|
|
|
| Good Ideas | |
If you are about my generation and grew up in Germany, Austria, or Japan, you'll have met Vicky (Wickie,ビッケ), the little Viking who travels with a band of surprisingly good-natured big Vikings and continues to save them and himself with his good ideas. His eureka moments are somehow miraculously associated with his little nose, which has to be rubbed to make the ideas appear. When I arrived at my hotel, sick and jet-lagged, on a trip to Vienna last week, I turned on the TV and there he was, bringing back all kinds of childhood memories (including: "Did I really use to watch that?").
Neither Jeromobot nor I are as eureka-prone as Vicky (our noses are not as cute), but during the last few weeks -- and especially after talking to so many folks during my two-week European trip -- I am more and more convinced and excited about this idea: Tool vendors are understandably having a hard time supporting language-specific rules in their tools. Some tools have some language-specific "knowledge," but that almost always is limited to the large European languages (whose speakers include customers with deep pockets) and often does not go very deep to start with. Other tools don't have much of anything language-specific (except maybe spell-checkers or segmentation rules for a handful of languages). Sorely missing are morphological rules, for instance, so that terms and segments can be recognized in TMs and termbases despite appearing in different grammatical forms. Or grammatical rules so when terms are replaced, the gender or number is automatically adjusted. And so on. These should be no-brainers, but they're virtually impossible for tool makers to implement across the board because of the non-justifiable cost. So, what if we were to turn the concept of crowdsourcing on its head and use it to record these rules and share them within our language? Granted, we would need some infrastructure for that -- something like a tool box that we could fill with the necessary data. Also, the tool vendors would have to have an interface that could read the data coming from our tool boxes. Obviously there is a bit of work to do before we can start to share. But wouldn't that be quite something? Anyone want to start working on a tool box? Or does anyone have some better ideas?
I love Easter. It's the time of new beginnings -- the time to conceive new ideas and make them happen.
Happy Easter!
|
|
| 1. Great Finds | |
I have written about fancy tricks for searching in Google and Bing (for Premium subscribers, see the archived November 13, 2009 newsletter), and I'm not going to repeat all that here, but I just found a very cool "Unofficial Google Advanced Search" guide mentioned on Twitter (courtesy of Uwe Mügge) that truly has some fun search parameters,
- ~ as an operator for synonyms, so that "~great translator" as a search query returns results with "best translator," "cool translator," or "top translator"
- .. as an operator for numeric ranges, so that "Translator's Tool Box $40..60" will find webpages where you can purchase this must-have resource for between $40 and $60 (a steal, if you ask me!)
- Searching for pages that Google has in its cache, so that "cache:internationalwriters.com tool kit" finds pages that have been changed or deleted
- Many, many conversions that you can do with Google. I generally prefer a tool like Convert where I can simply enter numbers rather than "syntax," but for some things that are not static, such as currency (3 € in $ OR 3 euros in dollars), this is very helpful.
I've been struggling to find a similar guide for Bing and have not been particularly successful, but there is a very techie guide right here, and I will let you know once I find more. By the way, Bing has one query type that Google does not have and which is very helpful to us: language. Conduct a Bing query for "language:ru jeromobot" and you will find all the great Russian sites that list our favorite patron saint.
|
| 2. Industrious? Yes. Industry? Maybe Not. (Premium Content) | |
While at memoQfest in Budapest -- a fun-filled and highly informative event that I would recommend for anyone who is or will be using memoQ -- it struck me how fragmented we are as an "industry." In this newsletter and elsewhere I've freely and proudly used the terms "language industry" or "translation industry," but are these terms appropriate? Are there such things?
In my mind, an industry is made up of commercial endeavors that are set up to fulfill a particular need. In my talk in Budapest I used the example of laundry detergent. There is a need -- clean laundry -- and a response in the form of products that are all more or less the same. Some detergents might have more bleach than others, some might be more environmentally safe, some will have a bigger marketing budget than others and/or more colorful packaging, but they all more or less do the same job and attempt to fulfill one particular need.
