A computer newsletter for translation professionals

This month I published an article in a leading Christian magazine on one of my passions, translation of the Bible. I realize that many of you probably don't share my religious beliefs, but do me a favor and follow along intellectually as I recapture some of my thoughts in a very abbreviated form. Why? Because it's a unique example of how powerful translation can be.

Here's the nutshell version: Christians believe that the Bible is inherently translatable because it was explicitly directed at all peoples, who, according to the biblical narrative, will one day join together in an amazing polyglot choir, each singing praises to God in their own languages.

It stands to reason, therefore, that translations of the Bible's message cannot be any less meaningful than the original (especially since much of the "original" story of Jesus is itself a translation into Greek by and about people whose mother tongue was Aramaic). Any other understanding would imply that there are different classes of Christians with different levels of access to essential information, which goes against everything the Christian Bible stands for.

But as translators, we understand that languages are not functional or descriptive equivalents. Each language represents a specific perspective of the world. In my article, I cite the example from many Chinese Bible translations that use a specifically created pronoun for God which renders God neither male nor female nor gender-less; instead, it refers to God in the third person with a divine gender (祂), a felicitous and organic figure of speech that is impossible in Hebrew or Greek or most other languages. The surprising power of this divine pronoun is that even if you can't read Chinese (or another language where a similar kind of exposition may emerge), your own view is expanded just by learning that a human language can shake off the shackles of other languages and express what must have been meant in the first place.

That's the super-condensed version of my article, but the significance to us as translators is this: in the case of Bible translation, the source text is dependent on the target texts, because only in the many thousands of target texts is the true meaning revealed. I'm not aware of any other situation where that is the case.

And here is as radical a change of gears as you may ever find...

The other day I found this in my Twitter inbox (I use a tool that delivers tweets right into Outlook):

Goodness, I thought! The great MT apologist Kirti Vashee (kvashee) has really changed his mind about machine translation! As you may have already guessed, however, "Arse" turned out to be a fragment of the far less scandalous "Arsenal" once I expanded the text.

Remarkable nevertheless.

And just to emphasize Twitter once more: if you haven't already, it's time to seriously consider joining the Twitter community of translators. It's becoming more and more relevant, and it's an increasingly good place to forge relationships and find information and work. Don't know where to start? Start with subscribing to Jeromobot's (my) account. I try to disseminate the information that's important for translators, such as this very poetic quote by John Wray: "Translators should have parks and streets and sailing ships named after them." 

Here is a tip from Mats Linder, author of the Trados Manual: the ABBYY Screenshot Reader is a clever tool that allows you to capture text in any dialog box or any kind of screen with the help of an internal optical character recognition (OCR) process. I've generally used the text-capturing mode of the screen capture tool SnagIt, which also is able to turn screenshots into text, but it can't cope with any image-based screenshot since it cannot use OCR (and is sometimes a little temperamental). Plus, the nice thing about ABBYY's product is that it's often tucked away as a freebee in the full FineReader product that you might already own.

Flash has traditionally not been a very translation-friendly format. It was difficult to get to the text if you didn't have a copy of the expensive Adobe (formerly: Macromedia) Flash Professional. Any Flash source file (*.fla) created from Flash Professional CS5 on (the current version is CS6) follows the same structure that many other file formats use: it's actually a compressed file that contains XML files which in turn contain the translatable text. All you need to do is rename the *.fla file to a *.zip file and unzip it (leaving the folder structure intact), locate the *.xml files with the translatable text and translate them (in a text editor or, even better, in a translation environment tool), place the translated *.xml files in their original folder, zip the whole folder structure up again, rename from *.zip to *.fla, and you're done. This of course presupposes that the creator of the Flash file knew what s/he was doing and created an internationalization-ready file rather than having text sit in images, for example.

How do I know all of this? I found it in a great article in MultiLingual Magazine. Though you might not be able to access this article without a valid subscription, you can get the next three digital issues for free if you enter the promo code d90jst at www.multilingual.com/promo.

