At fairly regular intervals, news services for the translation industry pop up. I usually watch those a little bit to see how they perform and how useful they are, but more often than not, they don't last particularly long and they really are just news aggregators -- something that's no longer particularly useful in these social media times.

So when Slator entered the scene last year, I was surprised to see a couple of relatively high-profile founders, but I still didn't expect too much from it. Well, it looks like I was wrong. Not so much about the founders -- Florian Faes is a former exec at CLS Communications and Andrew Smart is a highly experienced media personality -- but about their performance.

Slator publishes between one and three extremely well-written and well-researched articles a day (the eventual goal is five per day) that deal with all kinds of angles of the world of translation. Here is a sampling of articles of the past week:

• EU Commission to Pay for Translation When Online Shopping Goes Wrong (Note: this has the potential to be a real boost for European translators)
• Just How Big Is the Natural Language Processing Market?
• Transifex Appoints Three New Execs, Considers New Funding Round in 2016
• Microsoft Integrates Localization Kit Into Visual Studio in First Major Release
• The Rolex of Translation: Switzerland's Federal Language Services (Note: USD .40 per word anyone?)
• Spanish Translation Team of Crowdsourced Game Localization Goes on Strike (Note: great story that shows the risks of crowdsourcing)
• Translation Case Against South African Government Reaches Supreme Court
• Lawyers Excited by New US Patent Portal's Machine Translation

You can see that the range of topics is very wide. And while not always relevant to everyone within translation, they're always relevant to the world of translation as a whole. Plus, they are almost always original pieces of research (and avoid the unsavory, gossip-like stories that we're surrounded by a-plenty).

While Slator is certainly a different kind of animal than Common Sense Advisory, they cover some equal ground and that's a good thing in my view--it's not good to have only one outlet as the one everyone (including investors) refers to.

Today, Slator has two experienced full-time employees in the Philippines (Marion Marking and Gerard Castañeda), so it's a rather professional organization. I talked to Florian about his business model and how they're going to make sure they can keep up the high volume of information (or even increase it).

Aside from some advertising, some sponsored content, and a news release service, he pointed to an "RFP Center" and a job board to finance some of the operations. Another source of revenue is the organization of roundtable meetings between translation buyers and LSPs (mostly in Asia).

Florian is Swiss rather than American (or Irish), so he refrained from too much bravado when talking about his site, but he was definitely optimistic about its chances to be profitable and viable.

I really hope that he's right. 

Top-3 most popular posts on the Memsource blog:

• Chart: 15 language combinations with high use of machine translation
• Analytics, Multilingual Excel, InDesign preview in Memsource 5.3
• Sega Networks chooses Memsource

Have you ever encountered a situation where you had a set of Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents and you . . .. No, let me start this differently: Do you remember the last time you had a Word, PowerPoint, or Excel document and you really preferred not to have the name of the reviewer or person who tracked changes displayed? Or you didn't want to show how much time was spent working on the document?

I know, it was probably just last week...

Anyway, there is a very easy and seamless way to do that. In Office 2007 and above, select File (or the Office button) and then choose Prepare> Inspect Document.

This dialog shows up: 

The first two options are the most relevant in our context. Make sure they are selected and click on Inspect. 

You're shown what was found in those areas, and you can now delete all that information. You don't need to worry that comments and track changes will be deleted. Only the name of the person who committed those changes is changed to "Author" and the time stamp is deleted.

Very helpful at times! But, psst, stay undercover and don't tell anyone about it! 

Lilt: a cloud-based CAT tool based on Stanford productivity research.

Real-time adaptive MT, predictive typing of words and phrases.

Tracks throughput for every document/project you translate. Free trial now! 

Here are some things that came across my desk in the last few weeks. (Yes, I know, it's been a little longer than usual between Tool Box Journals, but I promise that the next one will be here quicker than you think!)

I was privileged to be at conferences in Barcelona and Jerusalem during the last couple of weeks (thus the delayed Tool Box Journal) and benefitted from listening to some interesting presentations.

One was by Portuguese "veterinarian-turned-translator-turned-business-owner" Tiago Neto on voice recognition for languages that are not among the eight languages directly supported by Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS). Tiago looked into a lot of different scenarios involving Mac and Windows PCs and in combination with iOS devices (iPhone, iPad) and Android mobile devices.

As noted before, the voice recognition supported by mobile devices (either directly through iOS or through Swype on Android devices) encompasses many more languages (40+) than DNS,and what I find particularly interesting in Tiago's research is how to directly transfer the dictation from the mobile devices into a PC. He achieves this through myEcho ("iOS Dictation for Windows"), TeamViewer, or Unified Remote, each of which essentially forms bridges between the mobile devices and the PC. It works quite beautifully. Don't believe me? Check out his blog post right here.