Can we say the same about our industry?
Look at the different goals that translation requestors have: While some do translation only because it's a legal requirement for a target market (and no one is going to read the translated products anyway), others do translation because being multi-lingual and multi-cultural is at the very heart of who they are. For some companies it's fine to have some "gist" translation done to communicate some approximate meaning; for others, lives are at stake when meaning is not 100% reliably communicated. Some companies pride themselves on achieving their multi-lingual goals by using their user groups to do the translation and making them into ever more ardent users, ambassadors, and "owners" of the product, while others prosecute users who do exactly that. And all this is just scratching the surface of the diversity that somehow ties us together.
And that brings us to "us." Who are "we" to start with? To satisfy the needs listed above, "we" includes everything from the bilingual secretary to the MT engineer to the enthusiastic translation volunteer to the highly specialized professional expert and everything in between. And these are just the ones who do the actual translation work. Then there is the middle layer, often represented by the translation agencies or the translation portals -- and you and I know that there is a huge diversity in that field.
Considering all this, can we really talk about one "industry," or are we more a hodge-podge of small groups or individuals who are trying to carve out niches for ourselves in answer to some specific, not yet fulfilled needs?
Terminology often -- perhaps always -- uncovers much more of what's real than those who choose it intended to convey. And I think that poor choices like localization/localisation, l10n, GILT, and transcreation are, in the context of this topic, nothing other than poor attempts to create something -- the sense of being an industry -- out of thin air. Just because the efforts in the realm of translation are fragmented, any attempt to call it anything but the powerful "translation" ("to carry across") seems silly. Add to this the now failed attempt to create a "Localization Industry Standards Association" and the crazy number of competing conferences and "industry associations" and you have to wonder: an industry? us?
If we are not an industry with common interests, is there value in bringing "us" together, in uniting us? To be honest, I can think of only a very few reasons why there would be value -- being a stronger lobby, being able to provide better funding for technology, sharing experiences -- and a whole bunch of reasons why it might not be a bad situation the way it is -- including the many, many niches that are left for all of us to occupy and the creativity we can harness to carve out even more.
Technology plays a very strange role in all of this. Technology is simultaneously the great divider (through access vs. lack of access/resources to use certain technologies) and the great uniter, at least in a top-down approach from the very large translation buyer to the translation agency to the individual translator. Technology also has the potential to shape some sections of the market in interesting ways, for instance by giving translation clients direct access to single-language vendors or individual translators while providing all the quality assurance and file management that the translation agency does today (keyword: disintermedation).
One of the last slides of my presentation in Budapest asked, "So, what does this all mean?" (In fact, someone tweeted this during my talk: "@Jeromobot has trouble connecting thoughts.") But if anything, this is what it does mean: So much of what we say and think and write about our work and our processes might fit perfectly for our situation, but it very well might not fit someone else's, and it certainly will not fit everyone's. Think about all the different groups that I mentioned above (and the many that I did not mention) -- there are only very few common denominators, and there is no reason to pretend there are more. Just yesterday I listened to an interview with Werner Herzog, who mentioned his all-time favorite movie scene: Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in the 1938 movie Swing Time. At some point the shadows become independent and cannot be reconnected. Eventually they vacate the premises, leaving Astaire on his own. I cannot help but think that this is a pretty good description of what we call the "translation industry."
If there were one single strand that could unite us, my wish is that it would be this: a love for language and a desire to communicate.
|
| ADVERTISEMENT | |
SDL Spring Offers now on!
Enjoy exclusive savings of over 30% when you buy SDL Trados Studio 2009 Freelance with SDL AutoSuggest Creator!
Are you an existing customer looking to upgrade to the latest version?
Upgrade online and receive 25% off for a limited time only.
