Sep 1st, 2012 | Business Tools, Machine Translation | No Comments
Auto-translation tools are increasingly used for quick translations; but once thrown, will the boomerang return to its originator or spin wildly off into an incomprehensible back translation?
An abundance of free translation services are available online; but what do you get for free? Will a simple sentence auto-translate cleanly across multiple languages? Or will the end result bear little resemblance to the original language? BY SARA GREENWALD
Most translators are all too familiar with the “free instant translation” services available online. I tried boomerang-translating, first using a translation website to translate from English to a target language, and then back-translating to English. Doing this shows what happens when the peculiarities of English are stripped away. If an English phrase or construction doesn’t have an exact counterpart in the target language, the translator has to make decisions based on meaning. When the translator and back-translator are making decisions based on words and phrases in their databases, the result can be pretty odd. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2012 | Business Tools, Reviews, Translation | 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 © 2012 INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ GROUP, COMPILED BY YVES AVÉROUS
Refactored memoQRather than just looking at the new features of recent tools and versions of
memoQ, I chatted with the developers to get some of the background story. I met with István and Gábor to hear them out about
version 6.
→ continue reading
May 1st, 2012 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed. | No Comments
The Russian idiom “buying a cat in a sack” means the same as the English idiom “buying a pig in a poke.”
Will tools typically used for analytical translations prove efficacious for fiction and poetry? A literary translator learns about CAT tools and considers their application in her own field. BY ANNE O. FISHER
For some time now I have been curious about CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tools and whether they would be useful for someone who translates primarily fiction and poetry. Unlike translators in other fields, literary translators are almost never required by their “clients” (publishers, poets, grant-distributing associations) to use CAT tools, but maybe there’s something we’re missing if we don’t? The NCTA CAT tools workshop on November 12th, 2011, was a good introduction to what these tools do and a great way to get specific information in a short time for not a lot of money. As for the particular applicability of CAT tools to literary translation, it seems that there is less to fear, and more reason to use them, than I thought. → continue reading
May 1st, 2012 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., NCTA Events | 1 Comment
Tuomas Kostiainen explains the basics of memoQ.
New to MemoQ? Help is available for every learning style.
BY MICHAEL WAHLSTER
I had to get up early on Saturday, February 25, to catch the first flight from L.A. to San Francisco where I attended Tuomas Kostiainen’s NCTA memoQ workshop at the SFSU downtown campus.
Just in case you missed it: memoQ is a translation memory tool developed by the Hungarian company Kilgray Translation Technologies. I became aware of it around 2009, mainly through blog posts and tweets by translators located in Europe. The program was generally described as easy to use and competitively priced, but translators were most impressed, it seemed, with the rapid response of Kilgray to users’ support requests. → continue reading
May 1st, 2012 | Business Tools | 1 Comment
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 © 2012 INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ GROUP, COMPILED BY YVES AVÉROUS
DuckDuckGo(ose)
I was just reminded of a new search engine called DuckDuckGo. Apparently it’s rapidly gaining in popularity after some of Google’s recent privacy controversies. The makers of DuckDuckGo have paid heed to Google’s struggles and go to great length to ensure the privacy of your searches. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2011 | Business Tools, Essays, Getting Started, Translation | 2 Comments
To avoid mental laziness brought on by new tech tools, make a point of watching yourself and your mind at work. BY JULIET E. JOHNSON
Technological changes over the past decades have revolutionized how we translators work as well as the very nature of translation. More subtly, the tools we use have altered our cognitive processes. The purpose of this article is to highlight the connections between how we work, how we think, and what it means to be a translator. Seeing those connections more clearly can help us mindfully choose how we work, how we think, and what kind of translation work we personally undertake and pursue. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2011 | Business Tools | 1 Comment
The latest technology update from the Tool Kit. BY JOST ZETZSCHE
“Sheep syndrome” doesn’t have very positive connotations, but in some cases the result of one following another is a lot more beneficial than its negative image might let on. Take technology, for instance. In a competitive landscape, the innovation of one competitor will inevitably lead to others following suit — if that were not the case, we probably wouldn’t have a competitive landscape to start with.
