TranslatorsTraining.com has launched its academic program at http://edu.translatorstraining.com. Academic institutions with translation courses and degrees can purchase unlimited access for all of their students for just 300 Euro a year. Most academic institutions have several translation tools installed in their labs to give students the hands-on experience they need -- but we all know that it is neither reasonable nor practical to provide access to all the available tools in computer labs.

TranslatorsTraining.com is the only site where students (and lecturers) can be introduced to all the tools on the market in a very practical and hands-on manner. Contact us at elearning@intrawelt.it and we'll set it up for you.

Really, I'm glad that I had some time to think between this newsletter's deadline and SDL's announcement of its new update policy last week for freelancers and language service providers. If I hadn't had time to think about it a little bit, I would have used way too many exclamation marks and words in all caps. As it is, I am still frustrated, but I've tried very hard to put things into context.

So, for those who haven't heard (that would include all those who spent their past week on Mars, for instance), this is what happened: SDL announced that any version including and prior to Trados 6.5 and SDLX 2004 would not be recognized as a qualifier for an upgrade to any current or new version after April 1, 2008. This means that if you own an older version of Trados or SDLX and really haven't had much of a reason to upgrade so far, you have three choices:

1) get an upgrade in the next few days, allowing you to stay in the "upgrade cycle,"

2) tough it out with the old versions until your computer breaks down and you have to buy a new computer with more current versions of Windows and MS Office, at which point your old version of Trados or SDLX won't work anymore and you can then shell out the money for a spanking new copy of whatever Trados/SDLX version is on the market then, or

3) say farewell to SDL and buy one of its competitors' products.

Like I said, I had a good week to think about this, but SDL's new policy still seems way out of this world to me. Well, maybe I should say, out of our world. I talked to SDL after the announcement, and during the discussion I realized that this really boils down to a clash of cultures.

In the last few issues of this newsletter we have talked quite a bit about prevailing attitudes among translation professionals when it comes to translation technology. Especially among freelancers, many of us value a certain amount of freedom and independence in our work lives, and with that comes a different attitude to the way we do business. This is expressed negatively by an unwillingness to invest -- into training, for instance, but also into tools in general, all the way up to the regrettable attitude of accepting or condoning software piracy with all the consequences that were mentioned in the last few issues of the newsletter. On the positive side, however, we look for supportive and communicative ways to work with each other -- see the many vibrant forums for translators -- and the tools that are truly embraced are not offered by anonymous corporations but by individuals or groups of developers who offer passionate support and whom we can somehow identify with. TEnTs (Translation Environment Tools) like Wordfast, Déjà Vu, MemoQ, Heartsome, or Metatexis come to mind. If you talk to most users of these tools, they will very passionately try to make you a convert. Like it says in the latest advertisement campaign of Déjà Vu (and you can replace Déjà Vu's name with any of the other tools that are mentioned above): "Other tools have users, Déjà Vu X has fans."

Of course, it is much easier to nurture that kind of company culture if your user group is only in the hundreds or thousands rather than in the tens of thousands. Aspects of that kind of company culture include regular free updates that support new or updated translation file formats (Office, FrameMaker, InDesign, etc.) and even completely new features in a matter-of-fact fashion. What we don't realize is that all this is rather exceptional. Our little niche translation industry has created a "tool and technology culture" that is very different from the culture of other industries. I think that one of the many reasons for this is that many of the original developers of the tools were translators themselves who strongly identify with their user groups.

And while the original Trados developers also were translators, it is probably fair to say that this is not the first perception that most folks have of Trados today.

There is no doubt that it's really hard, maybe impossible, to maintain that kind of (perceived) company culture once your user group has grown beyond a certain size. To counter this, in the last couple of years SDL has tried to institutionalize a kind of user community and training that was very positive, such as the regularly offered, high-quality web seminars or ideas.sdltrados.com -- SDL's  marketplace for new ideas. On the other hand, they introduced paid customer support -- a no-brainer in most other industries but a nearly unknown foreign object in ours. And now they have introduced this new upgrade policy -- and I can't help thinking that this really is a no-brainer.

In my talks with SDL I've left little room for doubt on how I feel about this new policy. If this really is a clash of cultures, then we can't assume that one culture always knows what the other ones thinks -- hey, we're translators and we ought to know that better than anyone else. But I think it would help both sides to talk before rather than after we make decisions.