To buy online or learn more about our products visit www.sdl.com/promo/toolkit5
|
3. Reviewing Reviewing (Premium Content)
| |
Editing, reviewing, proofreading, or whatever you might want to call it has long been the Achilles heel of translation environment tools. It's a) typically a manual process to make sure that the translation memory reflects the latest and (hopefully) "correctest" of the edits, and b) it's difficult to see what exactly was edited since most TEnTs don't have a feature like Word's Track Changes.
When a tool shows up that has advanced reviewing features, we all take notice. One such example is Lionbridge's Translation Workspace. Though overall I was not very impressed with it, it does offer a remarkable editing feature. This is what I wrote when I reviewed it:
One feature that I really like and that solves one of the most tedious problems of working with TEnTs is the review process that takes place in a separate, completely web-based, tabular interface with error-tracking, version control, and everything else you might want. Though you will have to expend some extra effort to create the review packages (upload the translated, bilingual files), you'll have the benefit that the very last version of your translated and edited files ends up in the translation memory.
Most other tool makers feel the heat is on to offer a solution that also offers advanced editing, tracking, and updating of resources. So it was very welcome news that SDL and Kilgray announced at last week's memoQfest that both Trados and memoQ will have a feature in their new and upcoming versions which will in some way emulate Track Changes and which will make communication between editor and translator much easier.
This feature might not necessarily take care of the client's edits, but another tool that promises a good solution to that problem is ReviewIT (not "review IT" but "review it") by Chinese language and solutions provider CSOFT. I had a talk today with two of the folks behind the tool, and while it is not quite ready for the LSP market (they presently market only a high-priced enterprise version but hope to launch a SaaS-based LSP version later this year), it's interesting to see what it actually does.
It essentially allows you to upload translated and DTP'ed MS Office, OpenOffice, PDF, and image files to a central server into an environment where you can use an editing and commenting feature set that is comparable to that of Adobe Acrobat but slightly more advanced (for instance, you can use tags to categorize your comments and edits), can be used by multiple users, and has a strong communication feature set with email notifications. All this I really liked. It was extremely easily structured, with virtually no learning curve whatsoever and access is given in the form of an email invitation.
I was not overly impressed, however, with the process that then has to be taken care of by the translation provider. The comments and edits are exported into a CSV file and manually implemented one by one in the original files and (if you're lucky and have the time) in the translation memory. It would be great to see a live link between the documents on the server, the actual translation files, and the translation memory, more along the lines of what one2edit does for InDesign files, as recently reviewed.
This is a very nice solution for clients, and maybe when it's officially released for LSPs it will have improved in automating some processes. I'll keep you updated.
|
| 4. MORE DATA | |
For those of you who are data hungry (the last newsletter dealt exclusively with that topic), here are some more interesting sources:
- UN corpus in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish at www.uncorpora.org
- Multilingual corpus with mostly government data at www.webitext.com
- Paid corpus in English, French, and Spanish consisting of Canadian government and International Labour Organization proceedings at www.tsrali.com
Plus right here you can find a very interesting collection of links to glossary and corpus data: www.delicious.com/manuelsaavedra -- kind of like an Easter egg hunt going through there.
|
| 5. A Love Story (continued) | |
Here is another addition to my family of remarkable characters that I have been collecting over the years. This is a character which caused a story that would have delighted the greatest of all writers from Prague.
If you have a Javascript-enabled browser, hold your cursor over the character for a definition.
|
6. New Password for the Tool Kit Archive
| |
As a subscriber to the Premium version of this newsletter you have access to an archive of Premium newsletters going back to May 2008.
You can access the archive right here. This month the user name is toolkit and the password is privilege.
New user names and passwords will be announced in future newsletters.
|
| The Last Word on the Tool Kit | |
If you would like to promote this newsletter by placing a link on your website, I will in turn mention your website in a future edition of the Tool Kit. Just paste the code you find here into the HTML code of your webpage, and the little icon that is displayed on that page with a link to my website will be displayed.
© 2011 International Writers' Group
|
|
