May 1st, 2008 | Business Tools, Reports | No Comments
The Tool Kit is an online newsletter that comes to its subscribers’ mailboxes twice a month. In Translorial, we offer a quarterly digest of Jost’s most helpful tips from the past season.
BY JOST ZETZSCHE © 2008 INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ GROUP, COMPILED BY YVES AVÉROUS
Savor This!
Backups—we know we’ve got to do ‘em, but we just don’t quite know how. Long gone are the days of the floppy disk, and I would venture to say that with the newly released MacBook Air without a CD-ROM drive, another era may also soon be over - we’ve long sensed that CDs and even DVDs are sort of “yesteryear.”
So what’s hip, especially when it comes to backing up your data? There’s no doubt that it’s got to be online backups. However, the hippest thing does not always have to be the best, so I spent some time last week looking at online backup services.
Two of the most popular products at the moment are Carbonite and Mozy. They offer a similar service: with Mozy you have the option to get a free account if you only need to store 4 GB (you’ll need more), but otherwise they are each approximately $5 a month for unlimited storage. They both require to download and install a small program.
Once you have the small program installed, the backup process starts right away. You’ll see a little notification that the first backup may take several days. In my case it took about five days. I disabled it while it was working during the day because it requires quite a bit of processing power and continued the backup at night. It all works seamlessly, and once the initial backup is complete each file that is modified is flagged to be backed up either right away or at a time of your choosing. The restore function also is super-easy: a new virtual drive is created that gives you immediate access to all of your files.
But here’s why I decided to return to my exterior hard drive backup: If you work with large translation memories and/or use Outlook, which stores everything in a large database-like file, the nightly backup may just not be enough to get everything that has been changed written back to the Carbonite server. Then you will have to have the backup run constantly, which tends to steal from your processing power.
This may not be true for you. You may not deal with very large files. In that case, Carbonite, Mozy, or some of their competitors may be the right solution for you.
There is one more thing, though. With the product that I use to run backups on my external hard drive, Acronis True Image, I can do incremental backups that not only keep the data from yesterday, but also from the day before and before and . . . (you get the picture). Quite often I realize that I need to dig much deeper than just a day or even a week to get something that may have been changed many times since, and that’s no problem. Of course, there are limitations, too (at some point the largest external hard drive is full), but these are things I can deal with.
Of course, if my office burns to the ground and wipes away both my computer and the external hard drive, I may regret what I just wrote — so I do use the good old CD drive to burn CDs with the most important files that I store outside the house.
(F)utilities
Working on revising my Tool Box book recently, it really got me thinking: of all the tips and tricks and programs that I mention (or have mentioned) in the book, which do I really use myself on a regular basis?
On my computer, the first group of diehard utilities are those that I’ve been using on a daily basis for the last few years: TrayIt to make room on my taskbar, PushPin to allow windows to stay on top of other active windows, Skype to communicate via voice and IM, IntelliWebSearch to speed and consolidate my dictionary searches (more on that below), and Lookout to index my Outlook mail (sadly this isn’t available as a separate application anymore, but it’s now integrated into Outlook 2007).
Then there are those utilities that I still have on my computer but don’t use the way their developers would like me to. They would like me to start these every time I start my computer, but I prefer to have them come up only when there’s a definite need for their specific function. These include ClipMate for managing my clipboard, SnagIt to manage my screenshots, and AllChars to enter some uncommon special characters or text strings. I’ve found that if I run these applications all the time, they tend to hog my system resources or have conflicts with other programs.
And then there are the plethora of utilities that are not designed to run all the time but are used for specific and relatively rarely occurring purposes. These include programs to convert measurements, data, and files; manipulate keyboards; search/replace text; manage, split, merge, and rename files; crack passwords; count words; track time; backup data; or manage downloads. Since these are used only in specialized instances, they usually don’t run into conflicts with other programs. And if they are well written, their footprint is so small that they don’t use any common resources. These are still installed on my computer as well.
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If you would like to subscribe to The Tool Kit, visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/ and mention Translorial during the subscription process; Jost will put your name in a drawing for one free Tool Box book per edition.