Magic Search is a search tool that simultaneously searches through many dictionaries. It's been around for a long time, but it's recently been enhanced quite a bit. In this video, SDL's Paul Filkin demonstrates how to integrate it right into Trados Studio. You could do the same with applications like memoQ Web Search or IntelliWebSearch, or just use it as a standalone tool.

You might remember that I previously announced LocJAM, an online contest for game translators.

Here is how the organizers describe it:

This year a short open source board game in English is published on the locjam.org site and everyone has a couple of weeks to submit their translations in French / German / Italian / Japanese / Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Russian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America). A jury of experts then picks their winning amateur and professional translators for each language, which get listed on the site and are offered studio tours. The contest itself is online and you can participate from everywhere in the world, but there are also optional and independent local workshops for those who want to know more about game localization.

This year's edition (3) will run March 14-27. You can find more info on their website or through this slick promo video.

There is no shortage of resources for translators who want to learn to use the open-source translation environment tool OmegaT efficiently. You can find many of them listed on Omegat.org, including Qabirias' full-fledged manual (in Italian).

The same folks who wrote that manual (Qabirias' Marco Cevoli and Sergio Alasia) have now also released a full-fledged OmegaT online course on the Alexandria Library platform (in excellent English).

Marco gave me a ticket to try it out and I really liked it. If you want to learn to use a tool that is easy to get started with but becomes rather complex when using the more advanced features, this course might do the trick.

The course is scheduled to be finished in 20 hours (but I think it can be done more quickly by most). It contains video-based and text-based tutorials with examination portions and the possibility to contact the course's authors.

After starting with an introduction and setup instructions, it covers translation processes and project management as well as advanced features and the (certainly very advanced) team projects process.

For users who only chose OmegaT because it's free, the course's 160-euro fee will sound too steep (even with the current offer of a 30% discount). But for those who have chosen OmegaT because they think it's a good tool that will help them become better translators, this might very well be a worthwhile deal.

Here's something I didn't know and learned from an article by Juan Rowda on LinkedIn.

He describes "advanced image search" on Google Images:

Not bad!

This month's installment of the Tech-Savvy Interpreter is personal, but if you have ever wondered how simultaneous interpreting will find its place among the new communication technologies of the 21^st century, read on. I've dedicated much of the last decade of my career to studying and promoting technologies -- and even creating a technology platform -- that can help improve remote access to simultaneous interpreting services. Why? Because my professional job -- interpreter -- is a direct expression of the fundamental commitment I have to helping people achieve true, meaningful communication. This past month, years of effort paid off in a culminating event that was both humbling and hopeful. The remote interpreting platform I've helped to nurture for five years helped the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in an urgent, multilingual effort to help fight the fast-growing Zika virus epidemic. More on that meeting a little later.

Let me provide some background first, because the journey to that meeting provides a clear and still troubling illustration of how undervalued investment in the infrastructure needed to facilitate global multilingual communication is, as well as the barriers that had to fall to make it possible.

In the last 20 years, the telecommunications world has witnessed a veritable revolution. Voice and video communication has mushroomed. Technologies once only available to the elite have made their way to the masses. Think about it. We now carry the ability to send and receive video calls in our pockets on the screens of our smartphones. Sadly, however, none of these big advances in information and telecommunications technology (ICT) took multilingual communication into consideration.

I can still remember in 2005 attending my first online meeting with audio and screenshare capabilities (there was still no postage stamp video back then). I was coaching a young sales representative on how to give a remote presentation in Spanish to a potential client in Mexico City. He shared his screen and audio with me over the Internet and then gave his presentation, and I dutifully gave him some pointers. While sitting in my home office listening and watching that presentation on my computer, that's when it hit me. How many of these "virtual meetings" take place every single day? How many of these remote meeting platforms exist? Is anyone attempting to build in to these new platforms the capabilities needed to provide remote simultaneous interpretation? Isn't this something interpreters should care about?

Since that time, I have interpreted countless telephone press conferences, negotiations via telepresence, videoconferences and conference calls using off-the-shelf technologies designed for monolingual communication. The working conditions were far from ideal. I usually had to fight for the best position I could get close to the speakerphone so I could even hear what was being said and then interpret consecutively, sometimes shouting, so people in the room and over the phone could hear me. At telepresence videoconference sessions, the interpreters would usually have to sit behind participants and engage in either whispered simultaneous or consecutive interpretation, depending on whether we were listening to audio coming from the videoconferencing unit or to someone in the same room with us. In both scenarios, you'd have to crane your neck and strain your hearing in an attempt to do your job as best you could. All parties involved in these multilingual exchanges usually come away feeling that interpreting is cumbersome and uncomfortable to use, including the interpreters. We'd prefer to be in a nice comfortable booth.