And here is one more tip: I've always maintained that Internet Explorer's primary benefit as a browser (I usually use Firefox) is its ability to directly import glossaries (you can right-click on them and select Export to Microsoft Excel). Only recently did I realize that you can actually do that directly in Excel without going through IE. Open Excel, select Data> From Web, enter the URL of the webpage that contains the glossary, select the table in the dialog that is displayed, and click on Import. Tada!

Download the full-featured trial version, attend the online training, and join us for free educational webinars. Learn more at http://kilgray.com.

Kilgray looks forward to meeting you at the company's fifth international memoQfest conference (http://memoqfest.org) on 8-10 May 2013 in Budapest, Hungary where you can learn more about memoQ and the technology behind it.

I'm excited to be teaching a number of workshops in the next few months, and I hope to have some of you join me.

The first workshop, in connection with the ITI conference in London on May 17, is unfortunately sold out, but you're welcome to join us for a talk I will give at the same conference on May 18.

Then it's on to Kiev for the Ukrainian Translation Industry Conference where I will speak on Sunday, May 19, and present a whole-day workshop on May 20.

And, yes, then I'll sleep for a couple of days once I get home (and get ready for my daughter's high school graduation).

Another very exciting opportunity will be in connection with the new Graduate Studies in Interpreting and Translation at the University of Maryland (you can read about the Herculean efforts involved in starting that program in an article by David Sawyer and Shawn Parry-Giles in this edition of the ATA Chronicle). I will be teaching a three-day workshop on July 25-27 at the University of Maryland. It would be great to see some of you there for that intensive class.

During the same month (I'm not sure about the exact dates), Lynn Visson will be teaching a workshop on Conference Terminology and Procedures at the same venue as well.

Awhile back I spotlighted a whole bunch of articles on books from translators about translation, and in particular about the business of translation. I covered books by Alex Eames, the Jenner twins, Chris Durban, and Corinne McKay. When I wrote about Corinne's How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator -- which I really liked -- I mentioned that she was working on her second book, a collection of many of her blog posts from her well-known Thoughts on Translation blog in book form. And though a little later than originally planned, this has now been released (you can also find it on Amazon) under the same name as the blog, and it's a very helpful read, indeed.

Corinne is special. While so many of us (read: I) tend to be rather chatty when we're writing, she is absolutely to-the-point and methodical when she writes about the many different things you should be considering when starting out as a freelance translator, growing your business, translation quality, the freelance mindset, client relations, translation technology, marketing, financial questions, and various other issues.

Common-sense sections like Using objective data to set your translation rates are helpful for all of us as a reality check, no matter how long we've been in the business. Now, you can also find this same information on her blog, of course, but it makes a lot of difference to me whether I'm reading something well edited and organized in a book or as fragmented posts on a screen (especially when WordPress forces one of its video advertisements on me after reading every post -- a real pet peeve of mine).

Plus, you gotta love a book by someone who explains why she has such a strong tendency to use open-source software: "When I married my tech support (a Unix administrator and free software evangelist) I vowed to love, honor and cherish my husband and forsake the products of a certain software company in the Pacific Northwest if I wanted to continue to get free 24x7 in-house computer help." That's true love!

Unfortunately, she's become a little unfaithful lately (to open-source, not to her husband!) with her change of heart about Trados, but she continues to be a very loyal cheerleader to our profession and the ongoing professionalization of the translation industry.

Make sure to thank Corinne for her well-done book(s) and her great blog when you see her at the next ATA or another conference.

The mentioning of Corinne's open-source aspirations provides a nice segue to the product that I've been waiting to write about for some time now: OmegaT, the open-source tool that just blew me away when I explored it this time.

Before looking at the current version and spending some time with OmegaT's development manager Didier Briel on the phone, I watched a video that I had made three or four years ago as an intro to the then current version of OmegaT. While at very first glance there are some similarities between today's and the previous version, the differences are mind-boggling -- really!

Let's first talk a bit about what OmegaT is, who uses it, and who develops it.

