A computer newsletter for translation professionals

. . . when you hold the first copy of Found in Translation in your hands on its publication day today!

It's a good day, a day of celebration, because Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World, Nataly Kelly's and my love letter to you, is finally being delivered by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and InTrans, downloaded on Kindles and Nooks, and flying off the bookshelves of every major bookstore in the United States.

In the email that I sent you a few days ago, I said that this book is "a testament to the work you do every day and how important it is." I can't tell you how much I believe that to be true. The importance of our work as translators -- whether we translate computer manuals, birth certificates, religious works, Dr. Seuss, or Nabokov -- is so profound that it shapes and defines the human experience. We are the gatekeepers who allow ideas expressed in one language to find a home in a new language. And in the process we create new language -- often actually creating original words and expressions -- that expands the world. That's what this book is about, and that's why we hope that you'll help us carry it out to your families, friends, clients -- heck, even strangers on the street corner -- so they'll finally get it and see you and your work in a completely new light.

You'll recall that awhile back I asked you to contribute little video clips that would be compiled into a new Gangnam Style YouTube sensation. This has happened. Thank you so much for contributing (many, many sent us clips that unfortunately didn't make it into the video due to length restrictions -- we owe you a special thanks!) and for sharing this link as well.

Other things you can do aside from giving out books left and right and talking about the video? There were a few hints in the email we sent out on International Translation Day. After you've read the book, please consider writing a positive review on Amazon.com. And then come join the celebration: We will be visiting a number of cities in the coming weeks, including Boston, Washington, Atlanta, San Diego, Monterey, Portland, Seattle, Detroit, Princeton, Chicago, and Mountain View. It would be great if you could get the word out about these events, drag your friends and clients there, and of course show up yourself.

And here's one more sobering thought about the relevance of translators. Often it is the ones "on the other side," those who try to stop a certain group from doing what they're doing, who provide the best testimony to translators' importance. When The Satanic Verses was published, Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding for years, as he retells in his newly released autobiography. Some of his translators were not so lucky. Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, was murdered. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing. And Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was the intended target of an assassination that turned into a riot, leaving 37 dead.

What we do matters. Let's tell the world.

Daniel E. DeCoursey sent me the most amazing quote from a New York Times article about meteorologists (The Weatherman Is Not a Moron). I am almost tempted to quote it without any further comment. Here it is:

Despite their astounding ability to crunch numbers in nanoseconds, there are still things that computers can't do, contends Hoke at the National Weather Service. They are especially bad at seeing the big picture when it comes to weather. They are also too literal, unable to recognize the pattern once it's subjected to even the slightest degree of manipulation. Supercomputers, for instance, aren't good at forecasting atmospheric details in the center of storms. One particular model, Hoke said, tends to forecast precipitation too far south by around 100 miles under certain weather conditions in the Eastern United States. So whenever forecasters see that situation, they know to forecast the precipitation farther north.

But there are literally countless other areas in which weather models fail in more subtle ways and rely on human correction. Perhaps the computer tends to be too conservative on forecasting nighttime rainfalls in Seattle when there's a low-pressure system in Puget Sound. Perhaps it doesn't know that the fog in Acadia National Park in Maine will clear up by sunrise if the wind is blowing in one direction but can linger until midmorning if it's coming from another. These are the sorts of distinctions that forecasters glean over time as they learn to work around potential flaws in the computer's forecasting model, in the way that a skilled pool player can adjust to the dead spots on the table at his local bar.

Among the National Weather Service's detailed records is a thorough comparison of how well the computers are doing by themselves alongside the value that humans are contributing. According to the agency's statistics, humans improve the accuracy of precipitation forecasts by about 25 percent over the computer guidance alone. They improve the temperature forecasts by about 10 percent. 

All right, I'm going to comment briefly after all.

Aside from having to adjust some percentages (OK, and "precipitation" and "Puget Sound"), don't you think this could have been a really great article about machine translation? 

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Windows 8 is just around the corner, and while there most certainly will be no need to upgrade immediately (or maybe, for what it's worth, ever), many will migrate to Windows 8 in the near to mid-term future, perhaps because of some clever feature (for instance, the ability to run the operating system in any of the many available languages) or because you buy it along with a new computer.

One of the biggest obstacles in upgrading to a new version of an operating system is the question of whether my translation environment tool(s) will support that move. So I asked each of the different tool vendors about their tool's compatibility. Since some were a little cautious in answering, I will quote most of them verbatim:

Star (Transit NXT): "Windows 8 will be supported from Star Transit Service Pack 6 on (this service pack will be released within the next weeks). For your information: Windows 8 has not enabled .NET framework. With Service Pack 6 this 'problem' is solved, so that Transit NXT can be installed without problems. But please note that Transit NXT is not fully tested for Windows 8 yet."

