In my last newsletter I praised Déjà Vu's support of SDLX .itd files (the SDLX translation work file format). And, indeed, I happen to have worked on a couple of SDLX projects since the last newsletter and all of them worked fine within Déjà Vu.

However, David Poole of the SDLX development team emailed several shortcomings of the Déjà Vu filter for his format:complex files that are conversions of yet other TEnT formats and files that originate from the SDLX Elite program are not supported; comments are not imported (or exported); and locked rows are not recognized. I asked for permission to pass some of these files on to the Atril development team, and before I knew it a super-productive discussion had developed between David and Daniel Benito of Atril on what could be done to improve Déjà Vu's filter for SDLX files.

All I can say is hats off to that kind of cooperative attitude among competitors. We need more of that!

I have mentioned Forum Open Language Tools (FOLT) before, a German translation industry association whose goals are to support open-source and non-proprietary software and technologies and to standardize exchange formats in the translation sector.

One of the first products inspired by FOLT has just been released by Frank Bergmann, the man who is also behind ]project-open[. While ]project-open[ is an open-source project management product with a lot of proprietary modules, Frank's new FOLT-inspired TinyTM is a "small but powerful open-source translation memory." Frank stresses that TinyTM is not a product that is in any way ready for production work, and so far only a first module that needs to work with Microsoft Word 2003 is available for download.

Its goal is "to deliver a commercial-grade translation memory as open-source software." Rather than compete with other open-source projects like OmegaT,Frank aims to integrate its translation memory back-end, a TM server based on the PostgreSQL 8.2 database, with OmegaT and other tools, including of course his own ]project-open[.

Unfortunately I haven't had the time to test TinyTM yet, particularly since the TinyTM website is down at the moment, but this seems to be just one more step toward diversification of the TEnT market by someone who has shown in the ]project-open[ product that he is able to deliver.

While we're talking about open source, here are two more items: Marta García, a professional translator and a teacher of translation in Spain, is conducting a survey for a research paper on open-source software for translators. There are four parts to the survey, but most of you will only qualify to answer two of them:

• Use of Open Source Software for Translators: General Questionnaire
• Use of Open Source Software by Windows Users
• Use of Open Source Software by GNU/Linux Users
• Use of Open Source Software for Mac Users

And finally, here are two websites that I recently stumbled on that have interesting links to open-source and free software for the Mac: www.opensourcemac.org and www.freesmug.org.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) -- i.e., the ability to scan a document and make a program such as ABBYY Finereader or Nuance OmniPage turn it into an electronic document that we can use with TEnTs -- is an often tedious process, but it's here to stay for the time being. In my translation activities I only have to deal with these projects every once in a while, but for others this is a common scenario.

Unfortunately, the above-mentioned programs are not exactly cheap. And since many of us also have to deal with pesky PDFs (remember what PDF really stands for: Pretty Darn Frustrating), we have often chosen to purchase the less expensive siblings of the above programs that allow us to do the conversion from PDF to a number of other digital formats by internally OCR'ing the file (i.e., Nuance's PDF Converter or Abbyy's PDF Transformer). Maybe I'm just kind of slow, but what I never realized until last week is that there really is no reason to ever buy the more expensive full-fledged OCR programs (unless you have to do some really heavy-duty OCR'ing). It's fast and easy to scan any document, save it as an image file, convert the image file to a PDF (in the case of Adobe Acrobat you can do this with a right-click command within Windows Explorer), and then open that file with the Converter/Transformer solution.

Another case are password-protected PDFs. Of course, there are various levels of password protection. The most relevant ones for us are typically the password protection to open a PDF file and the one to edit/print, etc. If you know only the open password but not the edit one, your OCR program (should) prohibit you from reading your file. Becky Blackley had an interesting suggestion on how to legally circumvent this restriction:

You can use SnagIt [a high-powered screen capture tool] to capture a page, click the Copy All icon on the toolbar, and then just paste it into the OCR program [or save as an image]. It takes only a matter of seconds to copy and paste a page. Do this to add each page of the document to the OCR batch. Then have the program read all the pages at once. 

Now we can justify buying SnagIt as a business expense. It's not just for fun anymore (although, Lord knows, it is fun). It sure was a big help in getting a totally locked PDF file into a workable format.  And think of all the trees that were saved by not having to print the document! (I live in a forest, so I'm fond of trees.) Cool.

And cool it is.

