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.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Business Tools, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
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!
Alison Dent
posted this article under Business Tools, Reports on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Feb 1st, 2008 | Essays, Localization | No Comments
By Anna Schlegel
How do transnational companies maintain their brand integrity across the multiple localizations of their Internet presence? A case study from VeriSign.
To put the globalization challenge for VeriSign’s website in perspective, it is first necessary to understand that the firm protects, with digital certificates, the secure websites of a majority of companies that have a presence on the Internet. This means more than 750,000 web servers, including 93 percent of the Fortune 500. VeriSign operates the largest independently owned specialized network in the world, routing billions of connections from carrier to carrier—between protocols and across national boundaries. The company monitors 300 million retail transactions and delivers more than 200 million mobile-originated intercarrier messages and more than one million multimedia messages every day.
In 2003, VeriSign had just four international sites—in France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K.—in addition to its corporate website, supported by a single Global Project Manager. Today, the company has more than 18 international sites organized under a centralized global web operation, supported by five language service providers across the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the U.K. The team has grown to include an international executive producer, developers, designers, a localization team and project managers in various geographical regions.
Starting at the bottom
Prior to my joining the company in 2004, VeriSign was using an array of consultants and tools to launch websites with little in-country support or dedicated international developers, as the company was not yet fully staffed internationally. Issues such as international tax, customs, and legal matters were not being addressed consistently (if at all), so appropriate content definition was a complex issue.
Upon my arrival I was told, “Look at what any of the global top five companies do and implement something similar. And, while you’re at it, choose and implement a global content management system (GCMS).” In other words, I had to start from scratch, developing a global website strategy, and virtually every one of its component parts, from budget, affiliates, and team resources to workflow automation and vendor management to localization, website maintenance, and, of course, buy-in from both corporate leadership and international management.
Aligning goals
I determined that the best way to implement such sweeping changes was to ensure that my globalization strategy meshed with the business plans of both senior and line management. I attended many presentations at the director level and above, always making sure to ask the presenter how international needs and requirements figured into their plans; many times, of course, they didn’t. I presented executives with visual evidence of current and future pages in order to educate them on what was currently wrong with the various websites, and how they could be changed to support the VeriSign brand.
It took two and a half years, some burnout (the workload and strategic planning during this period were handled by just two staffers, one vendor, and no translation tools) and a lot of hard work to clean up everything and to gain management support to build a real team with a real budget. An enormous resource was the International Product Commercialization (IPC) Group. By joining this organization, I was able to have a voice in creating VeriSign’s global brand in terms of what the company could market and legally sell around the world.
Another important factor in our eventual success was creating a vision and mission statement for international operations, and continuously sharing it companywide at every opportunity. Our team set up glossaries and style guides, and I recruited as many allies as I could throughout the organization, focusing on the brand managers (who were key) and in-country personnel. Where positions weren’t filled, we used contractors. We built our budget dollar by dollar, until we could finally support the team that was required to carry out a globalization strategy appropriate for our company.
Keys to success
As proof of VeriSign’s success with our global website strategy, we saw the number of words processed doubled from 1.1 million to over 2 million between 2004 and 2006. In 2003, there were no stakeholders for this endeavor; by 2006, there were 14 major stakeholders actively engaged in the localization process. The number of countries supported jumped from seven in 2004 to 16 in 2006. Non-core language support now includes Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Farsi, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian and Turkish. Infrastructure tools include glossaries and style guides in four areas: keywords, website buttons, products/services/descriptions, and a monolingual glossary to support translators. We recently launched an initiative to deploy a global content management system to replace the old, email-based system, with full approval from top executives.
As of the beginning of last year, our corporate site had 5.3 million unique visitors and 30 million page views. The international sites, including 10 in the EMEA region (Europe/Middle East/Africa) and two in Latin America, had 557,000 unique visitors and 2.7 million page views. While the corporate site has experienced a modest 3 percent increase in visitors and a 1 percent increase in page views year-over-year, the increases for the international sites were 74 percent and 41 percent, respectively! France was up by 288 percent, Switzerland by 139 percent and Germany by 122 percent.
