A computer journal for translation professionals

Phew, the end of the year! I truly hope this was a good year for you and that you feel positive about the coming year. As far as business goes, there's no reason why it shouldn't be good for you. If you've developed good ways to market yourself, there's plenty of translation work to be had.

Many publications and pundits use this time of year to predict what will happen next year. Rather than singing along with that loud choir (though I'm sure I could contribute parts that some would consider way off-key), let me offer some predictions of what is not going to happen.

Machine translation will not chip away at your livelihood. This is a technical journal, so this prediction comes first. If you've read this journal for more than a couple of months, you already know this: machine translation plays an important role in some areas, but it's very unlikely to be in the same area that you work in or have worked in. In retrospect, 2013 (and probably 2012 and 2011) might very well be classified as the year of the gasbags and bloviators. Machine translation has not had nearly the impact that many want to make-believe. You're well advised to continue watching what happens with it, but make sure you don't get gas blown up your nose.

The "translation industry" will not fall back into one big group hug again. There's not going to be a big happy reunion as we recognize that we all ultimately do the same thing. We might all be selling translation of some kind or the other, but our products are all very different from each other. And that's a good thing. This also means, though, that each of us needs to define what we are actually selling. And if we want to do that successfully, we need to do it in terms that can be understood by our clients. If terms like "translation" or "quality" seem too vague, don't replace them with silly new fabrications that end up not communicating anything; instead, just explain adequately how they relate to the product that you are intending to sell.

Prices are not in freefall. Common Sense Advisory said that prices fell by 35% for the 20 most common languages between 2010 and 2012. Unless I live in a parallel universe (and my wife claims that's a real possibility) and all other surveys among translators are wrong, this does not match our reality. For some of us, prices might not have risen as much as we would like them to, but maybe that's because we just haven't raised them recently. Remember that explaining what we do (see above) includes demonstrating what our value is.

Have a great and prosperous New Year and a very merry Christmas.

OK, I promise that at some point I will stop talking about Linguee, but in a way Linguee is like that fake sign interpreter at the Mandela memorial: It's a good chance to talk about what we actually do. See, Linguee is not used by translators only. There are plenty of us, but still not enough to come up with the two billion hits (yes, that's a "b" and not an "m") that Linguee has registered since its inception. It's very widely used, finds plenty of mentions in the mainstream press, and is just a good idea overall (though we didn't find it good enough to make it even more useful -- see the last newsletter).

Even so, it has just gotten better. This is a view of all the new and old languages that are now available:   

There have been many expressions of joy on Twitter and elsewhere by translators who will benefit from those additional languages, and I'm sure that there will be more from those who read it here for the first time.

And, by the way, there is no reason to feel bad if you didn't know about the extension into Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Dutch. Even Linguee's own website still says: "English Dictionary and Search Engine with 200,000,000 example sentences from human translators. Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese."

Oh, well.

And, by the way, don't expect the quality of all the language combinations to be equal. When I talked to Linguee's CEO Gereon Frahling a few weeks ago, he acknowledged that significantly more manual labor had gone into improving the materials for the EN<>DE language combinations than any other. Plus, if you look into some of the new language combinations, you'll notice a note stating that the important "editorial dictionary [is still] under construction" -- but that's partly why Linguee has hired native-speaking experts in all language combinations to work on those. So in many ways it's an ever-evolving product that I'm sure for many Italian, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Dutch translators will now become part of their pool of resources.

Happy lingueeing!

memoQfest Americas: Improve your translation business! 
Event date: 27 February - 1 March 2014

Kilgray is organizing a conference on translation technology to be held on 27 & 28 February 2014, followed by a training session on 1 March, in Manhattan Beach, California.

We'll dig down deep into quality assurance, MT, industry trends, special memoQ features -- tips & tricks, beginner and master classes, discussion panels, user forums and much more -- all for you to save costs and boost your productivity.

Be inspired by translation industry professionals, and find out how optimized translation processes can improve your translation business: check out the conference program, register now and save $$$ -- check out the early bird prices!

www.memoqfest.org 

After the pleasant topic of Linguee, on to one that is less pleasant: PDFs.

A couple of weeks ago during a talk and a workshop in Guadalajara, Mexico, I trotted out one of my lame jokes for the audience (one that you as a Tool Box reader are only too familiar with). I asked: "Do you know what 'PDF' really stands for?" At least three people in the audience responded by rolling their eyes and groaning: "Pretty Darn Frustrating...." Note to self: It's probably a good idea to lay that one to rest....

Laying a tired joke to rest, though, does not mean that the PDF issue has been solved, something that reader Jason Christensen wondered the other day with Word 365/3013's much-touted PDF Reflow feature, the MS Word-internal PDF conversion program. I had a quick look at it and found it be a nice conversion utility that does fine with simple PDF files, but it shares the same problems common to almost any other program that converts PDFs to truly editable and therefore translatable files. Laudably, Microsoft is not too shy about talking about the limitations. In fact, when you open a PDF file in Word, you are shown the following dialog:
This warning does not even address the fact that many PDFs are completely graphics-based, including the text on these graphics. And since that text also needs to be translated, the best option for converting PDFs are still tools that also have OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities, such as FineReader by ABBYY and OmniPage by Nuance, along with their lighter and cheaper versions that work only on PDF files (PDF Transformer by ABBYY and PDF Converter by Nuance) and convert only PDF files.

Of those two, I would recommend the ABBYY products since Nuance's products always convert into the locale of the operating system that you work on and you can't do anything about it unless you want to change your locale. This essentially disqualifies the product for anyone who might work in any source language that is not the language of his or her operating system.

Some time back I mentioned a "better way of working with PDFs" by OpenOffice and LibreOffice -- and it's too bad that MS Office hasn't followed suit.