Oh, here is one more little PDF trick that can be helpful. It's often important to understand the source format of a certain PDF. This is important for you as a translator because if you find out that the source format was InDesign or Quark, there are additional hurdles to cross -- even if you get your hands on the source file -- and, of course, it's even worse if the originating file format is a graphic file and/or scanned page. To quickly find out with Adobe Acrobat/Reader, right-click into the open PDF. Even if it is just displayed within your browser window, select Document Properties> Description and in 90% of all cases you can see it right there (although when I did this yesterday to a PDF, the PDF creator had entered smiley faces into the appropriate fields, so I guess he got the last laugh on that one).

Sometimes it takes someone else pointing out that something you worked on actually turned out to be pretty good before you realize it yourself. This is what happened with TranslatorsTraining.com after I read this review in MultiLingual. It also occurred to me that the strongest point for signing up at TranslatorsTraining.com is this: No matter whether you are already a TEnT user and would like to see what else is out there, or whether you still need to take the plunge -- to truly test all the products, it would cost you a week to download, install, and test the available programs (this doesn't count the time you need to restore your messed-up computer a number of times in the process). And even that wouldn't give you a complete overview of what you can truly do with these tools because, well, you still wouldn't really know them. The Flash tutorials at TranslatorsTraining.com of tools like across, Déjà Vu, MemoQ, Similis, OmegaT, Star Transit, Wordfast, Lingotek, Trados, SDLX, Heartsome, Metatexis, and MultiTrans (Swordfish and Cafetrans will be added next week) are built around the concept of an easy one-to-one comparison that will allow you to do that one-week chore in two hours. Max. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Oh, and MultiLingual has again allowed me to pass on four free digital editions to you. If you go to www.multilingual.com/promo and enter D74TKA as your promo code, you can read the review of TranslatorsTraining.com in the current issue, and receive the next three issues in their beautiful online edition.

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There is one huge drawback to being able to index and quickly search email files: I don't do a good job of managing my email anymore. The days of sorting everything into folders are long gone for me -- I just don't take/have the time to do it. As a result, at this very moment I have 173 messages that are highlighted as "need to respond to," 8165 messages in my inbox that were deemed important enough not to be deleted and are supposed to be archived at some point, 11902 messages in my Sent Items folder . . . well, you get the picture. Of course, one other result of this overload is the file size. I happen to use Outlook and all files, including all attachments, are saved in one large .psd database file. While supposedly the size limit for Oulook 2003 .psd files is 20 GB, it's a safe guess to assume that this does not make backups and other procedures any easier.

To store attachments in a separate location and delete them from the Outlook file, I discovered a handy little plugin called EZDetach. While it doesn't look like much, it provides a plethora of options for your attachments -- and you would be wise to try to understand them as much as you can before running the tool and/or create a backup of your email before doing anything. After a couple of unwise strategies for running the tool (and subsequent restores of my Outlook file), I ended up having the tool create folders named after everyone who has sent me email, and then storing all the attachments there with the file names changed so that the reception date is added. The emails themselves retain links to the attachments, and I'm having a much easier job of managing my email.

For Mozilla Thunderbird there is a similar program called Attachment Extractor. While Thunderbird does not store everything in one hideously large database file, the attachments are still part of the email message and cannot be accessed independently.

Sometimes when I write something in this newsletter, a voice inside tells me that I should refrain because I realize that I really don't know enough about it. This was the case when I mentioned the use of Wikipedia for terminology research in the last newsletter. Now, what I described is still a good method to research terminology, but it didn't even begin to scratch the surface -- as I realized when Alain Désilets pointed me to one of his many papers on the subject of Wiki-like collaboration and translation: www.aslib.com/conferences/TranslationWikified.pdf. It's one of those papers where I actually felt justified in cutting down a little tree by printing it out. I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of translators are not aware of the many Wiki(-like) projects that are going on to try to find reasonable ways to make MOC (Massive Online Collaboration) work for translation purposes.

Of course, this might at first glance have the same kind of job-threatening feel that some of us associate with machine translation (and indeed Alain describes a link between the two), but it can only help us to familiarize ourselves with it and find good and profitable ways to co-exist, or even better, contribute.

Herbert Eppel agreed that it is helpful to customize My Places in the Office Open and Save as dialogs, but he also pointed me to a tool which truly leaves that feature in the dust: File-Ex. With File-Ex you can change virtually any Open and Save as dialog on your Windows system (only up to XP!) to something a lot more useful than just for opening or saving files, including searching for files, remembering recent files, and many other things. I'm not yet sure that this is necessarily worth US$20, but it's definitely worth giving it a shot with the trial version. (Because remember: 10 saved clicks a day turns into 3650 clicks a year, which turns into five saved hours, which turns into . . . ).

You might get tired of me continuously writing about IntelliWebSearch, but it is worthwhile to note that  Michael Farrell, the tool's creator, has released a new version that now contains a wizard to simplify adding new searches to online and offline sources alike.

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© 2008 International Writers' Group