May 1st, 2008 | Business Tools, Reports | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
APOLOGIES TO PC USERS
With the advent of Spring, Mac OS X celebrated its seventh anniversary—the Age of Reason, as we call it in France. How appropriate for version 10.5, Leopard. I still remember my first “back to the Mac” purchase in 2002, the articulated iMac, with the second iteration of the OS, 10.1. The machine couldn’t smooth fonts properly and went into kernel panic as soon as I tried to impose Virtual PC on it. So I returned it.
Times have changed! I finally found a good replacement for my five-year old PowerBook G4 12” in the shape of a gorgeous MacBook Air, and getting Windows to work on that new slim machine was a breeze—not to mention that everything else working smoothly under Leopard.
And this is where I need to apologize to my PC-toting colleagues: six years ago, they could smile at my renewed enthusiasm for the Mac, as there were still enough reasons for a translator to find that a Mac was coming up a little short of their expectations. Not anymore, and the comparison is not even fun. Following one misstep after another, Microsoft has left PC users very frustrated, and the delight Mac users are expressing with their machines is only adding salt to their wounds.
So I try to restrain myself, but it is difficult. My new MacBook Air is a dream! Even with the slowest chip in the Mac lineup, it is still one of the fastest machines I have ever used, with one of the best screens I have ever enjoyed. Add to the mix Quick Look, Spaces, the new Safari, the enhanced Mail, iCal, oodles of beautiful and convenient third party applications, and you will find a happy camper. I’m sorry if I can’t hide my enthusiasm.
With all that there is to talk about in the Mac universe these days, do not miss our next TransMUG meeting, on Saturday, May 10 at 11 AM, just before the General Meeting, at The Center (see back cover). We would love to hear about your best experiences with the current tools at our disposal and answer your questions. Don’t miss it!
Feb 1st, 2008 | Business Tools, Web services | No Comments
By Jost Zetzsche © 2008 International Writers’ Group, compiled by Yves Avérous
The Tool Kit is an online newsletter that comes to its subscribers’ mailboxes twice a month. In Translorial, we offer a quarterly digest of Jost’s most helpful tips from the past season.
Imagine 2008
I have already given some of my predictions in the 100th edition of my newsletter, but let me repeat one for its shock value and give another that I have only recently realized: 2007 was the last year in which MS Word still played any significant role in the TEnT (Translation Environment Tools) translation process. With Trados already having moved away from Word as its preferred translation platform, Multitrans and Wordfast on their way to doing the same thing, and Metatexis hoping to do likewise, there really aren’t that many left hanging on to Word.
That was a giveaway, but this prediction may be more interesting: SaaS! SaaS, or Software as a Service, has finally arrived. SaaS is the concept of not having to install the software on your local computer, but instead using it through a web browser, with most if not all of your language data being hosted by a server. To be fair, there have been a number of applications working in that realm for a while, but they should now gain wider acceptance.
When I first heard about server-based computing it sounded too futuristic, and I resented the idea because it seemed to promise less control. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that freedom (from software updates, computer problems, and backup worries) is not a bad thing, and even traditional vendors will find ways to walk that plank (and I think that most of them will find out they are pretty good swimmers).
Intelligent Web Searches
At the end of 2006 I mentioned the site IntelliWebSearch (www.IntelliWebSearch.Com ) as the tool that should be given the “winner of the popularity-vote-by-translators award.” Last year it should be the tool that “is most often mentioned in this newsletter.” Be that as it may, I can’t help mentioning it again because I have just found out that it is also possible to search the EU’s IATE database with IntelliWebSearch, a process that helped me enormously with a project this week (you can find instructions on this at www.intelliwebsearch.com/readme.html).
And for the one remaining reader who doesn’t know what it is: The free IntelliWebSearch copies highlighted text from any Windows application with a number of user-definable shortcut keys, opens your default browser, and sends the copied text to up to 10 customizable search engines or on-line dictionaries. You may need to fiddle a little bit to configure your search engines and dictionaries for your language combinations, but from that point forward there will be only bliss.
