Here are two cool tools that those of you who don't know and use them already will immediately become fans of:

Manypedia is a tool to search for a Wikipedia page in a great number of languages and then look up the corresponding Wikipedia page in another language. It will then tell you the percentage of the similarity of the concepts and display the pages side-by side to allow you to familiarize yourself with the terminology of those subjects in both languages.

Let's try it step by step. In the pop-up bar on the top of Manypedia's page you can enter a search term under Search and then select which language version you want to look at. The correct page will be displayed on the left-hand side of the screen. Under Compare with the, select which language version you want to compare it with; in the page that appears on the right side of the page, you can select disable translation to see the page in the original corresponding language. Sound complicated? Head over to Manypedia and you'll get it.

Meme Miner is somewhat similar, but you leave more things up to the judgment of the computer. Just as with Manypedia, you can query Wikipedia for certain terms and Meme Miner's underlying program then mines corresponding information from Wikipedia in another language that you have specified. It's also a great tool, especially if you just want a quick idea for a term or phrase.

Fortis Revolution is the computer-assisted translation tool that will direct how you purchase and interact with translation software in the future.

Before Fortis Revolution, businesses had to piece together frustrating translation tools with confusing and hard-to-navigate product packages. Times have changed.

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 had a talk with David Canek of the Czech tool provider MemSource Technologie about his product MemSource. David is a very interesting conversation partner whose speed of speech sometimes outpaces his filtering mechanisms (we have a lot in common in that way). He made some strong comments on standards when we talked, which he clarified in a later email, and he also had some strong statements about freelancers' use of MT at a recent conference, something he clarified as well.

The product is interesting, with an intriguing history and what may be a promising future. David insisted that there is plenty of room in the translation technology market, and I can only agree -- there's still lots of virgin soil, especially when it comes to technology use on the side of translation buyers, and there is always room for improvement in technology.

MemSource had its start not as a translation tool but as a TM-based authoring tool that was developed by Sun and Charles University in Prague. This tool is still available as the UTMA tool on the MemSource website, but I had the distinct impression that UTMA has suffered a similar fate to most other products of that category -- it's good and has huge potential, but the market is simply not mature enough to truly realize its benefits. (I wrote about this many years ago in the ATA Chronicle as well as in this newsletter.)

Using some of the underlying technology of the authoring tool, MemSource's developers went on to develop a translation environment tool, along the way creating some new paradigms (that I know some of you will not like) about using and charging for machine translation.

So, here goes: As you might have expected, it's primarily a web-based product. This seems to be the case with most new products (while the MemSource team first started developing in 2006, it's been marketing for only about a year now so it is still a "new" tool). Language service providers have the choice to purchase either a SaaS (Software as a Service) option where everything is hosted by MemSource (they utilize the Amazon server farms for that) or an outright licensing model where you can install your own server and host everything yourself. The SaaS price list mentions a Freelancer edition for $20 a month, but this is not MemSource's emphasis. The focus is clearly on the Team and Enterprise editions, which cost between $100 and $200 a month per project manager, each of whom receives 10 translator editions distribute for free to their translators.

The project is set up by the project manager through a browser-based interface on the server. A project consists of the translation files (the typical formats are supported: MS Office, InDesign, FrameMaker, HTML, XML, TTX, XLIFF, SDLXLIFF), a translation memory, a terminology database, and settings for online machine translation such as Google Translate. The translation memory and termbase are based on MySQL. This may sound overly technical, but it is sort of important -- as David stressed, quite a few parts of MemSource are based on open-source components (like MySQL). I see this as a positive development: it allows the developer to relatively quickly replace it with something else if necessary. For instance, the developers of Fluency were able to do this a number of times in a matter of hours (versus months and months of development on your own).

Once the project is created, a bilingual Word file (yes, you read correctly: an MS Word file) is exported and sent to the translator, who has already downloaded a Word plugin (for Word 2003 and above) that allows the translator to connect to the online TM, termbase, and the MT engine if the latter has been set up.

It sounds kind of crude, but I was really impressed with the way it works. Rather than displaying Word-compatible files in WYSIWG format like earlier versions of Trados or Wordfast Classic, it does not matter what your original file format is: the translation occurs in a two-column format with any kind of matches from the TM or termbase displayed to the right. The interface is very similar to the likes of Déjà Vu or memoQ -- only that it's in Word -- and is surprisingly functional. Matches that are displayed can be entered with a double-click or keyboard shortcut, you can use a keyboard shortcut to jump to the next segment while the translation unit is automatically entered into the TM, and you can also access a good number of QA tools that are comparable to those of the big guys.

Sending terms to the termbase is relatively easy -- maybe a couple of mouse clicks too many for my taste -- and overall the termbase is more of a glossary than a fully-functional termbase, but as far as the TM goes, it was great to see that they automatically and rather matter-of-factly also do subsegment searches.