37 percent of all traffic on VeriSign’s intranet is now generated from international offices, and 34 percent of the traffic on the company’s sales portal is from outside of the U.S. In terms of lead generation, 308,000 web leads were collected worldwide in 2006.
Along the way, our team took on responsibility for translation as well. Engineering depends on our team to provide guidance, and they share the same language service providers. Our team mandates the translation processes, QA processes, and more. There are now three Web Globalization Managers based in EMEA and some funding for usability studies in that region, as well as in Latin America and Asia-Pacific.
What has been responsible for the success of our team’s work? Perhaps the most important factor has been the engagement of the in-country marketing teams. By creating Service Level Agreements, providing tools and access for each region to request localized content, offering local training, preparing a glossary repository, and conducting frequent meetings with colleagues in the regions, our team members have been able to effectively integrate their goals and operations with those of corporate.
Lessons learned
In carrying out our plan, our team learned a number of important lessons. These included, among others, the notions that globalization must be supported by top-level management; a vision and a mission for international operations are crucial, and must be integrated with the company’s corporate vision; metrics must be communicated through lead generation, chat forums, and the company’s support site; and tools must be tested before buying, based on client requirements—not those of the vendors.
As we launched more websites, our team focused on overcoming still new challenges, which encompassed the need for consistency across all sites, a sensitivity to audience diversity, attention to revenue and strategy, success metrics, regional representation, and doing more with less. Throughout it all, though, we were able to effectively demonstrate how centralized website localization builds the VeriSign brand through the creation of consistent positioning, messaging, and voice and tone—all of which, in turn, helped build brand awareness and recognition. Such efforts also protected the company’s brand assets through trademark protection, by means of proper content translation, and mitigated the company’s worldwide exposure by protecting the company’s key trademark assets.
A clear globalization strategy and execution supports international expansion as well, through the extension of product offerings on a global basis via acquisition and monthly IPC approvals. Simultaneous website launches and support of worldwide sales activity also contribute to this.
Maturing with our markets
As the U.S. market matures, VeriSign’s corporate management looks to international markets as the company’s new frontier for expansion. Building on our team’s success over the past several years, we are now concentrating on issues such as contained English (that is, engaging writers to reduce the amount of content they create), expanding in Asia, allowing more customization at the local level, and, as always, maintaining a high concentration on quality.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Essays, Localization on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Feb 1st, 2008 | ATA, Ethics, Reports | No Comments
By Alison Dent
You’d think that handling the press would be easy for an industry that deals with words. But maybe not.
I think everyone who attended the 48th Annual ATA Conference here in San Francisco last October would agree that it was a great success. Hard work and many hours of volunteer time went into the conference, the pro bono project work, and the effort to get local publicity. On the first day of the conference, in fact, reporter Steve Rubenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed ATA President Marian Greenfield and ATA Public Relations Committee Co-chair Kevin Hendzel. The resulting article, “Translation business booming—terrorists’ languages most lucrative,” was published the next day.
War means business
Although the article successfully captured some of the buzz of the conference, it was impossible to ignore the one point that stood out above all others, and which ultimately served as the basis for the blaring headline: the message that war is good for business. While this statement may be a truism, was this really what ATA had intended to convey? Or, had the words of Ms. Greenfield and Mr. Hendzel been twisted in undue emphasis?
It didn’t take long for the NCTA members’ Yahoo! group to light up with animated discussions among members over this article and its intended message. One member felt strongly that the misrepresentation began within the leadership of ATA, and wrote a lengthy letter to the NCTA Board expressing his concerns. NCTA then contacted the ATA Board to solicit its reaction to the Chronicle article and request clarification of the intended message.
