May 1st, 2010 | Business Tools, Translation | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
Possibly the only important news for Mac-using translators coming from the last Macworld Expo in February was the announcement of a release time for the next Office for Mac: holiday season 2010. It’s big news for Wordfast fans who cannot use Wordfast Classic on the latest version of the suite due to its reliance on Word’s macro. This was removed from the 2008 edition, and users must run Word 2004 or forfeit Wordfast Classic altogether. → continue reading
Feb 1st, 2010 | Business Tools, Translation | 2 Comments
BY JOST ZETZSCHE
Before we explore Microsoft’s new operating system, here are some language-related pieces of information that you might not have read about so far: The new glossary for Windows 7 is available. You probably know some of the history of the so-called “Microsoft glossaries.” These were never really glossaries but large translation memories with the translation data of the user interface for many of Microsoft’s software products. From 1994 through the summer of 2006 they were available for free on one of Microsoft’s FTP sites. In July 2006 the free offer was replaced with a multilingual glossary, which now is gone as well. What still remains is the Microsoft Language Portal. → continue reading
Feb 1st, 2010 | Business Tools, Translation | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
- Early iteration of the Mac OS X Aqua interface.
We’ve already lived 10 years past the end of the world and gosh, how quaint 2000 sounds already! Remember Y2K? What I also remember from 2000 is the Windows flavor of the same name. It was the marriage of professional NT robustness with the friendlier interface of Windows 98… Ten years later, that line ended with XP and is finally tweaked to the point of usability with 7. In this issue’s column by Jost you can read about how so many Mac-like features finally made it to the PC with Windows 7 but still on a patched, tired architecture.
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Dec 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Reviews, Translation | 3 Comments
An ever increasing number of translation tools on the market means more choices and decisions for translators. Here, a review of STAR Transit NXT Version 4.0. BY MICHAEL SCHUBERT
The Swiss STAR Group was founded in 1984 as a technical editing and translation services company and now has 48 locations in 31 countries. STAR initially developed Transit as its in-house translation tool and began marketing it worldwide in 1991. The latest version, STAR Transit NXT, was released in November 2008.
The 150 MB download installed in under five minutes with no reboot required and also uninstalled quickly and cleanly. Comprehensive PDF user manuals are available in German or English (of sorts). The program user interface can be displayed in U.K. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, Swedish, Chinese or Japanese. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Reports | No Comments
Lured by offers of free software, translators may make decisions they later regret. BY HANY FARAG
Early in the week I received an invitation from XXX, a company that produces dictionary software, to join an outreach program for translators. This program offered to grant me a free license to their software if I placed the company’s logo on my website. I flagged it for later review and took a look again on Friday–a relaxed workday which I reserve for small jobs, casual business and which I typically conclude with some pleasant event.
On that Friday, my work load was light. The day would be made special by observing the ritual of Happy Hour. I checked potential spots and my evaluation ended with two top choices. The first was Elephant Bar & Grill, a great local place with a fabulous view of the Bay. With a stool in the right spot, I view the planes descending to San Francisco airport while also watching the TV sports channel. The second was BJ Brewery—dim lighting but it dedicates one big screen in the afternoon to European soccer.
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Dec 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Reviews | 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 © 2009 INTERNATIONAL WRITERS’ GROUP, COMPILED BY YVES AVÉROUS
GOOGLE CHROME SHINES
I always tend to use the software that I have just translated—after all, I know all the tricks once the translation is finished. Here are some things I recently learned that way about Google Chrome: My new favorite feature is a way to create stand-alone applications of web-based applications in Chrome. This means that you can run any website not within the tabbed browser- interface but in an interface that has nothing but the actual application. I really like this because it prevents you from accidentally closing an important application that you’re working in by closing your browser or browser tabs, and it lets you completely focus on your task. This is great for things like browser-based translation interfaces or many other important tasks for which it is not important to link continuously to other webpages. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Reviews | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
There’s never been a better time to get a new Mac. Since last June, the whole line-up of consumer machines has been completely revamped. Choices include the cost-efficient MacBook or a super-duper quad-core iMac. I am particularly impressed with the pixel real estate made available on the new 27-inch iMac. With a finer resolution than previous pricey monitors, this new all-in-one desktop counts as many pixels in width as the 30-inch Cinema Display and only 160 less pixels in height than that flagship monitor that is still listed at $1,800 by itself. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., Reports | No Comments
San Francisco’s resident Trados guru concludes his teaching and eating trip to India. BY TUOMAS KOSTIAINEN
The good start I had with the first workshop led to another pleasant surprise: a full Indian lunch buffet! Incredible. We have nice refreshments at NCTA workshops thanks to our Events Director, but this was something else, and we had it at every workshop, showcasing the local cuisine from the milder Delhi affair to certainly much spicier Southern Indian dishes in Bangalore. And although the local power strips and extension cords didn’t completely fulfill my standards for safe electronics, these buffets more than fulfilled my requirements for a lunch. And of course, we had plenty of chai breaks in between. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | No Comments
THE TRANSLORIAL TOOL KIT
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
CAN YOU SEE MY SKYPE?