Atril (Déjà Vu X2): "We are finalizing the tests on Windows 8 and Office 2013. On Windows 8 Déjà Vu X2 is pretty stable so far, and we are running the final test batteries this week."

Kilgray (memoQ): "On developers' machines memoQ has been running on Windows 8 for several months, but we haven't started extensive testing yet specifically to check user experience under the new operating system. We don't see thousands of users emerging immediately when Windows 8 is released. We'll do that before the end of the year."

AIT: The list of our software that is fully compatible with Windows 8: AnyCount, AnyLexic, AnyMem, AcroLexic, CATCount, ExactSpent, WinLexic, ClipCount. Also we will make the following software products compatible with Windows 8 in the nearest future: Projetex, Translation Office 3000.

MemSource: "We should be ready by the end of October when Windows 8 gets launched!" 

SDL (Trados): "We've tested it and everything works as expected, so should be fine."

Terminotix: "We had to adapt some of our tools to make them work smoothly under Windows 8 and we are now at the testing phase. We will probably be ready for Windows 8 in a month from now."

Wordfast: "None of our software is actually OS-dependent: Wordfast Classic is powered by MS Word, wherever Word runs (Win 95 to Win 8, Mac, Linux, Unix); Wordfast PRO is a Java application that needs a Java machine, that's pretty much any OS on earth; Wordfast Anywhere runs from within any JavaScript-enabled browser, that's pretty much any known browser these days."

MultiCorpora (MultiTrans): "Our tools will indeed run on Windows 8! MultiCorpora continues and will continue to support all Windows, Office and SQL versions as they are officially released."

There you have it. If you don't find your tool in this list, then the developers did not respond in time. 

Here's one of those things that we all sort of know about in Windows but many of us don't use to its full extent. The Send To feature. Uhmm . . .

You know, the feature in Windows that you access when you right-click on a file or folder within Windows Explorer. You can send the file or folder to a "compressed folder" (which makes use of Windows' bare-bones integrated compression feature), My Documents, the desktop, any attached media, or an email recipient. It's not really terribly exciting as is, you can, however, modify it to your heart's content.

All these options are actually shortcuts that sit in a certain folder on your Windows system, and you can delete any of these options or, more importantly, add new ones. Why would you want to do that? Well, "sending" a file means assigning it to a folder, a drive, or any program. As a result, if you add a shortcut to Excel, Word, a browser, a graphic program, a text or HTML editor, or whatever you think would be helpful, you can "force" a certain file to open within that application rather than going through the tedious open-application-select-File-menu-select-Open-search-for-file-and-select-file process.

In Windows Vista and 7, the folder in question is located at C:\Users/<user>/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Windows (Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings/<user>). But the nice thing is that you don't actually need to know where it is. Instead, it's this simple:

• Press the WinKey (the key with the Windows logo on your keyboard) + R.
• The Run window opens.
• Enter shell:sendto.
• Ta-da! You're there.

This automatically opens the SendTo folder, and you can now add shortcuts to whatever you like. Let's say you want to add a shortcut for Excel (this is really helpful if you want to open all kinds of text files, like tab-separated files, in Excel). You can navigate to the folder where the program file for Excel is installed (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14) or -- if you have Windows Vista or 7 -- you can press the WinKey and type Excel. At the top of the list under "Programs" you'll see the Excel icon. Right-click that and select Open File Location. This will bring you to the afore-mentioned path.

Once there, you need to create a shortcut to place in the SendTo folder. The easiest way to do that? Open the SendTo folder in a separate windows, select the EXCEL(.EXE) icon, press the Ctrl+Shift key combination and drag it over the SendTo folder. Now it will say something like "EXCEL.EXE - Shortcut" which you can leave as is or rename into just "Excel" or whatever you like.

From now on, every single time you right-click on a file or folder within Windows Explorer and select Send to, you can open any file within Excel or another program, or send it to another drive or folder of your choice. 

Helpful.

Because we talked about dragging files, there are also other ways you can usefully drag files. Most of you know that if you drag a file, press the Ctrl key, and release the file, a copy of the file will be created (this also works with whole folders). And we already talked about the same thing to create a link to a file or folder by pressing Ctrl+Shift.