On Demand Training
Well, we’re finally there. Most of you know that I’ve been working together with the Italian Intrawelt on a new site called www.translatorstraining.com that offers something unique: professionally produced comparative Flash-video-based presentations of the 13 leading TEnTs. These include well-known ones like SDL Trados, Star Transit, and Déjà Vu; open-source tools like OmegaT; and relative newcomers such as Across, Lingotek, and MemoQ. We asked the tool vendors themselves to capture the process of translating a very easy and repetitive Word file according to a very strictly written script. After we received the video files back, we narrated them so you wouldn’t be bored with marketing talk but with objective information on how to process the file. This gives you the greatest possible comparability between the different tools. The areas that we focus on are pre- and post-processing of the file, creating a translation memory and a terminology database, and reusing content from the TM and the terminology database.
Two Clever Office Tricks
If you are in a terrible hurry and you don’t want to wait a long time for complex Word documents to open, you can either open them in Wordpad (accessible under Start>Programs> Accessories), or you can render them in MS Word with a draft font. To do this, select Tools> Options> View>Draft Font (in Word 2007: Office button>Word Options> Advanced> Show document content> Use draft font in Draft and Outline views). This will not change the document itself, just the way it appears and the speed with which it opens. If you need to look quickly through a lot of large docs, this can be a real timesaver.
Here’s something that most of you know but which bugs me no end, especially in PowerPoint and Excel, but also in Word: the automatic URL hyperlinking feature in Office, i.e., the feature that automatically changes an email address or a URL into an underlined link. To turn this off, select Tools> AutoCorrect Options> AutoFormat As You Type, and uncheck “Internet and network paths with hyperlinks” (Office 2007: Office button> . . . Options>Proofing> AutoCorrect Options).
More
If you would like to subscribe to The Tool Kit, visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/ and mention Translorial during the subscription process; Jost will put your name in a drawing for one free Tool Box book per edition.
Feb 1st, 2008 | Business Tools, NCTA Meetings, Reports | No Comments
By Yves Avérous
It’s a Mac Macworld
After the big “Year of the iPhone,” in 2007, it was past time for Apple to give the star treatment back to the Mac in this year’s Macworld Conference and Expo held in San Francisco last month. More than ever, with all the recent product introductions, Mac users have an exciting choice of deft machines offering the best productivity a freelancer can get.
On the software side, the Apple suites iLife and iWork—having been refreshed last June—had to yield the center of the productivity stage to the big suite that finally could: Microsoft Office 2008! (The one that doesn’t support macros …) The good news there is the price, with a competitive $150 Home & Student version. Ars Technica’s first look (http://snipurl.com/1wum2) and Macworld’s review (http://snipurl.com/1y9q4) will show you all there is to like and dislike in this release.
Facing the possibility of no longer using Word on the Mac, I have given more consideration to Pages 2 (part of iWork ‘08) and got to really enjoy the elegant new version.
The Mac marketplace is now flush with applications that are as helpful as affordable. In the recent weeks, members of the TransMUG list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transmug) were made privvy to a few amazing online deals. On my short list of tools that you may want to try and find via Macupdate.com, I highly recommend content managers such as Yojimbo, Yep!, and Together; password managers such as Wallet or 1Password; and a fresh crop of “Getting-Things-Done”-inspired applications, from the basic TaskPaper, to the powerful OmniFocus, or the elegant Things.
With so much to discover on the Mac lately, do not miss our next TransMUG meeting, on Saturday, February 9 at 11 AM, just before the Annual Meeting, at The Center’s café. This time, it’s tech support (and switcher) extraordinaire Emmanuel Lemor who will MC the meeting. Don’t miss it.
Dec 1st, 2007 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., NCTA Events, Reports | No Comments
By Sonia Wichmann
Electronic tools—used correctly—can greatly improve efficiency, saving us time, money, and headaches. The NCTA-sponsored workshop “From Ink to Electrons,” held on October 13th, offered an excellent opportunity for translators to quickly learn a wealth of practical and time-saving techniques.
For some of us, tinkering with programs and gadgets and keeping up with the latest online resources comes naturally. But if you’re like me, you keep thinking that you should learn more (maybe even read the manual?), but rarely find the time or motivation until confronted with some mysterious technological problem—and usually just before a deadline.
Instructor Aaron Ruby, a full-time English>Spanish legal and technical translator and court interpreter, has previously presented on a wide range of legal and technical topics in forums such as ATA, NAJIT (National Association of Judicial Interpreters and Translators), OMT (Organization of Mexican Translators) and HITA (Houston Interpreters and Translators Association). In this well-organized and lively presentation, attended by about 20 participants, he provided an overview of electronic reference materials, Google searching, and common formatting challenges. The first half focused on electronic and online reference tools, while the second half dealt with techniques for Microsoft Word and strategies for effective searching.