In Mr. Hendzel’s reply to NCTA, he confirmed that the reporter, Mr. Rubenstein, intended to focus on the business side of the T&I industry. However, nothing was published about this subject: neither about the international commercial market associated with globalization, for example, nor about the U.S. domestic market, an area that is growing rapidly as hospitals, courts, and other public venues are beginning to provide translation and interpreting services in response to Presidential Executive Order 13166—topics which were talked about at length in the interview. Instead, Mr. Rubenstein—or his editors—stuck like a dog with a bone to the deliberately controversial notion of war being great for business, despite repeated efforts by Mr. Hendzel to steer him away from this.
Selling out; selling more
“How much can you earn?” “What are the ‘hottest’ languages?” These are the questions that reporters are trained to ask, believing that this is what most people really want to hear about. In the world of journalism, the answers to these questions, after all, create the headlines that sell newspapers. And yes, it was an eye-catching headline; yes, it made us read the article; and yes, we did talk about it at length afterwards. But does that mean that the article accurately portrayed the event and circumstances it was meant to cover? No, far from it. While the article did remind the public that translation is not all done by software on the Internet, it offered very little useful or interesting information about our profession. As with the lack of mention of business issues cited above, there was also no mention of the human side of translating—of any positive contributions made by translators and interpreters in war zones, for example, such as providing assistance in reconstruction and rebuilding efforts. Or of the lowering of civilian and religious conflict by allowing the various parties to communicate.
Somehow the old adage of there being “no such thing as bad publicity” just didn’t hold true in this case. Instead, with its emphasis on the sensational aspects of war-mongering, the article portrayed our profession in a negative, ambulance-chasing light. Because in the world of journalism, after all, sensationalism is what sells.
A different fight
In 2008, with ATA boasting over 10,000 members, and NCTA over 600 in this, our 30th anniversary year, we can look back and see that as a profession we have made great strides. But this episode has clearly demonstrated that we are not beyond having our words twisted. Jiri Stejskal, who took over as ATA President after the conference, agreed that the reporter’s slant was disturbing, and reflected poorly on ATA and the profession. Although a letter from ATA to the San Francisco Chronicle was reportedly being drafted, there is no information on any progress on the issue since then.
There is much, however, that we can still do. Specifically, we need to continue our efforts to get positive publicity for our profession; we need to educate our clients; and we need to get smarter about dealing with the press.
It’s time to use the tools of our trade—words—to fight for our cause
Alison Dent
posted this article under ATA, Ethics, Reports on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Feb 1st, 2008 | Court Interpretation, NCTA Meetings, Reports | No Comments
By Raffaella Buschiazzo
The December 1st NCTA General Meeting had a bit of everything, from a celebration of our most active volunteers to a presentation on how to become a California Certified Court Interpreter to a lively and pleasant hour of stuffing envelopes, sticking stamps, and general all-around schmoozing as we discussed our plans for the imminent holidays.
NCTA Vice President Yves Avérous opened the General meeting at 1:40 p.m. with a few announcements of upcoming events, and a call for volunteers to replace Alison Dent as manager of the online extension of our magazine Translorial (www.translorial.com). The site will include the full archives of Translorial from its first issue 30 years ago; Alison did a tremendous job putting content online and managing it, and we will all be very sorry to see her move back to Europe. Yves continued his introduction by drawing attention to the fact that 2008 will be a special year for our Association. We will celebrate NCTA’s 30th anniversary with a major event. Suggestions are welcome!
Awards
NCTA gave free one-year memberships to four members who distinguished themselves in 2007 by their contributions to the Association’s activities. Karen Tkaczyk played an instrumental role during the ATA Conference in San Francisco by working at the NCTA table and providing a storage place in her hotel room for all the association’s collateral materials. Patricia Ramos, who served as a board director from 2000 to 2002 and hosted the board retreats at her house several times, made the trip to San Francisco to attend the ATA Conference from Spain, where she currently lives, and helped at the NCTA hospitality table every morning. Tatyana Neronova has managed all the Translorial mail meticulously for a long time. And last but not least, Paula Dieli was presented with the Volunteer of the Year Award for her involvement in the ATA Conference and for setting up and maintaining the NCTA wiki page on the Conference.