I’ve written about Skype before and how it’s become the chosen form of communication in translator commu- nities, albeit primarily as a messaging rather than a telephony tool (I can’t even recall when I opened another messaging tool). A new feature that was introduced with the latest version will probably just cement this status. It is now possible to share your desktop with a person with whom you are messaging or talking.
Well, “sharing” may not be quite the right term since the only thing it does is display your current screen, but this is very help- ful when you have to ask a question about something that isn’t working or when you have to show someone how to do an opera- tion correctly. At this point, it’s not possible to have both ends share at the same time or to show something to more than one person at a time; in addition, the refresh rate is a little slow and the image looks a bit coarse. Though there are lots of other apps that offer this, I STILL like it, if only because it’s easier to stay in the program you are in while talking to someone, rather than starting up something different that the other person may first have to install.
BE ADVISED TO USE AN ADVISOR
Belarc Advisor to be exact. The irony with this tool is that while it reminds you of the necessity of Windows and Office updates, it does not remind you to update itself. So I have been using a copy that I downloaded a few years ago, unaware of the interesting new features that it now offers. This tool provides you with a very detailed report of all the hardware and software that you have installed, includ- ing operating system, processor speed and memory, system serial number, printers, controllers, displays, etc.
This can be very helpful for various rea- sons. It gives you instantaneous access to all the information you need when your computer requires servicing; it shows you how many crazy applications you have installed (and hopefully convinces you to uninstall a bunch of them in due time); and it lists serial numbers for many of the software programs you installed which you might otherwise have forgotten or have a hard time getting to.
What I did not mention is that it’s free, it takes just a minute or so to install, and not more than two to execute and receive a many-paged report. As mentioned above, it now also gives you a report on Windows or Office updates you might have missed (therefore circumventing the memory- draining Windows-internal tool for this purpose).
PDF-TO-WORD MULTILINGUAL
In a recent newsletter I mentioned the new online-based PDF-to-Word application, which works surprisingly fast and accurate- ly. After I sent the newsletter out, however, I was embarrassed to notice that I had not looked into its multilingual capabilities, a shortcoming that was also pointed out by Claude Simard. Well, I am glad to report that it is mind-bogglingly multilingual. On PDF-to-Word’s company blog it says Multi-language text support. Convert all Unicode-based text, in any LTR (left-to- right written) language.
Yeah, right, I thought. Show me the goods! So I converted a PDF file con- taining Chinese, Russian, Swedish, and Spanish text, and it did so beautifully. Wow, I thought, that’s not bad, but I know where to prove them wrong: Amharic — no way they can do that right (many of you remember that I wrote about the poor Amharic support in many tools). But what can I say? It converted it beautifully. Now, you can’t convert a non-Unicode exot- ic-language font, and image-based PDFs (including scanned files) also don’t work, but otherwise it looks quite powerful. (You can check them out in Article 2201 in the Trados knowledgebase—thanks to Emma Goldsmith, Carmet Erez, and Amit Dharma for this tip.)
ACROBATIC SEARCHES
This past week I realized that Adobe Acro- bat (Professional) has a feature that I have simply overlooked in the past — the index- ing feature. I was working on a job with a couple hundred PDF files as reference ma- terial. While it’s possible to search through all the PDFs in a full-text search, it’s both time-consuming and heavy on your pro- cessing power. What I had never realized is that it’s very easy to create an index for any number of PDFs on your hard drive or network that you can easily delete after you are done with the task.