Aaron began by introducing a number of useful resources for translators such as electronic, pocket, and online dictionaries. While online dictionaries are becoming more common, they are still mainly limited to general or monolingual dictionaries. Electronic dictionaries, available in many languages and language combinations, allow the user to search in multiple dictionaries and find results in a matter of seconds, rather than flipping through bulky paper dictionaries. Pocket dictionaries, while limited in scope, are extremely portable and instantly ready to use, which can be helpful for interpreting or travel situations. Aaron also reviewed several useful sites such as Dictionary.com, Eurodicautom (the official dictionary of the European Union), and how to use sites like Wikipedia to gain a quick introduction to an unfamiliar topic. Especially impressive was the demonstration of Webster’s Online Dictionary, The Rosetta Edition, which currently covers 90 modern languages. He also shared his evaluation of various English dictionaries available on CD-ROM.
After the break, we turned to formatting issues in Microsoft Word. Increasingly, translators are being asked to provide documents with more complicated formatting, and while it’s reasonable to decline jobs requiring complex desktop publishing tasks (or at least demand more money), it is also important to be able to do common types of formatting with a minimum of stress. We learned about efficient ways to work with tabs and margins, tables, spacing, the Track Changes function, and—an audience favorite—the mysteries of text boxes and how to edit them.
Finally, Aaron gave a quick overview of using Google, “a translators’ best resource.” As he pointed out, researching a topic on Google can help translators create equivalent expressions that are idiomatic for the target language, rather than simply translating from dictionaries. There are different ways to search, whether using the Google Language Tools or country-specific home pages, and it pays to use a variety of approaches. In addition, using Google or other desktop search applications enables you to quickly access vast amounts of information on your hard drive, whether in old files you’ve created or in downloaded webpages.
I came away from the workshop better equipped, and even inspired to invest a bit more time in poking around Word, Google, and my electronic dictionaries. Clearly, this workshop addressed very relevant topics and there was a general consensus by the participants that a Part II would be welcome!
Dec 1st, 2007 | Business Tools | No Comments
By Jost Zetzsche © 2007 International Writers’ Group, compiled by Yves Avérous
The Tool Kit is an online newsletter that comes to its subscribers’ mailboxes twice a month. In Translorial, we offer a quarterly digest of Jost’s most helpful tips from the past season. If you would like to subscribe to The Tool Kit, visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/ and mention Translorial during the subscription process; Jost will put your name in a drawing for one free Tool Box book per edition.
Time to explore
Anne Vincent reminded me that I haven’t encouraged you lately to spend a few minutes every day in your program of choice, clicking through menus (and the ever-present Options dialog box) to learn some new techniques and tricks. Thanks for reminding me, Anne. Note to everyone: Consider yourself encouraged!
Most of us can’t sit for eight or ten hours straight doing translation, and while it may be a very good idea to do something computer-unrelated during your breaks, a five-minute break to find something intriguing about your current application might actually end up saving you ten or more minutes at the end of the day.
And, yes, of course, there are some of us who tend to go off the trail when one thing leads to another, and we waste a lot of time in the process. But if you’re one of those already, then I assume you don’t have to be encouraged in the first place!
Interesting contrasts
And while we’re talking about Windows, www.macvswindows.com is a great site where you can compare all kinds of things regarding Windows with their counterparts on the Mac. Though it’s not 100% objective (it tends to be Mac-biased), it is still an interesting site. I don’t need to mention that this site does not deal with translation-related issues, such as support for TEnTs (the very reason why I mostly deal with Windows), but still it’s fun and interesting to walk through.
Office wars intensify
It looks like more and more companies are trying to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in the Office market, including some companies that you wouldn’t have really expected to enter the field.