Interpreting in the Courts
The NCTA board wanted to have a presentation giving an overview of the role that court interpreters play in the court system, and what is required to become a certified or registered court interpreter in California. The goal was to offer specific information to those translators interested in expanding their careers and to interpreters who are thinking about adding this specialization to their resume.
The two speakers selected for our presentation by the San Francisco Judicial Council of California complemented each other thanks to their different profiles. Cannon Han is a Court Services Analyst with the Court Interpreters Program. Prior to joining the Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC), he was an attorney in the non-profit sector and in private practice. As an attorney, Mr. Han addressed language interpretation and quality of care issues in the mental health system and assisted low-income clients on a wide range of legal issues, ranging from public benefits to patients’ rights violations. Dr. Patricia Kilroe is a Linguistics Analyst for the Court Interpreters Program. Prior to this position she taught linguistics, French, English expository writing, and ESL for many years. Her degrees are a B.A. in French, an M.S. in linguistics, and a Ph.D. in Romance-language linguistics.
Mr. Han opened the presentation by quoting from the California Constitution’s mandate that “[a] person unable to understand English who is charged with a crime has a right to an interpreter throughout the proceedings.” For this reason courts must provide specially trained language interpreters whenever a party involved in a proceeding understands little or no English. The Judicial Council is the organ responsible for certifying and registering court interpreters. Currently, court interpreters can be certified in 12 languages: Arabic, Armenian (Eastern and Western), Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. Only interpreters who pass the Court Interpreter Certification Examination and register with the Judicial Council are considered as “certified court interpreters.”
Exams
Part of the examination tests writing skills in English and in the target language for vocabulary, reading comprehension, and grammar. The written examination consists of 155 multiple-choice questions to be answered in four hours and 20 minutes. If the candidate passes, he or she goes on to the oral component to test skills in simultaneous and consecutive interpreting and in sight translation. Interpreters of spoken languages for which there is no state certifying examination are called “registered interpreters of non-designated languages.” They must pass an English proficiency examination which consists of oral and written tests. In both cases, after passing the examination, the interpreter must submit an application to register with the Judicial Council and pay an annual fee. To maintain the certification, the interpreter must attend a Code of Ethics workshop in the first two-year compliance period, and submit proof of 30 hours of continuing education and 40 recent court interpreting assignments for every two-year period.
Dr. Kilroe explained what kind of knowledge, skills, and abilities are needed in court interpreting. She distributed a very long list of linguistic, speaking, listening, reading comprehension, interpreting, and behavioral skills required for this profession. These include language fluency and interpreting skills, such as the ability to concentrate and focus, to process linguistic information and choose terminology quickly, to think analytically, to conserve intent, tone, style, and utterances of all messages, to reflect register, and to self-monitor and self-correct. There are several colleges that provide training, but Dr. Kilroe offered some tips on how to prepare the for the exam with self-study techniques: expand your vocabulary, develop your own glossaries, develop interpreting techniques for consecutive and simultaneous interpretation and sight translation, develop memorization techniques and practice effective listening. She suggested the exercise of “shadowing” to improve one’s interpreting techniques. This consists of having somebody record passages from magazines and newspapers on tape and repeating everything the speaker says including writing out any numerals from ten to 100. We tried this exercise in groups of two people. For more information on becoming a court interpreter or on official workshops, you can visit http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/programs/courtinterpreters/becoming.htm
Thank you to Mr. Han and Dr. Kilroe for their very comprehensive presentations and for staying with us until the end of the general meeting to answer our multiple questions. They certainly provided a lot of information and good suggestions for those courageous enough to follow their path!