When these platforms (conference phones, videoconferencing units, etc.) were designed and built, none of them took multilingualism into consideration. Why? Because multilingual meetings are a niche. In some cases, a niche within a niche. As interpreters acutely understand, the need for interpretation is usually overlooked until the last minute, and investment capital isn't interested in how worthy a project is. It wants a solid return on investment from a business model that is scalable.

In 2007, I naively decided that I would try to change that. I had relocated to California to teach at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) located just an hour south of Silicon Valley. Miraculously, after several attempts, I did get some business development people to listen. However, as I pitched to some of Silicon Valley's giants the idea of reengineering hardware and software to accommodate simultaneous interpretation, the answer was always the same, "What's the size of the market?" or "Are any of our clients asking for this service now?" Sadly, my answers were, "I'm not sure," and "No, because they don't know they need it." These answers effectively ended most conversations when the "big boys" learned that the potential market couldn't be measured in billions of dollars and consequently wasn't worth their time.

After several years of beating my head against the wall with the tech giants of the day, in 2011, various events converged to create the fertile ground needed to grow a new remote simultaneous interpretation solution. First, I had the good fortune of meeting David Frankel, a Silicon Valley veteran with the interest and skill set to work with me on building and promoting a platform to provide remote simultaneous interpretation for virtual meetings. Second, cloud computing was becoming commonplace.

This mattered because cloud computing made it possible to virtualize or digitalize just about any service (including interpreting) and eventually put it on any device -- telephones, computers, tablets or smartphones. And third, this "virtualization" of services brought down the barrier to entry for thousands of startups around the world, allowing them to build and market their services without having to work with the big tech companies. In short, if you had a good idea and a team with the skills to build it, you could make it happen. So, in 2011, we began designing a cloud-based, multi-channel audio platform to provide remote simultaneous interpretation for virtual meetings. David and I sketched out our first design on a small piece of paper over lunch in Pacific Grove, California.

We officially launched ZipDX Multilingual in 2012 to provide remote simultaneous interpretation for conference calls and webinars. I could write a book on the ups and downs of marketing a novel service with no existing market, but suffice it to say we are still here and we've seen our clientele grow steadily over the years.

Fast forward to 2016. In mid-February, we were contacted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies with an urgent request to support a conference call on how to control the spread of the Zika virus. They needed simultaneous interpretation into six languages -- Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. They needed to conduct this meeting quickly and participants needed to be able to connect by telephone, as internet access was not dependable enough in many of the participating countries. Thus ruling out using a purely web-based conferencing service. Our platform fit their needs perfectly, and the conference call was a resounding success.

Though the ZipDX platform, the IFRC was able to conduct this urgent virtual meeting with local Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in 45 countries in six languages with the use of professional remote simultaneous interpretation. The interpreters were located across Europe and used a virtual interpreter console on their computers (yes, unlike participants, interpreters do connect to the platform using the Internet). Participants were able to listen to and speak in their preferred language.

Although I've been at this for five years now, and the platform we designed and built at ZipDX is already used by many different organizations, this call was special. Special, because it represents what I envisioned almost a decade ago -- empowering multilingual communication through remote simultaneous interpretation and telecommunications technology to make a difference in the world. Something we had worked hard to design was helping specialists around the world to cooperate in an effort to protect public health. It was an honor to provide the technology to make this possible. If you'd like more details about the project you can read the joint press release.

Unlike 10 years ago, there are now many startups in different parts of the world seeking to provide the kind of tools interpreters will need to work remotely and provide interpreting services for the new ways the world communicates. Today there are even investors providing remote interpreting startups with investment capital. It's an exciting time for interpreting, and I am just grateful to be a part of it.

Thanks for your attention, and we'll get back to the geeky stuff next month.

Do you have a question about a specific technology? Or would you like to learn more about a specific interpreting platform, interpreter console or supporting technology? Send us an email at inquiry@interpretamerica.com.

The 3^rd installment of the groundbreaking GALA/InterpretAmerica collaboration think! Interpreting will take place at the 2016 Language of Business Conference in New York City from March 20-23, 2016.

Our innovative program will include a detailed look at new remote interpreting platforms and include insightful discussion about matters directly affecting spoken language services.

GALA 2016 is shaping up to be the biggest and best conference yet with more than 400 attendees already registered. Shouldn't you be there too? Register today! 

It's been several years (five to be exact) since I last talked about Stanislav Okhvat's TransTools. I felt bad when I realized how much time had elapsed because they certainly deserve more frequent mention.

Let me first quickly give an overview of what it is, then let Stanislav speak for himself, and lastly give some examples of why these tools are really quite clever.

TransTools (the site calls them both TransTools and Translator Tools, but Stanislav prefers the former) is a collection of tools for MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Visio, AutoCAD, and a couple of stand-alone tools that prepare files to be processed more easily in translation environment tools, help the actual translation process, and post-process them for quality assurance and formatting. It started off as a smallish collection of helpful tools but is now a proud assembly of around 30 tools, some of which are rather complex.