I mentioned in my newsletter that IBM had released its free and elegantly styled Lotus Symphony office suite (http://symphony.lotus.com), after Google had already released StarOffice, the commercial counterpart to the OpenOffice.org suite. (By the way, I did find two drawbacks with Symphony: It installs a “pre-launcher” for its productivity tools every time you start Windows, which is not a very polite thing if you intend to only use the suite every once in a while. Fortunately you can turn it off under File> Preferences> Productivity Tools. In addition, it also overwrites the default associations of .odt, .odp, and .ods files from OpenOffice to its own program—also not a nice thing to do without first asking the user’s permission.)
More recently, Adobe—yes, the Adobe of Acrobat, FrameMaker, Flash, and InDesign—announced that it has pur-chased Buzzword, an online word processor for collaboration purposes. This, by the way, in the same week that Microsoft announced that it also has extended its online collaboration for corporate versions of MS Office. I personally think that these competitive releases are much more interesting than, let’s say, the “browser wars,” which in effect have very little to do with our daily work routines as translators.
And just to make sure that you don’t misunderstand what I’m saying—this newsletter is being written in MS Word, and I have nothing against Microsoft Office in principle. In fact, I think it’s an admirably customizable suite of programs. It’s just that I think that competition is a very good thing.
Some helpful tools
Several months ago, Lee Wright sent me the link to www.no-nonsense-software.com/freeware which contains a list of a number of helpful freeware tools. For each of these features there are also a great number of other tools with similar functionality or completely different approaches, but these still look like great free tools.
PrintFolder is a little tool that allows you to print or save a list of files located in any folder. This is nice if you need to verify a list of translatable files, or if you would like to have a hard copy of a list that you can manually check off file by file.
SetFileDate can be used to alter the time and date of one or more selected files or folders — great if you would prefer your clients not to know that you worked on their files until the early morning.
And ScreenGrab is a screenshot program. There are many, many other programs that do the same thing—and possibly in a more advanced fashion—but this one is for free and that’s hard to beat.
Here is another tool that is also free and really saved me recently: The Windows Installer Clean Up utility is a free download from Microsoft that fixes errors that may have been caused by an erroneous installation which could, for instance, result in your inability to uninstall the application again. You can find good information and the download links at http://windowsxp.mvps.org/MSICLEAN.htm.
Dec 1st, 2007 | Business Tools | No Comments
By Yves Avérous
A New Cat in Town
At last, the newest version of Mac OS X is on our desktops. The question is, what does upgrading to Leopard translate into? First, surprisingly enough, I must say that even on my 4-1/2-year-old PowerBook G4 at 867MHz (slowest configuration permissible), this “cat” is still faster than the previous one (called Tiger). I heard they had made a particular effort on the optimization of the system and it is notable!
Then, there’s the look. Overall, it’s darker, and although more serious, it remains— thanks to the fact that most of the unified look draws from iTunes—very much playful. What impressed me the most after only a few hours on the system was how crisp everything had become. There has obviously been a serious effort applied to the resolution of the characters on the screen. It is a welcome improvement, as Mac users had to pay for a more accurate rendition of the fonts with a tad more blurriness. Until now.
Apple has over 300 more reasons on their site (www.apple.com/macosx) to convince you. One of my favorites on the list is screen sharing, which allows me to take over mom’s machine in France and fix some shenanigans remotely without any prior voodoo settings. And don’t get me started with the Finder: you can now see the front page of most of your documents (Office, PDF, images, and more) in Cover Flow view like you do in iTunes, and even skim through them with Quick Look!
And, saving the best for last, at least for those who don’t use Super Duper!: Time Machine is introduced. This is pure high-tech magic made simple, allowing you to go back in time virtually and retrieve long-lost documents where they were at the time you left them. Welcome to the advent of the “no configuration, no excuse” backup, all in the background.
To learn more, you may want to join the discussion on the TransMUG group list. Visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transmug to become a member and get discounts on hardware and software, too. TransMUG meets every quarter before the NCTA general meeting.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Business Tools, NCTA Events, Reports | No Comments
By Kathy Davis
On the golden spring evening of Wednesday, April 18, a group of nine NCTA translators and interpreters gathered at the home of Christine Lamar-Drake in San Francisco to meet Yves Champollion, the developer of the Wordfast Translation Memory engine. Mr. Champollion was in town on business (his first visit ever to San Francisco and his first time in California since the 1980s). The nine of us, some experienced in using Wordfast and others new to the tool, were together for a question-and-answer session on the use of Wordfast.