Alison Dent
posted this article under Court Interpretation, NCTA Meetings, Reports on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Feb 1st, 2008 | NCTA Events, Reports | No Comments
By Nina Bogdan
The annual NCTA New Year’s brunch was held at Skates on the Bay restaurant in Berkeley on January 13th. This is the fourth year that the event was held at this location and the general consensus among attendees was that it remains a good choice. Approximately 30 members attended, although apparently 50 or so sent in a positive RSVP. The whereabouts of the missing attendees remain a mystery and they certainly did miss out on a very pleasant social and networking event. This was my first time attending the brunch and I must admit that while I made the decision to go only at the last minute, I am very glad that I overcame my slothful inclinations and took the plunge.
Skates on the Bay is located on the Berkeley waterfront and has a sweeping (one might even say “spectacular” view) of the bay. The weather on Sunday was perfect—clear and bright with a slight breeze. One of the blessings of living in the Bay Area is having these unexpected very un-winter like days that pop up between rainstorms and overcast drizzly periods.
Lunch began with an offering of a variety of beverages. I, not being a designated driver for once, opted for a Bloody Mary and although it looked almost too pretty to drink, it went down quite nicely. We proceeded with ordering brunch and then were presented with pastries, coffee, and tea courtesy of NCTA.
There were quite animated social and business discussions throughout the meal and it was quite apparent that a good time was had by all. I was finally able to put names and faces together, which I find to be an important part of networking when most communications are by email. The lunch ended with what may become a traditional walk on the long pier adjacent to the restaurant and the obligatory group photo. All in all, this was a very pleasant way to spend an early Sunday afternoon.
Alison Dent
posted this article under NCTA Events, Reports on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
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).
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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.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Business Tools, Web services on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
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.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Business Tools, NCTA Meetings, Reports on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Dec 1st, 2007 | Essays, Machine Translation, Opinion, Translation | No Comments
By Paula Dieli
Mention the words “machine translation,” and a translator’s thoughts will range from job security to the ridiculously funny translations we’re able to produce with so-called online translation tools. Should we be worried that machines will take over our jobs? Paula Dieli thinks not, and explains why in this report.
I recently attended a presentation on “Challenges in Machine Translation,” sponsored by the International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG), at which Dr. Franz Josef Och, Senior Staff Research Scientist at GoogleResearch, presented some of the challenges Google is facing in its machine translation (MT) research, and how some of these challenges are being addressed. Excitement about successes in machine translation research initially came to a head back in 1954 with a report in the press regarding the Georgetown University/IBM experiment which had used a computer to translate Russian into English. Since then, over the past 50 years, we have continued to read about the great advances that will be possible in “the next 20 years,” but these great advances never came to pass. When the Internet came of age, online translation tools surfaced and we translators amused ourselves by seeing what crazy translations we could come up with by entering seemingly simple phrases.
The linguistics of MT
So why did the research never produce anything really viable? It was based on a linguistic approach; that is, an analysis of the structure of a language followed by an attempt to map it into machine language such that one could input a source language text and out would come a wonderful translation in the target language, albeit with a few minor errors. As we all know, a language is filled with so many cultural, contextual, idiomatic, and exceptional uses that this task became virtually impossible, and no real progress has been made with this approach in the past 50 years.
Dr. Geoffrey Nunberg, Adjunct full professor at UC Berkeley, linguist, researcher, and consulting professor at Stanford University, had this to say at a recent NCTA presentation: “I asked a friend of mine, who is the dean of this [MT] field, once, ‘if you asked people working in machine translation how long it will be until we have perfect, idiomatic machine translation of text …?’, they would all say about 25 years. And that’s been a constant since 1969.”
The data-driven approach
In recent years, MT researchers have begun to take a different approach, which can be loosely compared to the work you do as a translator when you use a tool such as SDL Trados WinAlign or Translator’s Workbench. That is, you use a data-driven methodology. As you translate, you store your translations in a translation memory (TM), so that if that same or a similar translation appears again, the tool will notify you and let you use that translation as is, or modify it slightly to match the source text. The more you translate similar texts in a particular domain, the more likely it is that you will find similar translations already in your TM.
