A computer newsletter for translation professionals

In this strangest of all weeks -- the week between the years (for those calendars that apply) -- I wish you the very best for the coming year!

Personally, 2012 has been a hard year for me, but as the biblical Preacher says, there is "a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance." So here's to a coming year of laughter and dancing!

He also says that there is "a time to break down, and a time to build up" -- and for our profession, this certainly was a year of building up. Earlier this year I speculated that 2012 just might become the year of the translator, and in many ways I think that I was right. Just look at this: Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World was the first book produced by a major publisher about translators and interpreters from the viewpoint of professionals. The accompanying video -- featuring you -- has been viewed thousands of times. The media coverage -- at least here in the US -- has been phenomenal.

And translation technology has made some fundamental -- and challenging -- jumps forward. Just think about these important advances that happened this year:

• We can mine data from our own and others' translation memories in increasingly comprehensive ways.
• Machine translation has found its way into translation environment tools and the production process of many professional translators.
• These two processes are gradually beginning to communicate with each other.

While not everyone is happy with these changes (especially the second), they are changes nevertheless, and we are free to take them up or leave them aside. This coming year and those that follow will usher in great improvements in how TM and MT are woven together, a new definition and utilization of terminology, and a move away from the desktop and into all browser-based interfaces of our technologies.

Further down in this newsletter you will find the exciting announcement of the long-overdue latest edition of the Tool Box ebook (I hope you'll share my excitement!), but I want to leave you here with this:

In the memorial service following the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, the priest Kathie Adams-Shepherd led the reciting of Psalm 23 by asking the crowd on hand and the much, much larger audience around the world to recite it "in any version you would like." Can you imagine the simultaneous sound of those myriad translations, whether prayed silently or spoken aloud? That's an auditory image that boggles my mind.

For many of you, real-time collaboration with translation environment tools has long become a reality. You are accessing the same translation memories, termbases, and in some cases even the translation files that other translators in your virtual workgroup use and add to at the same time. The vast majority of TEnTs offer this kind of feature nowadays with either a server- or cloud-based setup. In most cases, though, there is one other uniting factor: a corporate edition of the tool is required, something that most freelance translators are not willing or able to purchase.

Recently I took some time to look into which tools offer real-time collaboration in their "freelance" editions (or whatever the "basic" or, in some cases, the only edition might be called).

The list boiled down to a small handful of tools: Wordfast Classic/Anywhere, OmegaT, Lingotek, Google Translator Toolkit, and MemSource.

Let's look into these in more detail.

• It's not surprising to find Google Translator Toolkit on the list; after all, it's built around this very concept. Still, the vast majority of professional translators do not choose GTT for two reasons: the lack of support for commonly used file formats (no support for Word 2007/2010, Excel and PowerPoint files of any version, InDesign, or generic XML files) and, more importantly, concerns about sharing clients' data with the rest of the world.
• I've written about Lingotek a number of times now. It's a great tool, but unfortunately it still lacks a smooth way of applying for a (free) freelance license. However, the makers have promised me repeatedly that freelancers will be issued a license if you just send them a message. Since Lingotek was the precursor to Google's tool in many ways, it's also built around the very concept of sharing data, so it's easy to set up workgroups through which you can share your TM and termbase data in real-time.
• Wordfast Anywhere is the free web-based pendant to the previous two applications. Though I think it was built primarily for access from anywhere with an Internet connection (Wordfast Anywhere), it has become the heart of sharing for Wordfast. It's easy to share TMs and termbases through the online interface, and interestingly it's those databases that you can also connect to through Wordfast Classic, the Word-based version of Wordfast. Some of you might remember the VLTM (Very Large Translation Memory) concept that Wordfast pioneered years and years ago -- an online TM that consisted of publically available and aligned resources that could be accessed from within Wordfast -- and later the ability to create and share TMs with an additional little application that you had to install. All this is now accessible right in the Word interface through your Wordfast Anywhere account (your registration email just has to be the same for both --  you can find a demo right here). Very clever if you ask me.
• Also, the tool that never stops surprising (well, I should probably say never stops surprising me) -- OmegaT -- also offers the real-time sharing of translation data. True to the nature of an open source tool, the setup is a little more involved, but you can find a good description right here.
• And lastly, MemSource, the tool that I've written about a number of times in the last year or so, is offering the 1+Freelancers edition that allows you to build up projects with TMs and termbases that can be shared in real-time with colleagues. If you remember, MemSource first started off with a Word-based interface, which was quickly abandoned in favor of a platform-independent XLIFF editor that you can download for free and install. While this editor is and will still be available, it is now offered in combination with a highly usable, completely browser-based editor. In fact, you actually have to look twice to distinguish it from the desktop application.