What you might not know is that sometimes it's also helpful to drag a file into an empty, open program. For instance, if you have an empty instance of Word open (make sure that no file is showing, not even an empty file), you can drag a file or many files to open in Word. That's not that revolutionary. But what about if you have a really complex project that needs to be processed in translation environment tools (TEnTs) like Trados 2007 or memoQ with, say, HTML files in many folders and subfolders? Rather than adding them one by one, you can search for them in Windows Explorer by going to the root folder of the project and entering *.html in the search bar in the upper right-hand corner of Windows Explorer. You will receive a list of all files in the main folder and all the subfolders with the extension .html (the asterisk * is just a placeholder for any number of characters).

All you need to do now is to select all those files and drag them into the Translate (or Clean or Analyse) window in Trados 2007 or the Translations window in memoQ. The files will be listed and processed within their correct location without you having to hunt for them.

Not bad!

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Here is the most intelligent and by far most productive way of using generic machine translation such as Google Translate or Microsoft Bing Translator. It almost always makes audiences of translators gasp in shock when I show it to them (I think they typically gasp because they simply can't believe that MT can actually be useful, but then maybe they just need oxygen to prevent falling asleep during my talk!).

To my knowledge, Déjà Vu X2 is the only tool out there that uses a feature called fuzzy match repair with machine translation. Fuzzy match repair has long been a specialty of Déjà Vu: Every time a fuzzy match is encountered (a fuzzy match is a translation memory match where the source segment in the text that needs to be translated is not quite the same as but very similar to a source segment in the TM), the internal processes of Déjà Vu try to identify what the differences are, whether it knows what the corresponding parts in the target segment are, and whether it can replace them with a translation that it knows.

In practice it works like this:

Imagine you have this segment that needs to be translated.

The TM contains:

Imagine you have this book that needs to be translated.

with the translation:

Stell dir vor, dass dieses Buch übersetzt werden muss.

That would be a fuzzy match. If the terminology database contains the entries

segment

and

book

Déjà Vu would automatically replace the translation of book with the translation of segment and come up with:

Stell dir vor, dass dieses Segment übersetzt werden muss.

and you end up with a repaired fuzzy match.

Naturally there are many variables that prevent this from always going so well (such as gender, etc.), but this is how it generally works. In many cases it does a great job, leaving nothing or very little for the translator to do.

This feature now has been enhanced with two processes that make it even more useful. The first is sub-segment matching, a process that virtually all translation environment tools use in some way or the other. What this would do in our example is that segment and book would not necessarily have to be separate entries anymore but, provided that they appear often enough in the translation memory, Déjà Vu would be able to extract that knowledge on its own.

The second feature is in a way a logical extension of that. Here only the old term needs to be known (in our case book) so that it can be marked for replacement. If the new term cannot be found, Déjà Vu goes out to a machine translation engine of your choosing (the available ones presently are Google Translate, Systran, Microsoft Translator, iTranslate4 or PROMT, provided you have the licenses), retrieves the translation for that term, and automatically uses it to replace just that part of the segment.

This works not only with single words but with phrases of any length as well.

Is this always useful? Nah, sometimes it creates more work than the good it does, but more often it's a very helpful and intelligent use of machine translation that I'm surprised more vendors don't offer (please correct me if I'm wrong). And it's definitely a sign of better things yet to come. 

Marco Cevoli has put together a helpful list of free or inexpensive tools for translators. There are still many that can be added, and I'm sure Marco would be glad to receive your suggestions.

It's well known that building your own machine translation engine with Moses, the open source statistical machine translation toolkit which forms the basis of many current MT solutions (including Asia Online, KantanMT, PangeaMT, and many corporate in-house developments), is no bed of roses, even for the technically inclined. TAUS, the Translation Automation User Society, has now released an online tutorial for doing just that. Still no bed of roses, but helpful nevertheless. (Plus, this whole "bed of roses" metaphor -- I'm not sure it would be that comfortable to sleep on a bed of roses to start with!)

One correction from the last newsletter: I said that Adobe is using Lingotek technology for their crowdsourced translation. This was true for some products in the past, but they discontinued this practice last January and are now using their own technology.

And here's one more thing: Many of you know that a few years ago my family and I rented out our house in Oregon for a year, packed our suitcases, and moved to Berlin. Our kids went to German schools and my wife and I were able to continue our work seamlessly (the beauty of working as freelancers!). Why do I mention this? Just this past week I heard of a couple translator families who are planning to do the same thing or are already doing it. Let me tell you, it's a great experience on all fronts: the improved language ability of the kids, my own refresher in my target language, and an all-around great cultural and world-enlarging family experience. And now that my older kids are applying for and entering college, the year abroad looks extremely good on their college and scholarship applications and entrance essays. 

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Here is another addition to my family of remarkable characters and writing systems that I have been collecting over the years. This is a character that speaks of great language pride.

Hold your cursor over the character for a definition. 

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© 2012 International Writers' Group