The evening began with introductions and quickly became a bilingual event, since most of the attendees were fluent in both English and French. Mr. Champollion spoke briefly of the development, in 1999, of the Wordfast tool, which is now at Version 5.51j, as of April 2, 2007. He is currently working on a linguistic experiment involving the use of Wordfast for visually-impaired translators. This project anticipates having the source segment read aloud for the translator, who can then enter the translation into the Wordfast segment.
The question-and-answer format of the evening addressed the following questions:
Q: I use Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) as dictation software for translations. It does not work well with Wordfast, since the cursor jumps a few lines up and down when a new segment opens. What can I do to correct this?
A: Wordfast has a tiny, three-line macro which was written to correct this problem. Use of the macro as a hook will change the code and bring the cursor back to the correct segment. This macro is available at the Wordfast website, www.wordfast.net
Q: I am having problems using Wordfast with Arabic-English translations.
A: Wordfast can be successfully used with Arabic texts. However, if Latin characters are embedded within the Arabic, there may be a problem. Go to the Wordfast hotline at the website and describe the problem in detail.
Q: The Alt-Home shortcut in Wordfast, which takes you back to the segment you were originally working on, is not operating.
A: Rather than using the shortcut, select the function from the drop-down menu. Sometimes if you use separate keyboards—for example, one for French and one for English—various shortcuts may be disabled. Check to make sure that there is a connection to only one keyboard. If a connection exists to more than one, disable the one least often used. This should enable the shortcuts again.
Q: What are the most useful features of Wordfast, beyond the basic ones?
A: The glossary feature is very useful. Word and Excel glossaries of your own can be easily converted for use with Wordfast. Convert the Excel or Word table to plain text with tab delimiters. Then save the file with a .txt extension, and specify the file as a glossary.
Q: How do you convert multiterm glossaries to a glossary usable with Wordfast?
A: Put the multiterm glossary into an Excel file, ensuring that there are no empty lines or spaces in the Excel file. Give the file a name, and specify that it is a glossary and not a translation memory (TM). This file can be converted to a Wordfast glossary as a tab-delimited file.
Q: When I open up Wordfast, I see four identical Wordfast toolbars instead of just one.
A: It seems that when you upgraded your version of Wordfast, previous versions were not deleted or replaced. Therefore a toolbar is appearing for each version. Delete the older versions of Wordfast (using Add/Remove Programs or Tools/Templates), and the extra toolbars should disappear.
Q: How do you align texts?
A: Download the Plus Tools file, available at the Wordfast website, as well as related manuals. These will guide you in alignment.
Q: how do I work with Wordfast and an Excel file?
A: Open your Excel file. Open Wordfast in Word and enter the translation into Excel. Details are provided at the Wordfast website and in the Wordfast manual.
The following snippets of information were also revealed in the course of the evening.
1. Wordfast Office is now being rewritten in Java, and the Very Large Translation Memory (VLTM), which previously was remotely accessible, is now being incorporated into the automatic installation and upgrade process.
2. The latest version of Wordfast is compatible with Office 2007 for PCs, but it is not yet compatible with the latest Mac upgrade.
3. Yves Champollion is related to Jean-François Champollion, the famous French Egyptologist (b. 23 Dec 1790, d. 4 Mar 1832) who is best known for his work (1822-24) on translating the Rosetta Stone, found during Napoleon I’s 1798-9 campaign in Egypt.
4. Wordfast is entirely compatible with Trados, which historically was the first CAT tool, developed in the early 1990s. When Mr. Champollion developed Wordfast, he re-cycled some Trados ideas, including the segmentation look, so that it would be well-integrated with Trados.
5. The choice of Java for the latest Wordfast version was based on making Wordfast available for Linux users. This will make it look something like a tag editor, but it will have the features and shortcuts of MS Word.
6. It is important to only use the website www.wordfast.net for downloading the very latest free trial version of Wordfast. Other websites may offer free versions but they are often not the latest. The Wordfast website also offers genuine support and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to assist Wordfast users.
7. For answers and assistance with questions that are not mentioned here, users can go to the Wordfast website and get on the email list to ask questions.