Aside from seven tools (the Word tools Correctomatic, Unbreaker, Quotation Magic, Document Format Converter, Spellcheck Assistant, and the PowerPoint tools TagCleaner and Unbreaker), they are all free, so I asked Stanislav why and how he is doing all of this and what his future plans are. Here is what he said:

The first thought I had when I read this: I'm so glad there are in-house translators who have evenings with time on their hands!

The second thought: What a nice guy.

Here are some examples of what you can do to Word documents with the tool set. You can clean the document of anything that causes unnecessary tags in a translation environment tool (Document Cleaner), take out any unnecessary hard or soft returns (Unbreaker), exclude text that is not of the source language from the translation process (Dual-Language Document Assistant / Hide/Unhide Text), get rid of unnecessary spaces (Find & Replace Excessive Spaces), place all graphics and embedded files into a new document (Collect all Graphics from Document), automatically convert any measurement or other locale-specific convention (Localisation), set yourself reminders of what needs to be done to the document once the translation process is done (To-Do), automatically change often occurring (mis-) spellings as between US and British English (Correctomatic), set quotes to your target locale's convention (Quotation Magic), set non-breaking spaces where they should be set (Non-breaking Space Checker), check whether there is any text left that was not translated (Language Check), check often occurring terms that need to be changed (Find Multiple Text), increase the power of the MS Office spell-check (Spellcheck Assistant), and so on and so forth.

Time to breathe!

You can find out for yourself what you can do with Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio files, but I do want to highlight the AutoCAD tool, which has a significantly higher degree of customizability than competing products by allowing you to choose exactly what you want to export for translation. The only downside of this tool is that you actually need a copy of AutoCAD on your computer, which most translators don't have (and can't afford). 

crossMarket brings together translation service providers and customers. For freelance translators, the crossMarket membership also includes the basic or premium variant of the Across Translator Edition, depending on their membership type.

Start now and save up to 50%: www.crossmarket.net

Since you asked...

For starters, read the previous Tool Box Journal articles about the tool (here and here) to give you an idea of what Lilt is about.

If you're short on time, here is a one-sentence summary: Lilt is an extremely easy-to-use tool that combines machine translation, translation memory, and a glossary into one entity that interacts with you as you translate and instantaneously learns from any input you give it.

Or here is a shorter sentence: Lilt presents what I believe to be the most productive translation technology for the translator on the market today.

Lilt pace of development has not slowed in the last few weeks, including the addition of EN<>PT. (When I asked Spence Green, Lilt's CEO, about the type of Portuguese, he answered: "We train on all of the publicly available EN<>PT data, which is mostly Iberian. We did find about 100k segments of Brazilian PT, which we included in the bitext. Users so far have found that the system starts adapting to Brazilian PT fairly quickly.") There are also new features like a preview mode, XLIFF export for quality assurance or other external processing, and speed and productivity enhancements. The preview mode, by the way, is not a true preview mode like you know from other translation environments where you have the translated text displayed in fully formatted fashion, but it's a stripped-down, tabular view that allows you to see the translated text in a different, text-only manner next to the source text and where you can also perform quick edits.

They also did comparative productivity testing against Trados Studio (version 2011) with this set-up: They had four testers (actually five, but one of the testers was eliminated because she was too familiar with the source text so her results distorted the end results) who all work as English>French in-house translators for a single-language vendor that works primarily for other LSPs. For that reason, the translators were virtually tool-agnostic because they switch between tools all the time. They naturally use Trados Studio (the agency's main production tool) extensively, and none of them had worked for more than six hours with Lilt.

They all had to translate two different kinds of text (one IT, one tourism-related) for an hour each in Trados and Lilt with the same kind of TM data loaded (in the case of Lilt, the TM data is just added to the MT engine). After the hour had passed, the translated segments were evaluated by the regular editing teams that the agency uses (outside the translation environment at this point so the editors wouldn't know where it originated), and the quality factors were then applied to the resulting word count from the hour-long translations. (The quality turned out to be virtually identical no matter where the text was translated.)

The results? The productivity increase in Lilt averaged approximately 22% with the IT texts and a little more that 13% with the more complex tourism texts. You can read all the details about this little study right here.

The "little" in the previous sentence may indeed be a little problematic. It would've been good to have more than four testers (Spence's goal is to achieve that for the next round of testing), but I (and I imagine Spence) was still encouraged by those numbers. They don't promise the silly 300% increase of productivity that vendors like Asia Online like to promote, but instead a realistic and yet significant uptake in productivity (with the same qualitative results). I'm looking forward to the next study.

Oh, and did I mention that you should try out the tool? 

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