May 1st, 2009 | ATA, Business Tools, Continuing Ed., Reports | 2 Comments
An ATA-sponsored translation tools seminar in San Francisco provided information about ways to increase professional productivity. BY RON TISCHLER
The translation tools seminar held on March 14, 2009 at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco was divided into morning and afternoon sessions, plus there were exhibitors, a networking session, and a parade! The parade down Market Street, which seemed to have something to do with the color green, could be watched (until you got too cold) during the lunch break. The morning session, given by Rosalie Wells was titled “Productivity Tools for the Professional Translator.” The afternoon session, given by Dierk Seeburg of IcoText, was titled “Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) Tools, from Term Extraction to Integrated Translation Environments.” There were about 100 attendees and four exhibitors: Across, Payment Practices, Total Recall (product named Snowball), and Wordfast.
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May 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | 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
INFORMATION SUPER-STORAGE
With the content-centric Web 3.0 in the making, storage, retrieval, and interpretation of content is front and center to many technologies. But many of these technologies are concerned with large databases and are just a bit beyond the scope of the regular user, who’s just looking for good ways to store and retrieve data efficiently. I recently looked at a number of tools designed to help with that, and I liked none quite as much as Evernote. → continue reading
May 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | 2 Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
A recent switcher and user group member recently asked me if he should install some kind of security software on his new MacBook. I held off on my answer until I read about the Pwn2Own contest, part of the CanSecWest digital security conference held in March in Vancouver. Contestants chose a platform, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and most smartphones, and demonstrated a winning attack. Charlie Miller, a security expert, won $5,000 and a MacBook. AppleInsider found an interview of Miller and beautifully summarized the facts. → continue reading
Feb 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | 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
A TRUE TOOL BOX
I recently analyzed my main computer to find out which tools I truly need, not necessarily the ones that are nice to have for those super-exotic projects that come in every other year, but the well-constructed screwdrivers, hammers, and wrenches that, when combined, take us where we need to go. → continue reading
Feb 1st, 2009 | Business Tools | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
Pages and Numbers, the core applications of iWork, are now at version 4 and deserve a new review. Is the Apple Office suite ready to compete with the top tier of the market? When Pages (Word replacement) and Numbers (for Excel) were added to Keynote (for PowerPoint) to form iWork, the comparisons were not favorable, although Keynote was superior to PowerPoint in many respects from the start. Pages and Numbers were more like a modernized version of AppleWorks split in two, minus the drawing tools. The combo didn’t feel like a real Office contender. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2008 | Business Tools | 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
Let’s talk about security
I’m basing this article on a chapter in my e-book where you can find much more detailed information, including screenshots and step-by-step instructions about processes. → continue reading
Dec 1st, 2008 | Business Tools | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
How sweet is that picture? The new aluminum MacBook and its companion 24″ LED Cinema Display—isn’t that a dream-like combination for a translator’s home office? With this setup, you can follow your Apple Mail Inbox on the laptop’s screen and work with all your translation tools’ windows on the splashy display. And when you’re away from home, you get the lightest, most powerful, full-featured consumer laptop ever made by Apple! Not so fast. There are still a few caveats to take into consideration: 1) if you depend on FireWire connectors for external hard drives or previous generation camcorders, you will find no port for them on this MacBook; 2) display quality, though greatly improved thanks to LED technology, is still not up to par with that of the MacBook Pro, or even the MacBook Air; 3) finally, if you want to get the benefit of your Mac as a media center for your home, you will quickly feel constrained by the 320GB-maximum hard disk. → continue reading
Sep 1st, 2008 | Business Tools | 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
Similis for Free
Lingua et Machina (
http://www.lingua-et-machina.com/), the maker of the TEnT Similis, is offering its tool for free in a limited yet functional version. I have praised Similis in the past, in particular for its term extraction capability in the languages it supports (English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French) where it achieves a much higher accuracy than any other tool that I am aware of. It is also a full-fledged translation tool with a translation memory and dictionary component.
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Sep 1st, 2008 | Business Tools | No Comments
BY YVES AVÉROUS
With 86 members registered on its list, one would think that TransMUG has more than enough members to host lively discussions on ones experience as a translator on a Mac. When they sign up, the new members always sound eager to participate, but in the end, rare are those who initiate a discussion. Maybe it’s because may of us are already members of MacLingua and get enough techie talk there to abstain on our own list or maybe we are too busy to bother. → continue reading
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.
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.
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!