Both of these office suites offer the option of creating a PDF that has a LibreOffice/OpenOffice file embedded, making this PDF completely editable within its originating application. In fact, when you open this PDF within LibreOffice/OpenOffice, it automatically opens in the word processing/spreadsheet/presentation component it was created in just like a normal document. If it's "only" a normal PDF that is not directly editable, it opens in the graphics component.

These kinds of PDF files are called hybrid PDFs, and you can create them by selecting File> Export as PDF> Embed this document inside the PDF (OpenOffice) or Embed OpenDocument file (LibreOffice).

Again, this works only for files that were created with those two open-source word-processing tools, but it would be great if other tools such as MS Office would support a feature like that as well, automatically making the world a better place. (If it were only that easy, huh?)

That's the title of the first of two webinars that I'm giving in January for eCPD, the company that, as many of you know, provides webinars for translators. I'm really looking forward to these webinars. The first one on January 15 (yes, that will be January of 2014) will be an interactive format that allows us to collect ideas on how technology should serve us better. Since I am sure that we will find a number of things that are not completely the way we imagine them to be, I will address those in the second part called "Translation Technology -- How can we plug the gaps and fix what's wrong?" two weeks later on January 29. Make sure that you sign up early so you can participate. It should be a really exciting start to the New Year!

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For more information, please contact: info@star-group.net

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About three years ago I had a look at Text United. I liked what I saw, but then the Vienna-based company behind it sort of went into hiding. Well, I recently had another talk with them and they revealed that they will relaunch in January.

Text United is a hybrid tool. In this case, hybrid means that there is a locally installed Windows-based desktop application that connects to data (which include translation files, glossary, and translation memory) sitting in the cloud (this particular cloud is hosted on a Text United server in Vienna).

You won't be surprised to hear that the product is sold as a SaaS, "Software as a Service," so you'll have to pay a monthly fee for its usage. The fee depends on what you want to do with it. You'll pay nothing if you work on just one project at a time or for someone else, 20 euros a month if you work on a normal case load by yourself, 40 euros a month if you are a freelancer who works in groups with other freelancers, and 190 euros a month for an agency.

But back to the tool itself. The translation interface has an Outlook-like Home screen, and the translation is displayed in a translation grid like so many other translation environment tools, with TM and glossary matches on the side (I'm saying "glossary" because it really is not a full-fledged termbase). All processes are role-based, i.e., a project is assigned to a translator (who can be identical with the project owner). The translator has only as many rights to the project and its resources as the owner assigns to him or her.

When importing a file (supported file types presently include HTML, MS Office, OpenOffice, XML, Visio, FrameMaker, and InDesign), a terminology extract of the file's content is automatically performed that can serve as the base glossary for the translation of the project. If you're not interested in using it, just ignore it. Only terms for which a translation is entered will be displayed during the translation process. The tool naturally supports TMX for TM exchange and TBX for glossary exchange.

By default you'll need an Internet connection to work in the tool, but it's possible to download a local copy of your project and your resources (if you know that you'll be offline for a while) and continue to work offline. Once the connection is restored, everything is synched and you can continue to work online.

Oh, and for client reviewers there is a special read-only browser-based mode to review the files.

It's a nice tool, but I'm afraid that the makers have not quite kept up with the times. Some of you will shrug your shoulders when you hear that unlike virtually all other translation environment tools, there is no MT connector. A more serious flaw is that there are no automated subsegement searches (a feature that wasn't used much when the tool was first developed three years ago but is very widely used today). I also miss a more automated workflow model -- right now the tool relies on "manual" communication between, say, translator and editor -- and it would be helpful to have support for the file formats of some of the competitors, including SDLXLIFF.

Still, for small workgroups of freelance translators who want an easy way for real-time sharing of resources, it is one of the viable options.

Enjoy translation with the new SDL Trados Studio 2014

"If I was to describe the progress that was made in Studio 2014 I would say definitely more user friendly. Nicer to work with, better looking and quicker!"

Sonia Jankowiak, Medical & Pharmaceutical Translator

See what Sonia and many more translators are saying about SDL Trados Studio 2014.

Discover more today »

Heartsome, the Hong Kong/Singaporean translation technology provider, recently released a new version of its TMX Editor, an editor for the translation memory exchange format.

This is a timely and important release. In this age of subsegment TM matching, there is an increased need for clean TMs and therefore for tools that allow us to perform good maintenance on our TMs. And while most translation environment tools offer some internal TM maintenance tools, they typically leave a lot to be desired.

Existing dedicated TM maintenance tools include user favorites like Xbench and Olifant, but there are some benefits to the Heartsome TMX Editor that make this a potentially interesting choice. For one thing, like all Heartsome tools, it is Java-based so it runs on all OS platforms. That's good. What's also really great is that it's very, very fast. When I tested it with a 40,000-translation-unit TM, it opened in a few seconds and the filtering of problematic TUs took all of a second.

What are problematic translation units? Those that are displayed to you according to a QA (quality assurance) filter that you apply to your TMX file. The QA checks examine whether there is a difference between source and target relating to tags, numbers (unfortunately it does not take decimal conversions into account!), and leading and trailing spaces; whether there are untranslated segments; whether the target is identical to the source; and whether there are inconsistencies in the source or the target text.

Once those TUs are found, you can either batch change or delete them or process them individually.

Furthermore, you can also use the tool to modify and/or add the metadata (data about the translation unit), change the code page, merge or split TMX files, or export TMX files into a great number of other formats, including a number of text formats and Word or Excel formats.

Many (and more) of these things can also be done with a tool like the aforementioned Xbench, but it's nice that this TMX Editor is extremely user-friendly and self-explanatory and, as I mentioned, independent of the operating system.

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