Similarly, if before you began to translate a weekly online newsletter of real estate announcements, for example, you searched the Internet for already existing translations in your language pair and then aligned them and input them, via WinAlign, into your TM, you might find that much of the work had already been done for you. Imagine now if you were to input 47 billion words worth of these translations. Your chances of being able to “automatically” translate much of your source text would certainly increase. This is the approach that Google is taking.
Google’s goal, as stated by Dr. Och, is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Now before you go thinking you’re out of a job, their data-driven approach has proven successful only for certain language pairs, and only in certain specialized domains. They have achieved success in what they call “hard” languages, that is from Chinese to English, and from Arabic to English in domains such as blogging, online FAQs, and interviews by journalists.
Dr. Och reported that their reasons for progress were due to “learning from examples rather than from a rule-based approach.” He admits that “more data is better data.” He went on to say that adding 2 trillion words to their data store would result in a 1 percent improvement for specific uses such as the ones described above. They see a year-to-year improvement of 4 percent by doubling the amount of data in their data store, or “corpus.” The progress reported by Dr. Och is supported by a study conducted by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2005. Google received the highest BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores using their MT technology to translate 100 news articles in the language pairs mentioned above. A BLEU score ranges from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest) and is calculated by comparing the quality of the target segments with their associated source segments (a penalty is applied for short segments since that artificially produces a higher score).
Challenges and limitations
So what are the limitations of this data-driven approach? When asked by a member of the audience if Google’s technology could be used to translate a logo, Dr. Och instantly replied that such a translation would require a human translator. It’s clear that Google’s approach handles a very specific type of translation. Similar data-driven MT implementations can be used to translate highly specialized or technical documents with a limited vocabulary which wouldn’t be translated 100 percent correctly, but which would be readable enough to determine whether the document is of interest. In that case, a human translator would be needed to “really” translate it.
The Google approach described above deals with a tremendous amount of data and a very targeted use. It works only for some languages—German, for example, has been problematic—and in order to improve in more than just small increments, human intervention is required to make corrections to errors generated by this approach. One example that Dr. Och provided—the number “1,173” was consistently incorrectly translated into the word “Swedes”—confirms that a machine can’t do it all.
And if you think for a minute about the amount of Internet-based data being generated on just an hourly basis, it’s great to have machines around to handle some of the repetitive (read: uninteresting) work, and let us translators handle the rest. That still leaves plenty of work for us humans.
Alternative technologies
There are other approaches to MT, including example-based technology, which relies on a combination of existing translations (such as you have in your translation memory) along with a linguistic approach that involves an analysis of an unmatched segment to a set of heuristics, or rules, based on the grammar of the target language. Some proponents of this approach concede that large amounts of data would be needed to make this approach successful, and have all but abandoned their research. Once again, we can see that any approach that relies even partially on linguistics has not met with a reasonable level of success.
Other advances occurring in the MT arena include gisting and post-editing. MT can be used successfully in some settings where the gist of a document is all that is needed in order to determine if it is of enough interest to warrant a human translation. There are also MT systems on the market that produce translations that require post-editing by human translators who spend (often painful) time “fixing” these translations, correcting the linguistic errors that such a system invariably produces. While this may not be the translation work you’re looking for, I know of at least one large translation agency that provides specific training for this type of post-editing to linguists willing to do this kind of work. This is another example that shows that while machines play a part, there is still a role for human translators in the overall process.
Still other advancements include the licensing of machine translation technology based on a data-driven approach, which can be tailored to work with existing translations and terminology databases at a specific company. As with the Google solution, such technologies typically work on a limited set of languages. However, if they can help translate some of the less interesting, repetitive information out there, with more information being produced at a continually increasing rate, have no fear; there will still be plenty of work for human translators to do!