As far as I can see, that's it. Of course, there are a lot of projects for which real-time sharing has been enabled through customized or packaged software, especially when it comes to crowdsourcing, but the administration of these is not within the freelance translator's reach.

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When I first started publishing my ebook, The Translator's Tool Box: A Computer Primer for Translators, I prided myself on distributing new editions with the latest and best information every couple of weeks. Well, this became a little more difficult as the number of readers and the volume of material grew. Never would I have imagined, though, that I would actually go two years without releasing a new version.... My excuse? Well, I've been pretty busy with another little project (aka Found in Translation), and there was a certain consensus in my family that it might be important to work on more profitable projects (that would be: translation) at least every once in a while....

So, I'm a little embarrassed that the update took so long, but I'm also tickled beyond description. The new version is really everything I had hoped for. Every one of the more than 400 pages was checked for current relevance and updated accordingly. Here are some of the new topics that were included:

• Everything you need to know about Windows 8
• Updated information on how to deal more easily with PDF files
• Updated information on new versions of translation environment tools (Trados Studio 2011, Déjà Vu X2, Wordfast Classic, memoQ 6, and many others) and completely new TEnTs
• Added sections on MT add-ons within TEnTs; on differences in work environments in TEnTs; on exchanges between different translation environment tools; and on browser-based TEnTs
• A revised chapter on desktop publishing
• An added section on working with XML with embedded HTML
• And a lot more

Also, the book comes not only as a PDF file but also as an HTML help file (the same information but much easier access), plus I reinstated the policy that everyone who purchases a book gets one free year of access to the Premium version of this newsletter. (If you're already subscribed, I'll just tag the additional year on to your existing subscription.)

Wow, you must be exclaiming, this must be hundreds and hundreds of dollars! Nah -- not even! It's just $50 if you've never owned the book before, or $25 for an update to any previous version.

(And now you know why my family regularly urges me to work on more profitable projects!)

By the way, if you are teaching any kind of class on translation and you'd like to use the book as a textbook, let me know. I'll send you a free preview copy and give you information on special pricing for your students.

Yes, there is a Trados Studio manual!

Greeted with accolades; joint receiver of the SDL OpenExchange popularity prize.

". . . communicates both to a novice as well as a more advanced user." - Jost Zetzsche

"I am finally taking the most out of Studio 2011" - Alejandro Moreno-Ramos

As a year-end surprise of sorts, Kilgray, the maker of memoQ and other products, decided to launch a web-based tool called Language Terminal. The tool is interesting in itself, but it has a wealth of additional possibilities beyond what is currently offered.

Here is what Language Terminal offers right now:

• memoQ users can use it as a place to upload and back up their own projects (using up to 1 GB of space).
• memoQ users can upload their memoQ resources and share with other users (in memoQ talk, "resources" are things like segmentation rules, auto-translate rules, keyboard shortcuts, QA settings, etc.).
• Everyone can use the Language Terminal to upload original InDesign INDD files and have them converted to XLIFF files.

For this last feature, let me quote from an article that I recently published in Translation Journal:

The resulting XLIFF file can be translated with any supporting tool -- essentially every translation environment tool supports XLIFF. If you don't use memoQ, it admittedly takes a bit of finagling with the Language Terminal file before you can process it in another tool -- but the MQXLZ file you receive is actually just a zipped file, so you can simply extract the XLIFF file. Ideally you will want to process it in memoQ, though, since here you can see a very cool live preview of your translation in the original InDesign layout as you translate.

