This is going to be a long and, for some of you, tedious quote. I love every word of it, though. It's not about us translators. It's about librarians and how they have accepted what we are still struggling with:

 
The increasing role of technology in libraries has a significant impact on the changing roles of librarians. New technologies, such as open url, are dramatically increasing the accessibility of information, and librarians are adapting to the evolving needs of users that emerge from the adoption of these new technologies.

Librarians (...) [have] had to purchase and run the computers necessary to use the software. They [have] had to teach the public how to use the new technologies and move to more virtual working environments. (...)

Librarians must continually adapt to new formats for information, such as electronic journals and e-books, which present both challenges and opportunities in providing access and promoting them to library patrons.

Increasing technological advance has presented the possibility of automating some aspects of traditional libraries. In 2004 a group of researchers in Spain developed the UJI Online Robot. This robot is able to navigate the library, look for the specified book, and upon its discovery, carefully take it from the shelf and deliver it to the user. Because of the robot's extremely limited function, its introduction into libraries poses little risk of the employment of librarians, whose duties are not defined by menial tasks such as the retrieval of books. [my italics, quote from Wikipedia]

Let's repeat: ". . . whose duties are not defined by menial tasks such as the retrieval of books." Now exchange "books" with "words" or "phrases" or even "sentences" and you see a glimpse of the life of a technologically enabled translator. (And don't tell me that there's much more to translation than that -- I know! But the point is that we need to learn to reduce those repetitive "menial tasks.")

I was just about to disable my computer for all eternity this morning when I simply could not get Acrobat to produce a decent PDF from within Microsoft Word. After sweating and fretting and trying all kinds of computer acrobatics (no, it was not a pretty sight!), I spent literally 45 minutes reinstalling Acrobat. Still. No. Success. And then I finally remembered to check whether MS Office's strategy for disabling suspicious foreign entities was the root of the problem. And there it was.

At some point in my computer's past, Word must have crashed. No, let's put it like this: During one of the many times in the past when Word crashed, it must have been of the opinion that the Acrobat add-in was responsible, so it banned the add-in. It made it a "Disabled Item." And the developers behind Word 2000, XP, and 2003 apparently could not think of any better place to give the user renewed access to the disabled add-in than under Help> About> Disabled Items. Seems logical to you? Well, not to me, but it sure feels good to vent about it. In all honesty, this REALLY is the silly place where you'll have to go to enable add-ins or even documents that have been disabled for security purposes.

By the way, the Office program that has given me the most problems with this has not been Word but Outlook. If you use Outlook as your email client, check under Help> About> Disabled Items and you may discover a treasure trove, such as the disabled virus checker, zipping feature, or many of the other add-ins that can be integrated into Outlook. 

The Office 2007 team at Microsoft must have had a good number of complaints about the treasure hunter approach of its earlier developers. They placed the extra command Disabled Item right in the Help menu of Outlook, and in the other Office apps (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) it's now under Office button> Program Options> Add-Ins> Disabled Items.

Oh, and while we're complaining: I have always defended Acrobat as a reasonable investment for a translator. Many of its features -- like commenting, certifying, compressing, and summarizing -- may also be offered by some of the less expensive or free tools that create and manage PDFs, but you will probably be hard-pressed to find them all in one tool anywhere else.

BUT: I am now at a point where someone would have to come up with some extremely good reasons to convince me to update to the next round of Acrobat. Not only does the current version occupy an obscene 825 MB on my hard drive, but it also sneaks itself into all kinds of other programs, makes me spend more time fixing issues than any other application I have, AND costs an enormous amount of money.

There are good surprises and there are bad surprises. For me, SDL's acquisition of Idiom clearly belonged in the latter category. So after a hectic week of panicked calls and writing articles in response, it felt like balm to my soul to check out an application with a whole different approach, feel, and business model than that of SDL and Idiom WorldServer. In fact, Cafetran is everything that Idiom WorldServer is not. It's small, it's cheap, it's easy to learn and maintain, and it's definitely not built for corporate use!

I had heard about Cafetran before, but it never really registered as a possible TEnT alternative. So when I took a little time to look at the just-released version 2 I was surprise to find that I really liked it. It's a tool built for the freelance translator that aims to give as much of a true translation environment as possible.

It's written in Java, so it's platform-independent -- that means it runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It supports text, XML, HTML, MS Office XML formats (MS Office 2003 and above files that are saved as XML), or OpenOffice formats. While the number of formats is not really overwhelming, the tool comes with some other interesting features . .  .

• it provides an easy integration of queries to Internet-based resources (sort of like IntelliWebSearch),
• it allows you to use images as references when translating (either when you need to translate them or when you need to refer to them as a resource, such as a scanned dictionary),
• it has an auto-complete feature of already-typed text (I particularly like that),
• it naturally supports XLIFF and TMX,
• and it offers an extraction feature for frequent terms for glossary building purposes.

Not bad for a tool that costs 40 Euro! But I thought it was particularly fun that it even includes an accounting feature that allows you to write and send invoices.

As I mentioned above, the SDL-Idiom deal left many of us -- especially company owners -- spinning our wheels about how to respond and what to do, not only in regard to the Idiom WorldServer product, but to the other products that SDL owns as well.

