Psychologist Abraham Maslow once said that "if you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Though this quote has been used frequently in all kinds of contexts, I love it because I think it fits so well into what I am trying to do with this newsletter and my ebook. After all, I named them the TOOL Kit and TOOL Box for that very reason.

I still remember back in the dark ages when I was using WordPerfect on a DOS system, I was truthfully confounded as to why there needed to be so many different computer applications when it seemed you could do everything with your word processor. Now you might think my perspective was just a little simple-minded (and I won't argue!), but I'm hazarding a guess that many of us have not moved very far from that same concept. Yes, we know that we need an Internet browser and an email client and maybe Excel for accounting, but many of us think that otherwise we're just fine with the capabilities offered by MS Windows and MS Word. And that's no surprise. After all, both Windows (on a file management level) and Word (on a file level) pretend to do (almost) everything. You want to zip a file, burn a CD, search for some content, rename a file, or backup your computer? Windows can do that for you! You need to count words, sort a text, edit an HTML file, or extract keywords from a text? Word can do all that and much more for you! The problem is that any of these things can be done better by applications that are specialized in doing that.

You can always hammer a screw into a wall, but it would be much better for the wall, the screw, and the picture you're going to hang if you drill a hole, insert a screw anchor, and use a screw driver. In fact -- and this is what Maslow was referring to -- with only a hammer you can't even decorate your house at all because you can't begin to envision all the amazing things you can do with the right tools.

Now imagine your computer as the house you need to decorate (or in this case, to make more functional). Just as in the "real tool world," there are thousands of tools that are good for specific things and are much better than the proverbial hammer (i.e., Word and/or Windows). But unlike the increasingly expensive world of physical tools, the majority of our tools come in the category of freeware and do not cost anything! And as a rule of thumb, the more specific a problem is, the more likely it is that you will find some free or inexpensive software that can help you solve it.

The only challenge that's left for you is to go out and find your (software) tools and then learn how to use them appropriately.

Well, there is one more challenge: Just like your physical tool box, it's helpful when your software tool box (i.e., your computer) contains tools that make sense to your specific needs and that are located where you can find them again. (Yes, I admit to NEVER finding the right screw driver when I need to!)

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True story: A number of years ago I led a group of tourists to a relatively remote monastery in Tibet. The abbot of the monastery was delighted to see us and more than willing to talk with us . . . until he realized that most of us were Germans. After some persistent persuasion, he finally revealed that he was entirely disillusioned with Germans. It seems that the former German chancellor Kohl had visited him and his monastery for a photo op and had promised to send copies of the photos. But the eagerly anticipated photos had never arrived. I promised to contact Kohl, and eventually the abbot agreed to sit down and talk with us.

Once I was home, I started typing my letter to the chancellor's office on my old manual typewriter. However, since I was not a particularly good typist, I messed up one of the articles; instead of "das Kloster" (the monastery), I ended up with "der Kloster." Rather than retyping the whole thing, I made up the compound term "der Kloster- und Tempelkomplex" -- which now had the correct gender but had certainly never been used before in standard German. To my great glee, I received an answer from the chancellor's office within a couple of weeks, assuring me that the photos were now on their way to "der Kloster- und Tempelkomplex" and repeating the same silly concoction that I had created. Oh, the power of language!

The difference with the new term that I'm trying to push nowadays is that it is neither silly nor accidental. "Translation Environment Tools" rather than CAT (computer-aided translation) or translation memory tools is a better term on so many levels. It is not only more specific than "CAT," a term which includes all of the many tools that aid in the translation process, but it also allows for a much larger set of features than "translation memory tool." After all, the translation memory function is only one of many functions, albeit an important one.

Ultimately, I also hope that this new term will serve as an encouragement to the tool vendors. For the translator, I see these as positive steps toward a much greater connectedness with colleagues and clients, and a possibility to bring technology a good step forward and harness even more power from our friend, the computer. ;-)

The developers of TransSuite 2000, a little-used but (among its users) well-liked computer-assisted translation tool, have officially closed the doors of their company. One of its founders, Jos Bailleul, posted a last official statement in the tool's newsgroup. Some of the letter's content may be interesting to users beyond the TransSuite 2000 community:

(...) Knowing that almost 70% of our TRANS Suites that are currently running around the globe are illegal, I can say that a lot of you helped us to reach the point where we had to close the company because we had lack of funding. For some clients we had to give up to 15 PIN codes for ONE license in a year, which does say enough about the number of illegal licenses they were running. Other clients, even the ones that we once considered as our best clients, and which almost became personal friends of mine, were running such illegal versions. And to quote Eva: '"get around" without fixing new activation codes' seems to be a hobby for the users of software nowadays.