In the case of translation environment tools, this phenomenon has been repeated over and over with quality assurance features, context matches, concordance searches, and, lately, with AutoComplete features, i.e., the ability of the translation editor to predict or suggest text based on a few typed letters in combination with external data, such as the translation memory or other databases.
The latest tool that has now unveiled this feature is Wordfast Classic, and I have to admit that, somewhat to my own surprise, I like its version of AutoComplete the best so far. More on that later. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2011 | Business Tools | 1 Comment
BY YVES AVÉROUS
The summer of 2011 was a good season for the Mac. Not only does Apple computers’ market share continue to grow faster than that of Windows PCs’, but the platform received a very nice refresh with the launch of Lion and the addition of the Thunderbolt connectivity across the line.
I had already rounded up the main features of Lion in my previous report, now I have tried them. As a writer, the very first thing I enjoyed using in the text editing features that come with the system was the newly adopted AutoCorrect system akin to the one found on iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touchs). It’s working in Mail, Safari (and the WordPress Editor takes advantage of it—not Google Docs, alas), TextEdit, and Pages, for the obvious ones. How nice it would be to see it implemented in a native Mac CAT tool… (Wink, wink, nod, nod.) → continue reading
May 1st, 2011 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., Translation | No Comments
Facing your technophobia. BY MERAV ROZENBLUM
I’ll start with a confession: I’ve never considered myself a techie. But over the last couple of years, I found myself working for major Silicon Valley corporations with a team of localizers who were what Jost Zetzsche calls “Jerombots”: “as passionate about languages as St. Jerome, with the added power of modern technology” (Niels Nielsen, Cat Tools Workshop, Translorial Vol. 33, No. 1, January 2011). What I learned from them was not only mastery of certain CAT tools and software, but also to face my own technophobia.
This (still) conscious effort to keep up with the world of translation memory (TM) technology, as well as the realization that the new SDL Trados Studio 2009 is a standalone program that looks pretty different from the older version that I have been using in the MS Windows environment, brought me, along with 15 other participants, to the beginner Trados workshop offered on Saturday, November 13, 2010 with master teacher and then NCTA president Tuomas Kostiainen, a Finnish translator (given the choice, wouldn’t you, too, prefer the examples in a Trados workshop to be in Finnish?). → continue reading
May 1st, 2011 | Business Tools | No Comments
The latest technology update from the Tool Kit. BY JOST ZETZSCHE
Just Now Updated to Office 2010?
If you own an English, German, Chinese, or Japanese version of Microsoft Office, that’s the language that you’ll get for all the menus—oh, sorry, “ribbons”—dialogs, error messages, and other user interface controls. You do have more than one spelling and grammar checker installed with your particular language version of Microsoft Office (here you can check what kind of spelling checkers are included with what language version of Office), but if you are intent on using a spelling language that is not covered by your language version, you’ll have to look into purchasing an additional language pack. This is, unless you are a user of one of approximately 60 “minor” languages (I just recently learned that the politically correct term here is “languages of limited diffusion”), in which case you might find a link to a free download of an LIP (Language Interface Pack). This includes the ability to run Office in that language and use the spelling checker and sometimes even a help system and templates in that language. → continue reading
May 1st, 2011 | Business Tools, Opinion, Perspective | No Comments
The young whippersnappers today have no idea how good they have it. BY INES SWANEY
When NCTA was founded in 1978, any mention of e-mail would have been understood as Express Mail known in the United States as Special Delivery. This was the common way of sending urgent information, all typed or printed on paper, of course. Fax machines were a luxury that some major companies had at their offices. I still recall my first encounter with one of these devices. Someone explained to me that it worked just like a photocopier, except that you started with an original and then the copy would come out somewhere else, even in another continent, as long as everyone’s telephones lines were working properly and you got to keep the original. My cousin in Houston, who was involved in the energy industry, bragged that he had received a fax all the way from Qatar. → continue reading