Later this year there will be an additional translation interface, a stand-alone XLIFF editor which also will be provided for free and which can run on Windows, Linux and Macintosh computers and that very much emulates the MS Word interface only that it's faster and platform-independent. And in the next year we'll see a browser-based translation interface that David did not want to show me because it was still in its infancy -- but I imagine it's going to be similar to the other two interfaces as well.

Coming back to the XLIFF that will be used for the editor, David was very unapologetic for making broad use of the extension abilities of XLIFF. This will make it hard to process that kind of XLIFF in other tools, but I guess there is always room for improvement.

Neither the project management console nor the translation interface will take any time to learn since each is very intuitive. One word of caution with the Word- based interface: beware of potential conflicts with other Word plug-ins. (I don't actually know of any such conflicts, but this would be a very typical problem to encounter.)

In summary, David said this year was about catching up -- which they seem to have done a fine job with -- and next year is about introducing new features. He hinted at some, but I had to swear not to talk about them, so we'll wait and see what's coming.

So, what's the new paradigm that is being proposed (and used) by this tool? It's how machine-translated matches are optionally analyzed and potentially charged. If, they say, we can evaluate TM matches by the source (a perfect match is an identical source and a fuzzy match a similar source), we should look at MT matches by the target.

What?

Well, if there has been no change between a machine-translated target segment and a final target segment, it should be viewed as a perfect MT match and charged accordingly. If the changes are minor, it should be viewed as a fuzzy match, etc.

Yes, I know that many of you on the freelance side of things are making rude hand gestures toward your computer screen right now, but there is no doubt in my mind that this model will be evaluated by the industry. Whether it or another (like not worrying about word counts altogether) will come to fruition I don't know, but it's certainly an interesting development to follow.

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Buy or upgrade to SDL Trados Studio 2011, the latest version of SDL's translation memory software, and save 20% plus receive a free online training session. For more information or to buy visit www.sdl.com/promo/toolkit10.

Hurry, offer ends 31st October. 

When Google announced changes to its policy for Google Translate that would have users pay for it if not directly used though Google or Google tools, there was considerable excitement. But when Microsoft announced something very similar a couple of weeks ago, not many people took notice.

Here is what happened: Unlike with Google, pricing for the use of Bing Translator will only kick in at four million characters a month and will then cost half as much ($10 per million characters instead of $20). Most freelance translators who choose to use Bing Translator will not have to worry about this, but LSPs or translation buyers might. Interestingly, since Microsoft is interested in clean and high-quality data, you can also contact them and offer your TMs in exchange for high-volume service. They promised me that this can be done very quickly and unbureaucratically. Just send an email to mtcont(a)microsoft.com and you should quickly get an answer if this is of interest to you.

Unlike the makers of MemSource, the makers of memoQ have moved beyond the catching-up phase (that was done in 2008 and 2009). They are innovating like there is no tomorrow and doing a very good job of trying to outsmart the competition.

Awhile back I promised to write about the newly released memoQ 5, and last week I had a chance to meet with Gábor and Balázs from Kilgray for a good introduction into where memoQ is headed with its current version.

I'm not going to bore you with features that have been around before -- and have been discussed here -- but I would like to introduce the new stuff.

One of the very big features of the recent release of Trados Studio 2011 that came out a few weeks ago was the MS Word-like Track Changes feature, and this is one of the big features in this latest edition of memoQ as well. I talked to both parties, prodded, showered them with affection, threatened, promised them treats, insulted them -- all in an attempt to unlock an admission of whether their feature is just a response to the other party's action, but they both convinced me that these were independent developments. And if you think about it, it seems very strange to start with that it took two decades for a translation environment tool to offer track changes outside of MS Word. (In fact, a couple of weeks ago I gave a workshop to MITIN, the Michigan organization for translators and interpreters, and I showed them the track changes feature in Trados. I talked and talked about it until I listened to myself and started to laugh -- it really is more embarrassing than anything else that this has not been around for much longer.) MemoQ handles this "new" feature quite well, very much like MS Word or, for that matter, Trados Studio 2011.

Another slightly more complex feature that memoQ also offers with the same kind of tracking concept is versioning or version control. This is a feature that allows you (and "you" is more likely the project manager, in this case) to find out who changed what in any document and when it was done, and create reports about it. It's a cool feature, but after they showed it to me we had a long discussion about the philosophy of product design.

Let me take one step back: Why is it that for virtually every functionality aspect of Windows there is some kind of third-party tool that does a better job with that particular feature (think of zipping, backup, or search features)? Of course, the Microsoft haters are quick to answer here, but, no, it's not because of incompetence. It's because most software companies are eager not to overload their products with features and subfeatures.

The new versioning feature of memoQ is nothing short of amazing. In fact, it's a full-blown feature that rivals that of dedicated version control applications. It deals with major and minor versions of documents, permits you to take snapshots of the current state of documents, gives you various options to choose from when comparing versions ("last received" or "last delivered" version), and facilitates an "X-Translation" on the basis of a previous version (pretranslation without actually using the TM). All this is great, and I can imagine that some of you will say, "Yes! Exactly what I wanted!" But many others' eyes will have glazed over while reading this paragraph. It's a lot of functionality, and it's not even possible to access all from one place within the application.