We translators do not have a particularly good reputation in the software industry for our honesty in using and paying for software. And I have to admit that Jos' letter, which certainly confirms that reputation, provided me with some tough food for thought. . . .

I love the radio. It allows me to be doing something else while still ingesting bits of information that I can process if they are relevant. (My wife, on the other hand, hates it that I constantly have the radio on. . . .) The other day I caught this snippet that sent my thoughts spinning. The program had to do with the history of calculators and how parents used to protest their use in school because they thought it would mess up the way kids learned math. One of the commentators recalled that this argument was prevalent until it was universally understood that calculators actually were turning the little mathematicians from mechanics into managers.

Wow, I thought: What a perfect illustration of what translation environment tools do!

Now, nothing against mechanics (I happen to know that my car mechanic lives in a much bigger house than mine!). Nothing against translator-mechanics, either. If you enjoy the mechanics of repetition, of having to look up terms again and again because you feel like it might give you an added edge in creativity or something like that -- more power to you. But, boy, I want to manage that kind of stuff. Now, in the case of translation, I still need to know the mechanics of actual translation, but once that's done, it gives me great pleasure to manage what I have already achieved and rely on my computer to recall that from my translation memory or terminology database when I know my feeble brain won't.

Lately I've been talking and writing a lot about the appreciation that the translator community hopes to receive from the machine translation community. After preaching and exhorting and talking myself blue in the face, Laurie Gerber sent me this clever little story that sums up the point I was trying to make far more elegantly and succinctly:

A group of scientists was sitting around discussing which of them was going to go to God and tell Him that they didn't need Him anymore. Finally, one of the scientists volunteered and went to go tell God He was no longer needed.

So the scientist says to God, "God, you know, a bunch of us have been thinking and I've come to tell You that we really don't need You anymore. I mean, we've been coming up with great theories and ideas, we've cloned sheep, and we're on the verge of cloning humans. So as You can see, we really don't need You."

God nods understandingly and says, "I see. Well, no hard feelings. But before you go let's have a contest. What d'ya think?"

The scientist says, "Sure I'm all for it. What kind of contest?"

God answers, "A man-making contest."

The scientist replies, "Sure! No problem." He bends down and picks up a handful of dirt and says: "Okay, I'm ready!"

And God says, "No, no. You go get your own dirt."

Exchange "dirt" with "data" and "man" with "language" and you'll understand what I'm trying to say.

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Fortis Revolution offers the simplicity of one product, one distribution and service channel, and one price, in an easy-to-use, yet effective tool to meet your individual translation needs.

One product, one place, one price -- the revolution has begun!

I wonder more and more whether the keyboard cripple disease (KCD) is mostly an American affair, but it's more likely something that potentially affects all translators living in a non-native country. The typical preconditions are that they purchased a computer in the country where they learned to type (more effectively) and now use it to translate into their native language. The symptoms are an enormous waste of time finding and using so-called "shortcuts" to enter special characters of the native target language. These "shortcuts" are in fact completely imaginary and can lead to serious psychoses if the patients discover how many hours, days, and weeks they have wasted entering four-digit codes for one character, employing extreme finger gymnastics to reach humanly impossible key combinations, and/or finding themselves completely stranded on computers or applications that are not the familiar and the preferred.

(Maybe I should add medical translation to my repertoire of translation expertise!)

Really, there is hardly anything that gets me more enraged than the way many of us cripple ourselves with keyboards. In my opinion, there are three things that we need to be able to do as we enter text (note: this does not apply to CJK translators):

1. There should not be more than one keyboard stroke per entered character.
2. Whatever method we use has to work identically in all applications.
3. Whatever method we use needs to be able to be replicated on any other standard computer without installing third-party applications.

All these criteria sound like no-brainers to me, since they afford portability between apps and computers as well as ease of work. But it's far from the reality for many of us.

Here is something I have been fascinated with for years: in letter-based languages, especially if we are native speakers of that language, we don't read by looking at letters the way a computer does. Instead, we look at images. Deciphering words by their letters would take way too much time and effort. Don't believe me? Why don't you read "anopisthograph" out aloud. And now "qualifications." Which one went faster? Same here. That's because you knew the image for "qualifications" but (probably) not the one for "anapisthograph," so you had to decipher the latter but not the former. (By the way, anapisthograph is a manuscript, parchment, or book having writing on only one side of the leaves.)