There are only a small handful of open-source translation environment tools primarily geared toward the professional freelance translator, and OmegaT is without a doubt the king of the hill. Last month, for instance, OmegaT was downloaded more than 8,000 times (to bring the total number of downloads to more than 400,000), and even though these downloads include updates of existing users (typically between 8 and 10 updates per year), these are impressive numbers that show that OmegaT is not just used by some isolated software geeks.

Here are some other interesting stats: Spain has the highest number of downloads by far, followed by Japan, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Russia, and, yes, finally the US. The statistics for the operating system-specific downloads are also revealing: OmegaT can be run on Windows, Mac, or Linux because it's built for Java, which rides on top of other operating systems so to speak (if you feel insecure about Java after recent security scares, here are instructions on how to keep Java on your computer but disable it for browsers, which was the reason for the security breaches). 76% of all downloads are for Windows computers, with the remaining 23% about evenly split between Mac and Linux -- again a sign that OmegaT is much more mainstream than one might expect. (All these numbers can be found on OmegaT's Sourceforge site, where you download the program and where most of the development efforts are organized.)

What differentiates OmegaT's profile from other open-source products, according to Didier, is that the project is not run by one geeky developer whose manic phases directly affect the tool's success (I added that last bit); instead, it's run by a team. Didier Briel is the development manager, Alex Buloichik is the lead developer, Marc Prior is the project coordinator and website manager, Vincent Bidaux is the (new) documentation manager, and Jean-Christophe Helary manages localization and the (very supportive) user group. Among these folks, Didier and Alex are the only true developers. Naturally there are a whole bunch of other contributors working on the software as well. These guys submit changes to Didier, who decides whether to integrate them.

(Should the volunteer developer not be happy about a possible rejection, s/he is free to fork his project off the main development effort and essentially start a new product on the basis of OmegaT's source code. This happened awhile back amidst some conflict and hurt feelings with the so-called OmegaT+, though this forked project has apparently now peacefully fallen asleep.)

I was interested to learn that there are also commercially sponsored developments. On this page you can find a list of previous sponsors who essentially paid for the OmegaT development team's time to create a specific feature that those sponsors wanted to see implemented, but which then also made it into the commonly available application. (Didier gave one example of a recent Egyptian sponsor who paid for better bi-directional language support, which supposedly is now in good shape -- contrary to what some versions of the documentation say.)

A significant sponsor right now is Welocalize -- a language service provider that many of you will be familiar with. Welocalize is looking at OmegaT for two reasons: First, they themselves manage an open-source translation management system called GlobalSight. While GlobalSight comes with a bare-bones online editor for translation, their translators often prefer to translate offline on their desktops. This can presently be done only via XLIFF or various SDL products (TagEditor, Trados Workbench, WorldServer). Since most of these SDL products are increasingly outdated, and since it cannot be in the interest of Welocalize to continue supporting SDL, they needed a new offline editor. Their initial investment into the open-source OpenTM2 has really not gone anywhere, so they have now chosen OmegaT and have invested a "significant amount," according to Didier, into the development of some features (including better tag protection and a better matching of TMX and XLIFF results).

The second reason Welocalize (together with the Centre for Next Generation Localisation) is investing into OmegaT is because of a project called iOmegaT (thanks to John Moran for this info). This is a version of OmegaT used to measure MT post-editing productivity in comparison to TM-based translation. These features may or may not make it into OmegaT. You can find more information about that project right here.

I asked Didier about the desirability of working with large LSPs like this. In general, he said, the OmegaT team really welcomes partnerships with sponsors because it allows for the integration of features that would otherwise take a lot longer to develop. The partnership with Welocalize was not easy to forge but is now seen as positive, particularly because there are hopes that OmegaT will eventually become more attractive for agencies as well as translators (and be therefore able to cover the whole translation spectrum).

One major step toward making that a real possibility is the new possibility to run real-time collaborative projects with OmegaT. You can find a good description in this blog.

Did you read it? Are you a little confused? Me, too.

I asked Didier about the very technical nature of this and, yes, he said, you'll want a technical lead to set up a network -- once that's done, everything else is easy.

