translation buyers and translation companies -- it seems logical that these two organizations would provide leadership when leadership is needed.

However, most of you will have noticed that a very important segment of our industry -- the individual translator -- is presently not represented by these groups or any other group that is offering to look after the standards. Is that important? I think it's extremely important.

Here's the crucial question: What are translation data exchange standards good for? The answer will always depend on whom you ask.

Ask the translation buyer and he will tell you that he is losing significant amounts of money each year because of gaps in interoperability between different systems. Larger LSPs would answer in a similar manner but would also stress the necessary freedom to choose the technology they already own. For the smaller language providers, that last point becomes more relevant, and for the individual translator it becomes crucial. Clearly, all of these are valid points and need support, but each group will naturally look after their own interests first and foremost.

Exchange standards will always provide some kind of exchange between technologies, but it is important for us as translators to make sure that it's (also) happening at the level at which we need it to happen. For instance, if data is being exchanged exclusively on the side of the translation buyer or the language service provider but the exchange on our desktops is not possible or more difficult, that clearly would be against our interests. Is that going to happen? I don't think that anyone is planning for anything like that with the existing standards or any new standards in the making, but the fact is that there are some standards that work very well for translation buyers but are certainly against our interests. In my opinion, one of those standards is DITA, an XML-based standard that provides the ability to segment the source text into small chunks that can be used in a variety of ways and allow for a great reuse of data; however, this works much to the detriment of the translator who often lacks the necessary context. I realize that we aren't talking about DITA here, but it's one of those prime examples where we failed to participate in the development. Another that is probably closer to most of our hearts and where I wish there had been more translator participation in its first round of development is the termbase exchange standard TBX, a standard that I believe also has the corporate terminologist more in mind than the translator.

So what should happen? Alan Melby, I, and others have been talking about ways to harness the laudable engagement of TAUS and GALA while also representing the interests of translators. The most logical organization to represent translators on an international scale would be the aforementioned FIT, the Federation of International Translators, which has a technical committee (responsible, among other things, for the free tool drawing). One possibility for all of these organizations -- plus possibly some others who are stakeholders in this process -- would be to form a task force under the auspices of the Translation and Interpretation Summit, an umbrella organization for many different language associations within the industry, including GALA, TAUS, and FIT.

Or what else?

I would be intrigued to hear what some of you have to say. Is this all not important to you? Do you have other and possibly better ideas on how to represent translators interests in this context? Are you interested in getting engaged yourself? Let me know. 

During the last couple of weeks, most media outlets have had articles about the ins and outs of the various browsers since all the major browser developers released major upgrades of their products. Firefox was released in version 4, Internet Explorer in version 9, and Google Chrome in version 10 (if Google keeps up the speed of its versioning it should shortly be arriving at a version number and year equinox).

So, which browser to use? Truthfully, I think it almost doesn't matter anymore. And that would include the two "other" browsers: Safari and Opera.

Let's stay with the three big ones, though. Each one of them claims a major increase in speed, but I gotta tell you that though I'm busy, it does not make that much difference to me whether a webpage opens a few hundredths of a second more quickly in one version versus the other. The only drawback in regard to speed was that slow startup speed of Firefox in previous versions; however, this is now essentially fixed and virtually identical to its competitors. (If you do still experience a slowdown with Firefox, visit this webpage and update your plug-ins -- it worked wonders for me.)

It seems that the only browser that shows significant slowdowns in speed is Internet Explorer for the 64-bit version of Windows, while the 32-bit version is about as fast as its competitors.

Though Google Chrome is the youngest of the lot, it may have been the most influential on this group of releases: Every tab in the browser now represents its own process, so if one website or application within the browser crashes, the browser itself is still stable and every tab can be pulled out of a browser to start its own browser instance. This was first introduced by Chrome and is now being followed by both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Like Chrome, Internet Explorer also now multi-purposes its address bar as a search box, which saves space and adds some user-friendliness.

Space management overall seems to have been at the forefront of the development concerns for all three companies: no browser has a traditional menu anymore (Internet Explorer and Firefox still offer the old menu when pressing the Alt key), the traditional title bar is gone to make room for the tabs (Firefox and Chrome), there are only two or three function icons left for any of the browsers, and tab management is made easy by being able to drag them around to your heart's content. While Internet Explorer and Google Chrome offer the ability to drag a webpage down to the taskbar and pin it there in Windows 7, Firefox offers a similar feature within its browser interface by pinning a webpage as an "app tab" to the tab bar. Oh, and of course all three support HTML5, the new and more powerful flavor of HTML.

So, why do I use Firefox most of the time? Because I'm used to it, because it works, because there is a never-ending list of add-ons available for it (though I admittedly don't use many of them), and more than anything, because it's the only browser that can be dressed with a Jeromobot skin: https://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/242788 (it looks even better in the latest version of Firefox!).

In related news, I thought it was interesting that Firefox has more or less officially taken over as the leading browser in Europe as of the beginning of this year.

The FIT, or the International Federation of Translators, recently had a little competition where translators of FIT associations were asked to name their favorite free software.