The road ahead
Where does that leave us? From the typewriter to word processors to CAT (Computer-Assisted or Computer-Aided Translation) tools and the pervasiveness of the Internet, our livelihood has been transformed, in a positive way. We are more productive and able to work on more interesting translations than ever before.
I encourage you to embrace technology; understand how it is helping to make information accessible, and learn how technology can help translators do the work that only humans can do.
more information
The calendar of the International Macintosh User Group (IMUG) upcoming presentations can be found at http://www.imug.org.
You can get the official results of the 2005 Machine Translation Evaluation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/mt/doc/mt05eval_official_results_release_20050801_v3.html.
Alison Dent
posted this article under Essays, Machine Translation, Opinion, Translation on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Dec 1st, 2007 | ATA, Conferences, NCTA Members | No Comments
By Steve Goldstein, Editor
The 48th Annual ATA Conference
San Francisco
October 31 – November 3, 2007
“The convention seemed to capture the current wave of interest and enthusiasm that is rippling through the translator world, as most convention-goers seemed to sense that the tide is in the process of being turned—that it is perhaps not now unthinkable that our professional pride and prestige will soon take on greater and more justified proportions.”
Those words were written 29 years ago, by a young translator and writer; an emissary from the West Coast to the 19th Annual ATA Conference in New York, who had, just a few short months prior, been a part of the birth of his own local organization, the Northern California Translators Association, in San Francisco.
The President of NCTA at the time—a man who had taken that young translator under his wing in the nascent organization—had just been elected President of ATA as well, and was about to take office at the New York conference. This was an unheard-of and unprecedented occurrence—a West Coast president of what was at the time a largely East Coast organization. There was electricity in the air, and our young translator would get to write about it, in the unofficial conference coverage report. He would also bring back some of that momentum with him to San Francisco, where a small group of his colleagues was already at work building the foundation for what would in time become one of the national organization’s strongest local chapters.
Times have changed since 1978, of course. That NCTA and ATA President, Thomas Bauman, is sadly no longer with us to see some of the important changes that his work initiated and continued; changes at the national level, certainly, where our profession has indeed come a long way—although not without having continued obstacles to overcome. Today, ATA is of course no longer just a regional organization, but it’s not just a national one, either; today, it is a powerful international professional association of over 10,000 members around the world.
But changes have occurred at the local level, too. And nowhere, perhaps, has the example been more instructive than here in San Francisco. ATA has brought its annual conference back to the birthplace of its most active chapter several times in the past three decades, watching as NCTA continued its own robust growth, built as always on the infectious enthusiasm of dedicated and tireless local volunteers who believe in working together to strengthen their profession.
Today, that dedication continues, through NCTA’s active role as the host chapter of the just-concluded 48th Annual ATA Conference in our City by the Bay, and via this special Translorial supplement reporting on the event. In these pages, we look at the conference from a variety of perspectives that may not always be found in the standard, straight-ahead reporting of the conference, as that information is available elsewhere. It is, instead, a decidedly more human approach because, well … translators are people, too, and that always seems the more interesting viewpoint, doesn’t it?
All those who are reading these words owe a debt of gratitude to their NCTA colleagues who did double-duty at the conference: as regular attendees, trying to learn and network and grow their own careers and businesses, and as your reporters, to give you a taste of the conference that you might not have otherwise had the opportunity to savor. Without their dedication and sacrifice—including that of Oscar Arteta and the tireless Christopher Queen, who took our terrific photographs—this supplement wouldn’t have been possible, and so to them I say, Thank you!
Has the tide in fact turned for our profession, since twenty-nine years ago? Certainly. But there’s still more turning to do, and while our young translator from that bygone era is no longer so young, he’s still here—to keep learning, growing … and working, to help turn that tide.
Alison Dent
posted this article under ATA, Conferences, NCTA Members on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 12:30 pm
