I love receiving responses to this newsletter: they tend to be positive (who wouldn't like that?), those that aren't positive are rare (I'll leave those to your imagination!), and they often really make me think. That's what happened after the last newsletter. You might remember the article on the translation -- or the lack thereof -- of most TEnTs. I pleaded for understanding for the vendors because I know myself that it is not easy to maintain constantly updated documents in various languages. And I suggested that some language groups may be more sensitive to the absence of translated versions than others. Some readers understood my viewpoint as belittling the struggle that speakers of certain language groups have to maintain their identity, and the need for support that they require.

One thing that I know we all struggle with is understanding phenomena that lie outside our own culture or realm of experience. And quite frankly, this is one of those cases for me. Still, it's obvious that I need to be a little more appreciative of the struggles that some language groups have, and I shall endeavor to do so from now on.

Something that is only tangentially related to this but which tickles me no end is the rise of new languages. We rightly lament the dying out of many indigenous languages, but we tend to ignore the rise of new languages or forms of communication. How about SMS Language in its many variants or L337? It's easy to pooh-pooh these forms of language, but, hey, they communicate.

And then there are new forms of language that were already described in George Orwell's 1984, including examples like "Microsoft Language Excellence group," which you will find quite regularly on the MS website mentioned below

..V,(^_^)

These last couple of weeks I have been bombarded with relatively small half-day jobs. I usually enjoy the constant change of topics, the new research that each of these requires, and the quick satisfaction of "getting a job done." What gets hard sometimes is remembering all the different sources of information for each of these jobs. Yes, I have the translation memory(s) and terminology database(s), but especially for smaller jobs it often doesn't pay to convert/align external material into data that can be used within my TEnT. Here are some places on my computer that I find helpful to develop as "workspaces." They are easily set up and just as easily taken down when I'm done with the job.

The Quick Launch toolbar on the Windows Taskbar has to be the first among equals (if yours doesn't show, right-click on the Taskbar and select Toolbars> Quick Launch). This is the place where you can store links to your favorite programs, locations on your hard drive, or even web links very easily.

To store a link to a program, copy it from the listing in the Start> Programs menu by dragging it down to the Quick Launch area while pressing the Ctrl key. If your program is not listed there, you can go to the location on your hard drive where it is installed, look for the .exe file (if you can't see the extension, select Tools> Folder Options> View and unselect Hide extension for known file types in Windows Explorer), and press the Ctrl and Shift keys as you drag and drop the link to the Quick Launch area.

To store a link to a location on your hard drive (where you may have some reference material, glossaries, or whatever you need for the job), open Windows Explorer to the correct location and simply drag the address that is displayed in the address field (no need to press any key) down to the Quick Launch. Clicking on the link will open Windows Explorer right where you want it.

And lastly, you can of course also store web links in the same manner. No matter whether you use Internet Explorer or Firefox (Opera does not work this way), you can simply drag the URL from the address bar to the Quick Launch area. If the website has a favicon (the little icons that are displayed to the left of the web address in the browser), this will automatically be displayed. If it does not and you get confused by all the identical-looking icons in your Quick Launch area, you can simply right-click, select Properties, and change the icon.

Of course, you could achieve the same with the Links toolbar in either Firefox or IE (to which you can also drag locations on your hard drive or, in the case of IE, links to programs), but that way you still have to open a program before clicking on the respective links. If you feel you just don't have enough space in your Quick Launch area, you can drag the Taskbar up to make it more roomy. If it now takes too much room away from the rest of your screen, you can right-click on the Taskbar, select Properties, and check Auto-hide the taskbar. Oh, all the things you can do!

Another favorite shortcut of mine is in MS Office applications in the Open dialog. If you often use or save documents in a specific location on your network or hard drive, you can add a shortcut to that location in the Open and Save As dialog boxes in Office XP and above. The left-hand section of these dialog boxes contains some preconfigured shortcuts (My Documents, Desktop, etc.), and you can add a shortcut here to the location of your choice. Just go to the location that you would like to add, click on the Tools command in the upper right-hand corner of the dialog box, and select Add To My Places. You can now see that a new button was added to the My Places bar on the left side that will now be available in all Office programs.

In Office 2007 programs, you'll need to select the drive, the folder, or the Internet location for which you want to create a link, right-click in My Places, and click Add . . . .

The most powerful alignment tools available -- an essential companion to any translation memory or full-text search tool.

Align with speed and accuracy and increase the performance of your existing tools.

Visit our new Web site at www.terminotix.com.

I asked Daniel Benito of Atril yesterday whether there is anything in the immediate pipeline for the product development of Déjà Vu X. Well, there's nothing happening this week or next, but here are a couple of things that I like about Déjà Vu and that the DV users among you might appreciate.

Funky uses of the lexicon: The lexicon, that ominous third project-internal database, is good for many things -- as the preferred terminology container, as a temporary holding place for data that still needs to be verified before being sent to the terminology database, or as a means to extract terminology before starting a project to get some terminology research out of the way before diving into the midst of things. But aside from that, I use it increasingly often as a means to import data quickly into the translation memory or terminology database. Most (advanced) Déjà Vu users are familiar with the slow performance when it comes to database maintenance. It can take hours to import large external databases into an existing database (and just as long to export it again). Amazingly, importing into the simple lexicon (via File> Import> Lexicon) is done in a snap, and sending the lexicon to either a translation memory or a terminology database (via Lexicon> Send Lexicon to ...) is also done in a heartbeat. Once you are done you can delete your provisional lexicon from your project by simply right-clicking on it and selecting Delete. The additional benefit of this is that even the project-specific data on subject and client are sent as well, which means you don't have to fiddle with SQL commands to add that retrospectively.