If you are in the position of having to choose from the three different options above (upgrade, stick-it-out, or change), you might want to look again through the article on Trados compatibility that I've updated and republished in the Translation Journal.

Have you ever doubted the power of the written word? When I first wrote about MemoQ quite awhile back, I mentioned all the wonderful associations its name evoked of Kraftwerk's Creedence Clearwater Revival's Suzie Q. Only shortly afterward, though, I was badly disappointed when I met one of their developers who told me it's actually pronounced "Memok." I was still not quite over that disappointment when I recently met another of their developers who kept on talking about "MemoQueue." Upon seeing the amazed bliss in my face, he mentioned that he really liked the Suzie Q association so he has been calling it that ever since. Oh, the power!

Last time I wrote about MemoQ, Kilgray, its parent company, had just released version 2.1. Now they have released version 2.3. Just a couple of "point releases" you might say, but not so in Kilgray-think. Every point release equals a full release (and in fact needs to be upgraded in some case -- see more on that below).

For those who missed the last article, the changes Kilgray introduced in version 2.1 included an InDesign filter, the cool and unique "translation memory driven segmentation" -- which matches the segmentation (how a translation file is separated into segments) to the associated translation memory -- and in-context matching (also known as PerfectMatch or Guaranteed Match). Version 2.2, for instance, introduced support for bilingual RTF files (Trados- or Wordfast-prepared documents), creation of views and sub-projects that could be based on linguistic criteria ("named and dynamic views"), and a completely revamped document processing model.

Now, with version 2.3 the four most outstanding features have to be the support of Asian double-byte languages as source, TagEditor .TTX support, a flexible display of the different components on-screen (hit F11 to cycle through the modes), and a preview feature for MS Office and HTML files. Oh, and I almost forgot the most important one: a tool bar button with the cheerful tool tip "Do not press this button." And that's all I have to say about that, as my friend Forrest Gump would say.

While .TTX support has become quasi-standard these days, there are some flavors to MemoQ's methods that are particularly nice -- especially the ability to display tag content so that you can evaluate how and whether you can re-arrange them in the target segments. And the preview feature is nothing short of cool. It's a preview that is automatically displayed in real time right next to the translation grid. Of course, you do have to sacrifice a little bit of processing power for the constant updating of the preview, but it's bearable, especially because one of MemoQ's finest qualities in the first place is its processing speed. And while there are also other natural limitations that come with any preview -- i.e., text that is translatable but not directly displayed (index markers, meta text, etc.) is not part of the preview -- this is probably as good as it gets with a preview, and it's a great combination of powerful and thorough text extraction into a translation environment while seeing what your translation does to the real document.

Tag handling has gotten a lot better as well, especially in the InDesign filter. You can now edit the tags (for instance, to change font size or change character formats from bold to italic) in a user interface that breaks down the different components of the tag so that even non-techies can do it.

Another thing that I really like is the QA Module. This is not part of the original package -- you have to purchase it as a separate add-on -- but the breadth of the checks you can implement with it is mirrored only by Trados' QA module, which up until now was the most comprehensive integrated QA tool out there.

Since nothing is perfect, there are a few caveats. It's great that the new Unicode-based FrameMaker 8 is supported, but unfortunately FrameMaker 6 is no longer supported. I also still miss a feature that assembles translations from matches in the translation memory and terminology database (it only uses terminology database content to do that), and it would be nice if HTML tags could be as easily modified as InDesign tags, or if XML could also be shown in the preview (you can now only see the code in context by pressing F10). The good news is that Kilgray is already working on some of these issues.

There are also a couple of uncommon licensing schemes for MemoQ. For instance, Kilgray offers the tool as "postcardware:" you get a free license to the slightly outdated version 2.0 if you send them a postcard, and you can then upgrade to later (paid) versions. To me this seems a little convoluted: I am not sure why anyone would like to use a tool in anything but its current and best state -- particularly if there are also evaluation versions that can be downloaded for free as well. And if you purchase the product straight-out, you automatically buy three years' worth of upgrades. This particular point sounds rather generous to me, but be that as it may, their licensing policy is under review at the moment and things might change on these fronts.