There is a strange and remarkable dichotomy between the technical and easy-to-use parts in OmegaT. When you start the program, the initial screen has information on how to get started with OmegaT in five minutes. And they're not kidding. To use the basic features, you just start using the program and it works. When it comes to fine-tuning the OmegaT set-up, you might find some items available in menus and with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), but for other features you'll have to manually set up files and alter code. For instance, I wanted to see how to activate machine translation engines. Though it was easy to locate the information in the documentation, it took me some time to find the right file that I needed to enter the code that I received from Google and Microsoft to activate their engines. Or another example: to change keyboard shortcuts, you actually have to create some files that will cause the desired change. If you take your time to think through it, you'll get it done; if not, you'll end up being frustrated.

But there are so many great things as well.

The interface is super easy and user-friendly: the actual translation is done in a non-tabular, horizontal layout. If you have to deal with inline tags (tags within segments), they are clearly set apart from the translatables. Any panes with access to terminology, translation memory, machine translation, or comments can be arranged like you want and even dragged to a second monitor. And while I wish there were more right-click menus, the actual menus are well organized and give you the necessary access to available features.

Two things that I used to complain about the most are fixed. Previously there was not a good way to enter terminology into the glossary as you were translating -- now it's done in a snap with a great GUI all ready for you to use. And, more importantly, it was difficult to translate MS Office files (they had to be converted into OpenOffice files first) -- and now it's no problem to translate files from MS Office 2007 and above.

The range of other directly supported file formats is very impressive and includes TXT, PROPERTIES, PO, INI, SRT (subtitle), Open Document Formats, (X)HTML, XLIFF, RESX, LaTex, Wordfast TXML, and Visio files. When I say that these files are supported directly, it means that there are other file fomats that are supported indirectly through the open-source Rainbow application. You can find instructions on how to prepare files specifically for OmegaT with Rainbow right here. The file types you might want to use with that route include most XML formats, FrameMaker MIF, bilingual DOC, and Trados TTX files.

OmegaT also includes a very cool project concept: you can have numerous files of various different formats within a project that automatically open one after the other as you translate, and any search-and-replace action can be done simultaneously in all files. 

Another special feature is that the TM consists of an unconverted TMX file rather than a database system. This circumvents any necessary TM conversions or imports/exports of TM data (particularly because OmegaT actually automatically produces three versions of TMX files in different flavors of TMX). There is currently a limit to the size of the TMX file, but the only actual example Didier could cite was that it couldn't handle the EU's obscenely large Acquis Communautaire.

Yet another nice feature is the possible inclusion of Language Tools for inline grammar and style checking for a number of languages (inline spell checking is done independently of that).

And there is no worry about missing out on instruction for OmegaT: the manual is very comprehensive (Vito Smolej, the former documentation manager, wanted to create the "holy grail" of documentation, according to Didier). The new doc manager will approach things a little differently, including making French (rather than English) the authoring language. Because this is a volunteer effort, the currently 20+ different translated versions of the manual cover OmegaT anywhere between version 1.4.4 and the current version 2.6.3 (only English covers that version). Plus, be aware that the English documentation itself has various versions: the help system within OmegaT is slightly outdated, whereas the HTML version (found by a link in the installation folder) is current.

There are a good number of other resources dealing with OmegaT. There are plenty of how-to's and other information listed on Omegat.org, I already mentioned one really great blog, another one is right here, and then there's Qabirias's full-fledged manual (in Italian).

The OmegaT team is very excited right now because they feel that a new grassroots ecosystem has sprung up in the last few months, partly due to some of the independent resources listed above and partly due to the new server version of OmegaT.

I also was excited to get re-acquainted with this tool. I never disliked OmegaT -- in fact, I always admired it -- but I also felt that it was limited due to its missing file support for Office files and the poor terminology management. With those problems out of the way and the addition of many other powerful features, this is a tool that has no reason whatsoever to hide behind its commercial competitors. Just the opposite, in fact; you should be proud if you're using this tool, not because it's an open-source tool, but because it's a great tool.

Happy birthday Wordbee!

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