And speaking of SQL statements and Déjà Vu (for the uninitiated: SQL stands for Structured Query Language and denotes the languages that most databases understand; unlike human language, there is very little room for error): The most user-friendly place to enter SQL statements is in the project file itself to filter certain rows with certain criteria (and temporarily hide all the other ones). Some of you may be so horrified by the mere mention of SQL that you have never selected SQL Statement in the All Rows drop-down box. Unlike other places in Déjà Vu, there is an additional button on that dialog box that reads Build Expression and which opens yet another dialog that allows you to select any combination of translation unit properties by simply checking the relevant fields to filter your project accordingly. So rather than filtering your project according to "Exact Matches" OR "Fuzzy Matches," you can filter it according to something crazy like "Exact matches that are pending, locked, have multiple matches but are not duplicates."

The resulting SQL code, which looks lovely in this case --

((((Status_1031 \ 1) MOD 2) = 1)) AND ((((Status_1031 \ 1024) MOD 2) = 1) OR (((Status_1031 \ 512) MOD 2) = 1)) AND (((Status_1031 \ 65536) MOD 2) = 1) AND (Duplicate = 0)

 -- is automatically inserted into the query box, and all you do is click on Apply.

Another feature that may not be too obvious is the ability to sort the project alphabetically by clicking on the headers of the source (or target) column. I would not recommend actually translating this way (since you have suddenly lost all context), BUT it's a super helpful feature if you have a large project with hundreds of HTML files (for example) and there is a bunch of code-like stuff being imported. Yes, you can write a little filter to exclude that, but the quick and dirty way to exclude those lines is to sort the project alphabetically so you have all the culprits in one place (assuming they all start with the same letter or number), highlight them all (click on the Escape key to switch to the selection mode), and press F5 to copy source to target. Then right-click, select Do Not Send to avoid messing up your translation memory with garbage, and then right-click again and select Locked. Now you can select the All Rows dropdown, scroll up a little, and select All Except Locked Rows. The ugly buggers are gone (from your sight) and you can now restore the sorting order by clicking on the source language header.

And lastly, Déjà Vu's introduction of a filter for SDLX .itd translation files and SDLX translation memory files seems to have largely gone unnoticed. For no good reason. They work, and they work well.

Oh, how wise those Old English linguists were. They presciently made sure that all the terms in English with that crazy consonant mutation between f and v would be very closely related to the modern computer age, and the results of saving your data . . . or not.

Be that as it may, here are a few back-up applications that I have recently stumbled upon (or were pointed to).

The man with my dream job -- David Pogue of the New York Times -- wrote an interesting article on a new application called SugarSync. This program goes about online backups (remember my article on Carbonite a few weeks ago?) in a very different manner. Just like other online backup services, it stores your documents on an online server. However, SugarSync's trick is that it then automatically syncs those stored documents with other versions of the same document that you may have on other computers, including Windows, Macintoshes, or even mobile devices. This means that if you continue your translation in a Word document on a Macintosh laptop while travelling, you'll have the translated document on your Windows desktop when you come home. This sounds great, but I think it may not be as perfect for translators as for other groups. One of my main complaints about Carbonite was that it needed a long time to backup huge translation memory files, clearly an essential resource for us, and I would venture to guess that SugarSync will not even try to do that since it is limited to certain file types (which also do not include Outlook files!).

But talking about Outlook files: Here is a very clever and free way to backup your potentially enormous Outlook files and keep them in sync.

Per Tangerud must have been the fifteenth person to write to me about Cobian, a conventional (as opposed to online) backup program which everyone who uses seems fanatical about. I have not tried it, but the references sure sound great.

MemoQ -- the very user-friendly integrated translation environment which surpasses its competitors with its performance, savvy user interface and integration capability.

What's more, you can use MemoQ to translate all SDL Trados TTX files and bilingual documents generated in any version of SDL Trados.

Download the tool now and join the community!

Most of you will have read about the Language Portals that Microsoft has opened in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, and of course English. After being a little irritated that they are construed so they don't work correctly in Firefox or Opera, I spent some time actually looking at the content and liked some of it a lot. For instance, you can search terms from English to 100 languages or language variants within the Microsoft glossaries (the search URL is http://www.microsoft.com/language/en/us/search.mspx?sString=TERM&a
mp;langID=XX-XX for tools like IntelliWebSearch), or you can download the style guides for 35 languages (which many of us had anyway, but it's nice to get the latest version). What I liked as well was the fact that there are links to non-Microsoft events and websites (I missed one to the Tool Kit, though ;-). It's also positive that the language portals in the different languages are not translations of each other but original portals (including blogs and target country-specific events and website links) in the respective languages.

And there are some attempts at "crowd-sourcing." There is a terminology feedback link for all the languages, and the Windows Live Terminology Feedback Project for 38 languages allows users to comment on terms that are to be included in future projects. Let's see how that shapes up. So far (at least in German) there has been fairly little participation -- but I can certainly see that overall this is a positive move.

. . . has been Wikipedia for me. Most of you know that a quick way to find definitions with Google is to enter

define: term

in your search engine. And (almost) invariably a definition in Wikipedia is going to be one of the hits. Once you have found a definition of your specialized term for your translation project in your source language, chances are that there will be a number of links to other languages on the left-hand side. While these are usually original articles rather than translated articles, very often you'll find the heading of the article to be the target language equivalent.

If you would like to promote this newsletter by placing a link on your website, I will in turn mention your website in a future edition of the Tool Kit. Just paste the code you find here into the HTML code of your webpage, and the little icon that is displayed on that page with a link to my website will be displayed.

© 2008 International Writers' Group