Be aware that the resulting InDesign file will be in the latest version of InDesign -- regardless of the version that you originally uploaded -- and this might or might not be what your client wants. Still, this could make a real difference when it comes to processing DTP files. (For more thoughts on that, I invite you to read the Translation Journal article that I referenced above.)

When I chatted with the folks from Kilgray about the tool, they exhibited a certain sense of giddiness about its potential. Clearly, while this is a great and free offer at this point, Language Terminal has a rich development road ahead of it. Here are just a couple of the ideas that came up during the conversation (all still in the theoretical realm).

• Elsewhere in the newsletter I talk about tools that allow real-time sharing and administration of TM and termbase resources in freelance editions. That's certainly a possibility with Language Terminal, and one that would give memoQ an immediate lift into the cloud (in the technical sense, that is).
• It could also become an elevated meeting place of sorts, not of the cheap ProZ kind, but one where only quality projects might be exchanged or offered. Kilgray just might have the momentum to do this successfully.

Or . . . well, we'll wait and see what happens, and you'll be among the first to know. 

Here are some of the tools I've come across fairly recently that would make just perfect (albeit tardy) stocking stuffers (especially since most of them are free):

• CheckMate is a free, cross-platform QA tool from the Okapi family of tools. It allows you to work with bilingual files such as XLIFF, TMX, PO, TTX, or bilingual RTF files and checks things such as repeated words, corrupted characters, differences in tags, lengths of translations, leading and trailing spaces, etc.
• A new version of CodeZapper, the powerful eliminator of underlying codes in Word documents that often present problems with translation environment tools, has been released (that's one of the tools I use very regularly).
• A web-based tool by the lovely name of TuMatXa serves as a translation memory repository that allows you to manage and share your TMs online. Unfortunately, it is presently available only for Linux.
• Also available only on a non-Windows platform is the Mac-based TMX Assistant to, well, manage translation memory exchange files. It looks interesting (though I haven't tried it), but I'm surprised by the relatively high price of $24, especially since the other great TMX editor Olifant is available for free (though Olifant is not available for a native Mac platform).
• Michael Farrell, the creator of IntelliWebSearch, has a receptive ear for the very rare criticism he receives about his otherwise flawless tool. (For you few who aren't yet acquainted, it's an indispensable resource to quickly search through online and offline resources with a few keyboard shortcuts. It's easily my most often-used tool after my browser and email client.) The criticism? Many found it hard to "program" their own search scripts. To fix that Mike now offers a database where you can find and download language-specific search scripts to install in IntelliWebSearch or contribute some of those that you have created yourself. Everyone together, now: thank you, Mike!
• A tool of a different kind is the T-Index published annually by translated.net. Here you can find a fabulous list showing how important it is to translate which languages to reach what audience. It's a fantastic sales tool (and it's interesting in its own right)!
• Finally, Xbench, the awesome localization tool par excellence, has accomplished what I had prophesied (and hoped) long ago: they have started to charge for their tool. Oh, I don't mind not paying for good stuff, but I also know that there is a different and heightened kind of attention that's awarded to things with perceived commercial value -- on the side of both the user and the supplier. Case in point: the lovely new website at www.xbench.net and, of course, the new release of version 3.0 (with 64-bit support;support for new versions of memoQ, Wordfast Pro, and Déjà Vu; support for multilingual TMX files and the new Apple glossaries; and an integration with MemSource Editor). What surprised me and others is the relatively high price for the new version (though the old 2.9 version will be offered as freeware indefinitely): it's 99 euros per year. While there are some interesting ways those licenses are being used (you can distribute shares of the license to your heart's content), I predict that they will eventually have to come down in price. BUT, either way, you can purchase an annual license right now for 19 euros through January 10, with gradual increases continuing until the end of the beta period.

As a subscriber to the Premium version of this newsletter you have access to an archive of Premium newsletters going back to May 2008.

You can access the archive right here. This month the user name is toolbox and the password is donkeykong.

New user names and passwords will be announced in future newsletters.

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Here is one websites that mentioned the Tool Box last month:

http://tradosstudiomanual.com/

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© 2012 International Writers' Group