Awhile back I mentioned that the amount of spam mail I receive had reached momentous proportions. This became ever more clear over the holidays: I was away from home without my computer for five days, and when I came home I had close to 10,000 emails that I had to download. Over Christmas! At a time when much of the translation world is on hiatus! I use the latest spam checker that is integrated into Outlook and it did a fine job, leaving me with only a few hundred that were not filtered out (and of which only one or two dozen were actually useful). There's no way that I actually would have looked through the thousands of emails in my spam folder. (No time for that, anyway -- I was out buying cool fireworks with my kids!)

Spam has turned email into an increasingly unreliable means of communication since so much gets lost in spam filters. Naturally this potentially includes business communication, which is particularly important for freelance translators who rely on receiving job notifications (and The Tool Kit newsletter!) through email. One way to minimize the impact this could have on your business (or relationships, for that matter) is to set up rules or filters for specific return addresses.

In Outlook this is done "relatively" easily. Open an email of the sender you would like to be specifically notified about every time (s)he sends you a message, select Actions> Create Rule (in Outlook 2007 just select Create Rule), and select From <Sender>. Here you can adjust other settings, such as different sounds to chime every time when you receive an email from that sender. More importantly, select Advanced Options, click on From <Sender> (if it's not already activated), click Next, select Display a specific message in the New Item Alert window down at the bottom of the list, click on a specific message in the lower part of the window, enter the text (such as "Yippee, the next Tool Kit newsletter has just arrived!"), and click Finish. Now every time you receive email from that sender, a little alert dialog will annoy you with the text you just entered and you won't lose any of those specific emails anymore.

In Thunderbird, rules are called "filters" and are set up under Tools> Message Filters. In the Message Filters window you will then need to click New. When the Filter Rules dialog opens you can designate your settings in much the same way as in Outlook.

Fonts can be a big deal for translators, especially if we work as project managers and have to deal with many "exotic" languages that require special fonts. Yes, Arial Unicode in combination with Code 2000 covers a lot of languages, but not all, and the sad truth is that not all texts we receive are in Unicode. So we may end up with hundreds of fonts on our computers that slow our computers down significantly, especially when loading certain desktop publishing programs.

One way to deal with this is to uninstall each font when it's no longer used and simply reinstall it when it's needed again. But do you remember how long it took you to find that elusive Oriya font in the first place? There's no way you want to go through that again.

Enter Font Frenzy, a product that manages your fonts and "can help you 'defrenzy' your whole font folder and put an end to font frustration and slow boot-up times." The program keeps all your fonts separately and makes it a snap to restore them when you need them without weighing down resources in the meanwhile.

And, yes, it is free, and, yes, the tool's name is cool, too.

Speaking of freeware and shareware, after Becky Blackley pointed me to a PC Magazine link that lists interesting freeware tools to manage your computer, I realized that at least one link to a free- and shareware library in my ebook is outdated. Here are some great collections of freeware and shareware tools for the geeks among you:

• www.tucows.com
  
• www.download.com
  
• www.majorgeeks.com
  
• www.snapfiles.com

A warning: don't start clicking through these lists unless you know you have a couple of hours to spare!

But that's okay because a) she is pregnant, b) Kate Winslet is replacing her in the film, and c) you don't have to worry about it because you can have your computer read to you instead.

Seriously, though I don't use this technique myself, I know that many translators have their computer read their translation to them after they're done and feel it really increases their accuracy. After the article on voice recognition in the last newsletter, Volkmar Hirantner wrote this to me:

I found that after the initial break-in period (for me, not for speech recognition!), speech recognition not only made me much faster, it also added to my accuracy. How so? Well, I turned speech recognition around. Now, once I have completed the translation, I use the Text-to-Speech function of IBM ViaVoice to read the translated text, while I view the corresponding source text. It is amazing how well this works and how many errors I catch this way. Since I use SDLX as my TEnT, which displays source text and translated text in segments which are arranged in two columns side by side, this approach is really handy.

It is, incidentally, the only instance where I use ViaVoice. I dictate using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which works fine in SDLX, whereas it will refuse to read any text within SDLX.

ViaVoice, on the other hand, causes havoc when used for dictating within SDLX, but will read text in any SDLX column as long as the text has been properly highlighted at the outset.

Speech recognition is great, especially for legal texts, which I specialize in. I'm not so sure about engineering and scientific texts. Altogether, though, it has raised my total annual productivity (with and without speech recognition) by well over ten percent. And my accuracy? I don't know, I can't really measure that, but I am sure it has gone up. So has my self-confidence whenever I deliver a job!

A long time ago, I introduced the Swiss t4t website, Tools for Translators. Its owner Erich Brandenberger asked me to mention it again since there are some new tools, including T4T-SPP, a macro that lets you transfer text from your PowerPoint presentation into Word, translate it there, and then reimport it back. It's an interesting tool for those who feel that the typical translation environment tool (TEnT) doesn't do a good enough job with PowerPoint files. (Incidentally, there's also a competitor to this particular tool: ppt.helper.)

I'm not sure that t4t's tagline -- "Intimidated by MT software? Use T4T!" -- really resonates with me. To me it seems that there are many levels of tools between manual translation with a word processor and machine translation (MT), but it's still an interesting collection of macros that Erich offers, some of which are free and some are paid. These include tools to create glossaries; convert dates, times, numbers, and measurements; find duplicate text within documents; reconcile glossaries with translated documents; and combine various search processes into one. Like I said, all of these tools are Office macros, so you need to work within Office programs, which is a limitation (I assume that Office 2007 works, but I'm not sure). On the upside, however, many tools work both in Windows and on a Mac.

This was the question we asked ourselves when we created TranslatorsTraining.com -- only we were interested in Translation Environment Tools (TEnTs) rather than apples. Previously, there was simply no way to compare across, Déjà Vu, MemoQ, Similis, OmegaT, Star Transit, Wordfast, Lingotek, Trados, SDLX, Heartsome, Metatexis, and MultiTrans on a level playing field. Now TranslatorsTraining.com does just that with videos that show the exact same processes on the exact same file, produced by the tool makers themselves but without the marketing hype that usually accompanies such presentations. Even if I had not been part of this project, I would highly recommend it!

Here are three new websites that now contain the Tool Kit link:

www.german-english-translator.com
www.syzygy.com.tw
www.ndet.org

© 2008 International Writers' Group