Or here is another way to prove my point: Put something in a very strange font, one that does not call up existing images in your head but where you have to build up images from scratch. It takes a lot longer to read.

Here is why I think this topic makes sense in a newsletter for translators: Part of the translation process for most, if not all, of us is to proofread the text we have translated. And we all know the feeling when we stumble on a segment and "sense" that something is wrong without actually being able to pinpoint exactly what is wrong. (This typically does not happen with someone else's work, only with our own.) We look and look and vaguely perceive that there is something "wrong with the picture" -- and often that is exactly what it is. One word is misspelled, but some odd power of self-veiling does not allow us to analytically see it; instead, we just "sense" it. So here is my plea (to myself and others): Let's listen to our senses. Here is a dirty little trick that often un-veils the offender: Temporarily change the font into something truly bizarre and the images will melt, the letters will emerge, and the error magically appears. Right there!

It was one mind-boggling week. First, I finally read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and found out what the Babel fish is all about!

"The Babel fish," said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. . . . Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Oh, dear!

But then I received a mailing that was more optimistic. A lot more optimistic, in fact:

Looking into the future, I see a thousand MT systems blooming. I see fortune for the translation industry, and new solutions to overcome failed translations. I see a better world due to improved communications among the world's seven billion citizens.

So what? Are we caught in a perpetual cycle of war and peace? Either way, it sounds like what we do is vastly important.

Here in the U.S. we certainly see a lot of lobbying activities -- especially now in the midst of the ugly discussions on health care reform. But lobbying is not inherently ugly. You see, I'm lucky to work in a language combination that is beautifully supported by every tool out there, but there are only about a dozen other languages with the same kind of support. And there are many levels of support: Some languages may lack a spell-checker but everything else works fine, while for some the bare necessities (such as straightforward entering of text) might be difficult or impossible.

In my recent visit with the Israeli Translation Association, I was reminded that many tool vendors might have adopted the complacent attitude that "since my tools support Unicode, all languages are supported." Well, that's just not quite true, as any translator of a bi-di (bi-directional) language -- I think that ib-di or bi-id would be much cleverer, by the way -- would tell you. And these languages are not alone.

Some of the languages with unique challenges had an inherent lobby (=buying power), so tool developers worked hard to solve the conundrum with the East Asian double-byte languages and, lately, with Indic languages. But for Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and other bi-di languages, Trados (bless their hearts!) is the only relatively widely used TEnT with good support; most others have haphazard implementation at best.

Now, here's the deal: It's entirely possible that "inherent lobbying" is not as obvious in these markets, so it's up to the affected translators to directly lobby the tool vendors and show them that there is indeed buying power (at the recent ITA conference there were 300 attendees) as well as a willingness to support them in the development process. I have specifically written to one tool vendor and challenged its developers to seize this opportunity, but I hope that they will not be the only ones.

Though someone just broke my heart by telling me that no one really likes my riddles and jokes, and I had to promise several people not to start a riddle section in this newsletter (it's a great consolation to me that my five-year-old daughter still thinks I can deliver the greatest crack-ups [update: she is now 12 and has long since changed her mind]), here's one that I really like:

How many translators does it take to change a light bulb?

1) That depends on the context.

2) What will clients expect us to do next?

3) One, but he'll have to charge by the hour and he can't give a firm quote until he's seen it, because God only knows how it was changed before. (The last time he took a job like this, someone had wedged a "glow pear" in the socket.) 

Despite the recent charges of geekdom, I can be quite passionate about things other than computers and translation (just ask my wife . . .).

One thing is characters. I get a real high from exploring different writing systems, character sets, and fonts. To celebrate this passion, I'm starting a little virtual gallery of characters I love. I'll try to publish one for every issue of the newsletter, and you can find the first at www.internationalwriters.com/characters/chou.html. If you have a Javascript-enabled browser, hold your cursor over the character for a definition.

[This collection has grown quite a bit since it was introduced. You can find a table of contents right here.] 

The other day I was reminded of what may be the funniest audio clip I know. Those of you who live in the US probably know of Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers from NPR, two car mechanics from Boston who like to laugh and talk about cars and many other things. A while ago they had a little language-related feature that you can listen to right here. (And just in case anyone complains that this is biased of me to suggest this clip -- have you ever looked at my last name?!) 

The six-word memoir project for translators brought forth 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.
• American-English is just another language?  

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