One of Mr. Champollion’s other projects has been the Very Large Translation Memory (VLTM), which is now available via the Internet. He demonstrated the program, which now holds 45 languages and 45! pairs of terms, all of which were gleaned from free, open-source materials available on the Internet. It was originally created by aligning the official translations of the proposed European Union Constitution. The VLTM is read-only and can be used in conjunction with your own TMs. Although it is not highly useful for finding direct matches of entire sentences, it does have the capability of context searching, in which a sentence may be found which contains a specific word or phrase.
In order to use the VLTM, you need to have a recent, registered license for Wordfast and an open Internet connection. The VLTM can be selected in Wordfast from the TM setup dialogue box. Access is in the same manner as for normal context searches (highlighting a word or phrase and pressing CTRL-ALT-C). The source of the Translation unit (TU) can be found by pressing CTRL-M.
After the demonstration of the new VLTM, the attendees partook of a delightful potluck dinner, contributed by the participants. Among the comestibles devoured were: champagne to toast the guest speaker, Greek salad, various cheeses and crackers, a red wine bottled by one of the group, tender new spring green asparagus, spicy chicken à la kabob, fresh vegetables, a large selection of antipasto elements such as sardines and mushrooms, and for dessert brownies, ambrosia, fresh fruit slices, and rum cake.
Sep 1st, 2007 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., NCTA Events, Reports | No Comments
By Nina Bogdan (SF) and Elena McDonnell and Valérie Chataignier (LA)
In addition to the Trados workshops he conducted in the Bay Area this summer, NCTA president Tuomas Kostiainen took his show on the road: to LA, where he spread the Trados (and NCTA!) gospel to our Southern California colleagues.
San Francisco
Prior to the Trados Workshop for Beginners held on April 21, 2007, participants were asked to download a trial version of Trados by the class instructor, Tuomas Kostiainen. Egads! Unfamiliar and suspect software on my pristine new laptop—what evils will it perpetrate? Nevertheless, I proceeded to download the software from the SDL Trados website and was relieved when worlds didn’t collide.
Tuomas methodically followed his written class outline, spending a significant portion of the class on “The Very Basics”: arranging the desktop, preparing Word, opening and creating a translation memory and then, voila, starting to translate. Next, we edited the translated text, cleaned up the translated file, and were given tips on what to do if we damaged the segment markers while translating. Finally, we talked about more advanced subjects, such as changing the color scheme, choosing a minimum match value, translation unit setup, and substitution localization.
Trados is a tool that becomes more useful as it is used. The more translations completed and the more information in the translation memory, the more helpful Trados becomes to the translator. NB
Los Angeles
The atmosphere was very casual at our Trados Workshop for Beginners at the La Quinta hotel in LA on May 5th, and Tuomas’s occasional witty jokes made the workshop even more enjoyable. He started with the basic terms that every translator working with Trados needed to know. Then we proceeded to the hands-on part of the class—this was the only workshop that weekend where we were using our laptops, following the teacher’s examples projected on a large screen.
At the end of the day, not only did I feel more technologically advanced and more confident of my work with Trados, but I was also very impressed with how open for questions, and willing to share knowledge our trainer and his assistants were. As Tuomas jokingly mentioned in the very beginning, he does “not work for Trados, and all [he] ever received from SDL was a couple of lousy t-shirts.” However, his passion for translation and technology, and genuine desire to help his fellow translators to make their job easier, more enjoyable while improving quality, are really “beyond the basics.” ED
Having learned the ease of using the Trados Translator’s Workbench at our Trados Workshop for Beginners in San Francisco, I became curious about what other Trados 7.0 features lay beyond segment-based translation memory in Word. So I jetted down to LA for another Trados workshop masterfully presented to our Southern California peers by Tuomas Kostiainen: The Basics and Beyond: TagEditor and Multiterm, held at La Quinta LAX on May 6, 2007.
After an intensive day of instruction, I can highly recommend attending future meetings and seminars at this venue. It provides a comfortable and entertaining setting for “translorial” discourse at a very reasonable rate and takes no more travel time than public transit to SF from the South Bay. Amidst the pulsing waves of incoming tide and brushed by briny breeze, one can learn still more from our colleagues in the vast LA area. VC
Sep 1st, 2007 | Business Tools | No Comments
By Jost Zetzsche © 2007 International Writers’ Group, compiled by Yves Avérous
The Tool Kit is an online newsletter that comes to its subscribers’ mailboxes twice a month. In Translorial, we offer a quarterly digest of Jost’s most helpful tips from the past season. If you would like to subscribe to The Tool Kit, visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/ and mention Translorial during the subscription process; Jost will put your name in a drawing for one free Tool Box book per edition.