I love the enthusiasm of Kilgray's developers, but what I hope to see in the future are switches that allow users to say, "Yes, I'm a professional power user, but it's OK if I don't see every bell and whistle. If I need them later on I can activate them individually, but for now I don't want to be overwhelmed."

Other new features: Term Extraction is a welcome new feature that can be used on projects, TMs, or corpora. It's important to understand that this is not a feature where terminology is pretranslated -- which I think is a little unfortunate. I disagree with Kilgray's position that existing programs which do this have shown that it is unreliable to start with -- those that use linguistic data and not just statistical means often do well in making suggestions. What is nice with memoQ's term extraction is that there are some smart options like merging terms or using wild cards. Plus it's an integrated feature that neither needs to be purchased nor installed separately.

Cascading Filters is my favorite new option, and it's something that very few other tools have offered so far. This feature allows you to use any number of filters (to sepearate translatable from non-translatable content) on a file, one after the other. For those working with a lot of XML files, you will know that XML files often contain embedded HTML code. Up until now, translation environment tools have had a tough time dealing with that. They've typically left a lot of HTML code as translatables, which messed up word counts, translation memories, and the translation process. Another scenario includes Excel files into which an unsophisticated client pasted HTML or XML code. Same problem: It's easy to process the Excel file, but you end up with a lot of code.

MemoQ's cascading filter option allows you now to use one filter and then automatically run another filter on top of that. I tested it with a number of files, and it works seamlessly. Not only does it import very cleanly imported files, but the exported files are in pristine shape as well.

I've been writing about the lack of this kind of feature for a long time (to my knowledge SDL WorldServer is the only other tool that can do this), so I'm very pleased to see this implemented so well in memoQ.

TM Plugins are ways to automatically retrieve data from MyMemory and/or the TDA data collections which will be displayed alongside other matches from your TM(s). MemoQ had a similar plugin for the EuroTermBank for terminology for a while, which is now complemented with the other data sources. In general this is a really good and forward-looking idea; in practice it still needs some work -- especially because at this point it is not possible to filter the data according to industry or owner.

Content Connectors is a very radical new concept that shows that memoQ has gone way beyond a tool for freelance translators. (Kilgray never made such a claim, but freelance translators were its first enthusiastic user group.) Content Connectors allows you to specify a folder with translatable files in the many supported formats on your or any computer that you can access. MemoQ will automatically audit that folder, and if there is any change to any of the files (in the date or time stamp) or any files are added, you are notified and all you need to do is synchronize the memoQ project with that folder. Upon synchronization, the new content is brought in, automatically "X-Translated" on the basis of the previous files, and the remaining text can be sent to a translator (or translated by you).

Those of you who have worked with clients with content management systems will quickly realize that this will find a huge resonance. There's no more need to manually analyze and evaluate data -- now it just has to be stored somewhere, and memoQ analyzes it for you. Nifty.

Oh, and did I mention that the web-based translation interface for memoQ is now available? It's called WebTrans, looks like a clone of the desktop-based interface, and while it has some restrictions (no preview or advanced QA processes, for instance), it does not require an install of the desktop version, and the licenses are given out on the fly (if one user logs out, that license is immediately available to another user).

I always thought Men at Work were from Australia, but it seems that Developers at Work are from Hungary these days!

Lítost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.

Let me give an example: The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. He could not time his breathing properly and swam slowly, his head held tensely high above the surface. She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments' free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt lítost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother's overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country lane. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her. "What's the matter with you?" she asked him, and he started to reproach her: she knew about the current near the other bank, and that he had forbidden her to swim there because of the risk of drowning-- and then he slapped her face. The girl began to cry, and when he saw the tears on her cheeks, he took pity on her and put his arms around her and his lítost melted away.

Or take an instance from the student's childhood. His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in an old, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher's voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his lítost.

What then is lítost?

Lítost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery.

One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love's magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming.

Love's absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call lítost.

Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of lítost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Lítost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.

Lítost works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one's partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going.

Since revenge can never equal its true motive (the student cannot confess to the girl that he slapped her because she swam faster than he did), it must put forward false reasons. Lítost is, therefore, always accompanied by a pathetic hypocrisy: the young man proclaims he is terrified his girlfriend will drown, and the child incessantly playing off key feigns an irremediable lack of talent.

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Here is another addition to my family of remarkable characters that I have been collecting over the years. Coincidentally, Armenian was a language spoken by Steve Jobs, who regrettably passed away last week.

If you have a Javascript-enabled browser, hold your cursor over the character for a definition.

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 queensandkings.

New user names and passwords will be announced in future newsletters.

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Here is a webpage that added the Tool Box link last month:

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