Here is how you do it: Select Advanced Document Processing > Full Text Index With Catalog in Acrobat (please note that you need the Professional edition for that) and then click New Index. Under Index Title, type a name for the index file. You can also enter a description of the index and look through the advanced options under Options (where, for instance, you can exclude certain words), and then you will have to select in which directories and sub-directories the PDFs that are going to be indexed are to be saved. Once you are done with all of that, click Build, and then specify the location for the index file. The initial building process may take a few moments, but any subsequent search- es (you can perform these through the advanced options under Edit > Search or by simply opening the resulting .pdx file) are blazingly fast and give you very quick access to the respective location within the PDF files.
Once you have an index built, you can also use the Adobe Reader or the Acrobat Standard edition to look through it.a
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
CAN YOU SEE MY SKYPE?
I’ve written about Skype before and how it’s become the chosen form of communication in translator commu- nities, albeit primarily as a messaging rather than a telephony tool (I can’t even recall when I opened another messaging tool). A new feature that was introduced with the latest version will probably just cement this status. It is now possible to share your desktop with a person with whom you are messaging or talking. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
The keyboard is one of the translator’s most valued, though at times troublesome, tools. While past trends on the PC side have moved in the direction of hypertrophied ergonomic command centers, Apple has chosen a different philosophy in keeping with its primary goal of simplification. Mac’s compact keyboard is now the de facto standard on all models, both laptops and desktops. Less is more: gone is the numeric pad and many “missing” keys are easily accessed via a combination with the “fn” key—forward delete, for example, is “fn+delete”.
To view all the options available in this keyboard, just enable the Keyboard Viewer utility in the main menu from the International panel of the System Preferences, under the Input tab. There, you can add various keyboard layouts to match those with which you are most comfortable. Of course, you will need to know them by heart if your hardware keyboard has the English layout. Interestingly, when you configure a new Mac online, you can not only choose between 3 types of keyboards (wireless, compact, and extended) but also the 3 languages of NAFTA: English, French and Spanish.
While I would have appreciated that option when I was still typing from my memorized French layout on a material English keyboard, now my favorite keyboard feature is the versatility of the built-in key combinations offered by Mac OS X. This is where the Keyboard Viewer is most useful: when you press the Option key, the accents appear in orange. To type “é”, for example, you start with Option-E, then E, and the accent is added to the letter “e”—if you often type in two languages, it is convenient to use just one layout.
Unfortunately, Apple’s US online store offers only English keyboards, and non-English keyboards are not shipped to the US. Nevertheless, the Apple keyboard is yet another good argument for using a Mac. ya
TransMUG is a Macintosh user group for translators. To sign up, go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transmug/.
Max OS X’s Keyboard Viewer displays special characters as you press the keys (in grey).
The keyboard is one of the translator’s most valued, though at times troublesome, tools. While past trends on the PC side have moved in the direction of hypertrophied ergonomic command centers, Apple has chosen a different philosophy in keeping with its primary goal of simplification. Mac’s compact keyboard is now the de facto standard on all models, both laptops and desktops. Less is more: gone is the numeric pad and many “missing” keys are easily accessed via a combination with the “fn” key—forward delete, for example, is “fn+delete”. → continue reading
May 1st, 2009 | Business Tools, Continuing Ed., Reports | No Comments
A Bay Area Trados guru travels to the Indian subcontinent to spread the word, sample local cuisine, and experience a fascinating culture. BY TUOMAS KOSTIAINEN
It was too cool to pass up – you can’t be a real “Trados guru” unless you go to India to teach Trados, and if that wasn’t enough there was always a chance you might meet some of those beautiful Bollywood dancers. Or at least there would be plenty of good Indian food every day. So considering all of this, I said “yes” and agreed to teach three two-day Trados workshops in India last September. That was before I realized that it takes about 24 hours to fly there from San Francisco and I would need to subject myself to substantial needle poking by the Kaiser travel health nurse. Oh, well. There was also the less selfish point of view, and that was to spread the “happy Trados message” around the world… → continue reading