Seek and Ye Shall Find
I often receive queries from readers concerning all kinds of computer-related things. I don’t want to discourage you from sending these.
Often they’re very educational for me, and in many of those cases you will find the answers in this newsletter. Very often, however, they can be found easily by looking yourself, and I would really encourage you to use those resources before asking someone else.
The first place should always be the help system. You will usually have the best luck in getting the information you’re looking for by typing in some keywords related to your problem. As you would in Google, keep on trying different words or phrases until you find what you need.
The next step would be to go to the tool’s website and look for the FAQ and/or the knowledgebase and/or the support section — and I would do it in that order if they have all three.
If there is also a support section that requires you to send in a question, I recommend that you hold off and first try one of the next options.
If a specific error message accompanied your problem, make a brute-force Google query with the exact wording of the message in quotation marks. If it’s a question for which you don’t have such specific information, go to the user group of the product. And PLEASE look for an answer before you ask questions within the group. I would also encourage you to go to the “Files” section where you can find all kinds of manuals, utilities, and other interesting things that are specific to the group you’re looking at. Finally, to find a group for your particular tool, just go to groups.yahoo. com, type the name of your tool, and it should show up.
It’s also very cool to subscribe to these groups as RSS feeds. Rather than going out to these groups, you can have them “come to you” (see that ingenious little video: http://www.dotsub.com/films/inplainenglish/index.php).
Free Tools with Wordfast
Wordfast offers a number of interesting and free programs that are only indirectly related to its core features as a TEnT (Translation Environment Tool).
You can download PlusTools, a collection of powerful Word macros, on Wordfast’s website (www.wordfast.com) as a free download. It includes tools to simultaneously search and replace in a large number of Word documents at the same time, batch convert any number of documents, compare documents, crack passwords in Word-based documents, extract terminology, align documents, etc.
It also allows you to tag documents in a way similar to the description above for XML/HTML files. While the existing set of macros did not produce satisfactory results with my files in question, it is easy to modify existing ones or produce your own so that it would work.
TMs for Sale!
Full disclosure: I am one of the owners of TM Marketplace, but I’m still very excited to announce that we have launched a new program where we don’t just sell licenses to very large translation memories of the likes of GM, but we are now also selling translation memories that we have – legally — created from publicly available content. We are already offering Windows Vista TMs in various language pairs, but we are also offering a made-for-order model, where you can ask us for specific TMs for specific projects. After we verify that we can provide that kind of content, we will then create those databases and sell them to you. And we’ve even produced a little flash presentation that explains why (see www.tmmarketplace.com/align).
For folks wondering how they can import the TMX files into the tool of their choice, I have also created a document with descriptions for the 16 most popular tools and uploaded it to www.tmmarketplace.com/downloads/importTMX.pdf. This should be a helpful document whether you purchase TMs at TM Marketplace or not.
Miscellany
After translating a website recently I noticed that my client’s web engineer really did not know how to enter codes for certain special characters (such as en-dashes and em-dashes), resulting in them all ending up corrupted on the site when I did a quality assurance check on it. It was helpful to have a well-written list of codes for often-occurring special characters at www.alistapart.com/stories/emen/ that I could point my client to.
If your new computer is clogged with a multitude of annoying preinstalled programs, you may want to try a program called PC Decrapifier (www.pcdecrapifier.com) which uninstalls all that “crapware” on new machines. I haven’t tested it, but something with a name so profound can only be good.
Ever wonder how the mouse cursor moves? I always thought there was some highly complicated technology behind it, but no, it’s actually quite hands-on. See for yourself at www.1-click.jp. (You may need to wait awhile for the explanatory graphics to load, but you’ll understand when you, too, are able to move your cursor over the light gray circle. This will be your own personal initiation rite.)
Here is an interesting poll on how Vista is being accepted among translators: www.translationdirectory.com/polls/poll_022.