I had a chance to look at the different entries and found a number of expected responses -- IntelliWebSearch was mentioned a number of times as well as CodeZapper, both tools that I've covered multiple times before -- but there were also some that I wasn't aware of and that looked rather interesting, including these:

AutoUnbreak is a little utility that allows you to delete unnecessary hard returns in a text file but retain those that truly separate paragraphs. Most of us encounter this scenario often when copying text from a PDF file, and that is exactly what this small utility was created to solve. The caveat: once you paste text into the utility to remove the hard returns, most other formatting is also gone (plus, you can only paste up to 65,500 characters). Still, for the purposes of quickly copying some material out of the PDF file for research or alignment purposes, this is an extremely welcome utility with a price tag you can't beat. The original download location seems to be kaput, but you can download the 200 KB file at various download aggregators, including this one. (This tip comes from Robert Morin of OTTIAQ.)

From the same translators' association comes Joanna Martinez, who recommended PDF-XChange Viewer, produced by Tracker Software Products. This is a free program to view and annotate PDF files. It's sort of like Adobe Reader only not produced by Adobe and without some of the restrictions that Adobe Reader faces on using annotations. I've always felt guilty that I so rarely mention other PDF products aside from those by Adobe, and Tracker Software seems to be one of those development companies that are very well positioned to compete with Adobe in the PDF arena with a multitude of (usually paid, but much cheaper than Adobe) PDF products.

Inquiry Wizard is a tool that Dagmar Jenner of UNIVERSITAS Austria recommended. She writes:

When is the best -- read: slowest -- time of the year to go on vacation? Who is my best client in terms of translation volume? What is my proposal-to-job ratio? Do most potential clients contact me via e-mail or phone -- and can I fire my fax? All of the above are important questions for which I wanted to find statistically valid answers. What I needed was a tool that could track my inquiries, the price quoted, my potential client's contact information, etc. In short, I was looking for an inquiry management tool cum small customer relationship management tool. Inquiry Wizard is exactly what I need: it was created especially for freelancers (not just translators), it's very easy to use, it's online and it's free. I enter the relevant data every day and the tool automatically generates insightful statistics (which become all the more meaningful the more data you add over time). In addition, it has an export function to export all my potential customers' e-mail addresses, which comes in very handy for sending them newsletters, special offers, etc.

There is no need to download or install anything. All you have to do is register with your e-mail address. The FAQ section features two birds explaining the basics in a cartoon.

Cool.

Not associated with the above-mentioned competition, Radek Pletka recommended Gizmos Freeware Reviews as a site with incredible resources and tips about which freeware software to install and use. This might be good to scroll through while you have your second breakfast at your desk.

Here's something I recently learned about filtering files in Windows Explorer (works in Windows Vista and 7). When you view a list of files in the Details view (you can select that in the drop-down list under the View icon on top of Windows Explorer), you will have a number of headings by which you can sort the files (just click on the particular heading).

By default, the headings are Name, Date Modified, Type, Size, and Tags, but you can change that by simply right-clicking on the heading bar and selecting or deselecting anything else. This is all stuff that we've known for a long time, but now comes the thing that I at least didn't know:

When you hover with your mouse over any of these fields, a little down-arrow appears on the right of each of the headings. Upon your selection, this offers you fields by which you can filter the files in that view. The choices are context-sensitive, meaning that if you select Type, you will be offered only the file types that are in that particular view. Selecting any of these will filter the view down to those matching the filter.

The coolest filter field is the one shown under the Date fields (Date modified, Date created, or Date taken). Here you will see a little calendar on which you can select a date range that is applicable for your specific need. To do that, make sure you select Select a date or date range; then you can click on a specific date or on a range of dates by holding down the Shift key as you select the first and the last date.

You can also change the granularity of the displayed dates. If you click on the month name, you will see a list of all 12 months, another click will show you a list of all 10 years in this decade, and so on and so forth.

Once you make your selection and have the files in the current folder that match that date criterion displayed, you will be offered the option to extend your search to all subfolders. And here is where this all becomes very handy, because now, with just a few mouse clicks, you can quickly search through whole directories for files of a certain criterion.

Last weekend my wife and I celebrated our 20th anniversary (thank you, thank you!) with friends in Seattle. Our hosts actually live in Redmond, and guess where they work?! So we went to the Microsoft museum one afternoon and had a lot of fun playing, especially with all the huge, omnipresent Microsoft Surface screens. What's kind of interesting in this context is that some of the technology that was developed for touchscreen computers can also be found in "normal" Windows machines. For instance, if you swipe upward in Windows 7 from an icon on the taskbar with your mouse button clicked, you get the same "jump list" you would get if you right-clicked the icon.

Now, is this particular piece of information going to change your life? No, but it gave me a good excuse to brag about being married for 20 years!

I'm going to be speaking at a lot of conferences these next few weeks, and it would be fun to see you at one of those events:

• April 8 at the Innovations in Translator, Interpreter and Localizer Education at the Monterey Institute for International Studies
• April 11 for the WK Wien und UNIVERSITAS Austria in Vienna (they even have a photo of me in my younger and happier years in the upper left hand corner on that page)
• April 15 at the memoQfest in Budapest (as you can see here, the preparations to protect Jeromobot more adequately this time around are already under way)
• April 17 for the Associazione Italiana Traduttori ed Interpreti in Rome

And for those whom I won't get to meet along the way, I promise to bring back some fantastic Jeromobot adventures with the same high production values you've come to expect. Along the lines of this one.

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© 2011 International Writers' Group