One agency owner wrote to me saying that we need "Trados clones." Though I think that this is sort of an unfortunate term -- especially because he simply means a tool that would be "a perfect match with Trados input and output formats so that I could receive and deliver material seamlessly with clients and translators" -- I took the opportunity to look at how compatible other tools are with Trados.

What does compatibility mean?

First, there is the translation file format. The two most common formats that Trados files are delivered in are bilingual Word files and bilingual .ttx files. Since this is the most obvious area in which compatibility can be achieved, the vast majority of other TEnTs allow you to work with these files. Bilingual Trados Word files are supported by Wordfast, Déjà Vu, MetaTexis, Similis, MultiTrans, SDLX, or JIVEFusion, and .ttx files are directly supported by Déjà Vu, SDLX, MemoQ, MetaTexis, Heartsome, Swordfish, and Star Transit (I'm sure this isn't a comprehensive list). Furthermore, bilingual Word and .ttx files can be relatively easily converted to and fro with the help of a free macro from Terminology Matters. In effect, these formats have become exchange formats that can be used by a number of TEnTs.

 
Note: One exception to this is the translation packages that can be sent with the new Synergy product. These are compressed files that are encrypted and can be opened only by Synergy . . .

Second, there is the question of offline translation memories. To my knowledge, no tool (except Trados, of course) can directly support the binary, unconverted translation memory format; however, various tools support the exported Trados TM .txt format, and virtually all TEnTs support the TMX files that can be exported from Trados.

Third, there are offline MultiTerm termbases. This is a little trickier. Though it is possible to export the MultiTerm termbases into an XML or Excel format that can be read by other tools, a) it is relatively involved and b) quite a bit of information will be lost in the process. If you want only bilingual glossaries, you can quickly transfer those form MultiTerm into other tools, but complex terminology databases with graphics, cross-references, and the accompanying fields are a different matter. As long as TBX -- the termbase exchange format -- is not better supported, this will remain difficult.

Fourth, there are the online, server-based TMs and terminology databases. And that is where the real problems start. To my knowledge, these are not accessible with any product other than Trados (or SDLX), and if your client requires you to use and access those as you translate, you're stuck.

Lastly, there is feature compatibility. There are two features in particular that are not directly compatible. One is the Trados PerfectMatch feature. This feature allows you to leverage content from previous versions of .ttx files in context and locks these matches because they are considered to be in-content-exact matches. While almost all other TEnTs offer a feature like this, the exact workings are often different and it is difficult to exactly emulate this with another set of tools.

The second feature is the QA check for .ttx. files. Again, almost every TEnT offers QA checks, often in the same areas as the Trados QA module. However, if your client has very specific instructions on how to check a finalized .ttx file with Trados, you will again be hard-pressed to completely emulate this.

So, are there "Trados clones" that fit into the agency owner's idea? Not in all areas. If, however, all you need to do is use a translation memory created by Trados and work on bilingual Trados files (which were not sent via Synergy), you're dealing with (quasi-) exchange formats and will do just fine without owning or using Trados.

According to the much-trusted www.acronymfinder.com, this is what CMS stands for. Well, it's not quite what I had in mind. In our context, of course, it stands for "Content Management Systems."

At this particular time in our industry, content management systems have turned out to be a double-edged sword. Ten or fifteen years ago, the language industry was one of the primary promoter of single-source authoring -- the concept of writing content in one place that can then be repurposed in many other places and formats. The idea was to write once in FrameMaker and then output it to a webpage, a manual, and a help system. And since FrameMaker is well supported by translation tools, everything worked in our favor.

Content management systems are sort of the logical continuation of the same paradigm -- database repositories that hold data, typically in XML format, which can be repurposed in a number of ways and can be updated on-the-fly. While it's no problem to work with XML -- virtually all TEnTs support it -- it turns out to be not quite as easy for the translation provider to get into the CMS and access the content. It's possible to export the content into an XML or other text-based format and then re-integrate it, but that's a lot of manual work and also doesn't take care of the often updated content.

The very large translation providers have developed their own interfaces to these systems (or they've outright bought CMS providers, such as SDL's acquisition of Tridion), but since so much translatable content is moving into CMSs, the smaller providers need ways to take part in this as well. One way to do this is through middleware tools such as Clay Tablet. Clay Tablet essentially offers ready-made connectors between commonly used content management system and systems like across, SDL TeamWorks, Idiom WorldServer, Plunet, Beetext, and ]project-open[, with other connectors in the pipeline. It also offers the possibility to upload CMS content to an FTP server from where the data can be downloaded and processed with any tool, but of course there you have the manual component again.

And to anyone who says: "Cool, I'll buy it!" -- not so fast. This tool is not installed on the language provider's end but on the client's end, integrating with the CMS and then connecting with an outside system. This is good news because the service provider doesn't have to pay for it; but the downside, of course, is that the client may not be too thrilled about the expenditure of additional middleware either. There is light at the end of the tunnel, though: Clay Tablet will offer its product with a very affordable SaaS -- Sofware as a Service -- model, essentially forestalling any huge expenditure for anyone.

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