When Alchemy Software Development was purchased by translations.com last week it sort of came full circle. Starting out as a part of Corel many years ago and then successfully marketing their tools independently, they are now back in the corporate fold, albeit a different one. In the rush of recent acquisitions and mergers this does not seem to be too much of a surprise, but it's certainly worth a second look. Alchemy's products include not only its flagship product Catalyst, the leading localization tool, but also the interesting Alchemy Language Exchange, a platform to share and use translation memories. Especially the latter will certainly fit well into translations.com's arsenal of tools. And then there is also the soon-to-be-published Alchemy Publisher, a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) TM tool for formats like InDesign and FrameMaker.

So, what does that mean? For one thing it means that translations.com has officially entered the race with the other service/technology providers SDL and Lionbridge to gobble up technology. It remains to be hoped that the promise to leave Alchemy largely independent within the company will remain true, especially in regard to technologies like Language Exchange. For Catalyst (or its pendant Passolo, the tool that was recently bought by SDL) there are plenty of alternatives with tools like RC-WinTrans, Multilizer, Language Studio, Lingobit Localizer, Sisulizer, Clear-Cat, and Visual Localize.

I received a whole batch of notes and emails from readers concerning PDF conversions. And because it is the most painful, let me get the first one out of the way right away.

The two prime tools for OCR-based PDF conversions are probably Nuance's PDF Converter and Abbyy's PDF Transformer. These are fairly inexpensive tools that integrate right into Word and a couple of other Office programs and allow you to open PDFs right from within there, converting them in the process to Office files that can then be processed in TEnTs of all kinds. I used to be a big friend of Abbyy's products until I was burned by their customer service and was so enraged that I deleted all Abbyy traces from my computer and actually purchased the Nuance tool, which I really liked. Just like Abbyy's tool, it does not create perfect documents, but they're good enough that with a little bit of touch-up they can be worked on.

To my great embarrassment, I had never noticed a fundamental flaw in Nuance's product: while it supports a number of different languages, it will always convert into the locale of the operating system that you work under (if that language is supported, thus disqualifying East Asian or many other languages) and you can't do anything about it. I had simply never noticed that until Marian Greenfield mentioned it to me last week. Of course, this essentially disqualifies the product for anyone who might work in any other language as the source language than the language of his or her operating system. So I guess that I have to eat crow and return to Abbyy, which supports three dozen languages in a customizable manner. Darn it!

The same topic covers Dan Lufkin's email, which mentioned the following:

I know that quite a few translators use Nuance PDF Converter (PDF=>Word). I just updated to v. 5 and found some malware -- NuanceWDS.exe -- on the distribution disk. This program sucks up ~98% of your CPU cycles and causes suspicious activity on the Outlook address book. Nuance tech support was clueless. They say that I'm the first to report a problem, but the CD upgrade has been out only a week or two, so perhaps I'm the index case. Norton 360 didn't pick it up on my regular virus scan. The program is very new (Google has essentially only one entry).

Anyway, you may want to mention the potential problem in the Toolbox. You can fix it by renaming NuanceWDS.exe to Foobar or something. The converter seems to work OK without it, although I haven't tried any search function, which is what I'd expect WDS to run.

Like I said, Abbyy may in fact be the better choice. . . .

Dominik Kreuzer also mentioned "a fantastic PDF-to-Word converter that's inexpensive and yields excellent, usable converted documents: Solid Converter PDF." I myself have not tested it, but it may be worth a look.

Frank Dietz sent me this article on Computing's Final Frontiers by John Dvorak. I can almost promise that you will like it. It very cleverly lists four different areas where progress is lacking in computing, all of which amazingly are connected to translators' lives. No wonder our job is tiring!

While we all try to avoid printing to save the earth (right?), there are some cases where it is in fact rather helpful to proof a printed document. And sometimes we need not only to read the translation but to do that alongside the source. Since a number of TEnTs use hidden text in Word to deal with source and target, it's helpful to know how to print hidden text. In up to Word 2003 all you need to do is select Tools> Options> Print and activate the Hidden Text check box, and in Word 2007 select the Office button and then Word Options. Select Display at the left of the dialog box and activate Print Hidden Text under Printing Options.

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© 2008 International Writers' Group