support

Video How To on Slanger's Filer: File Manager

2009-05-13T06:46:33-07:00

Video about File manager.

How to use it, and its positive sides.
You may look at it here.

Video How To on Slanger's Dictionaries: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, English, Russian

2009-05-13T06:45:21-07:00

Presentation video of dictionary tool. It’ll show you how to use your dictionary.

More about more.aslang.com

2009-05-11T03:56:33-07:00

Would you like to know more about Aslang?
Find more here!

Thesauri - video tutorial

2009-05-07T04:30:14-07:00

To find out more on Slanger's one-language dictionaries and how to use them we published this short video tutorial here.

Slanger - wordform dictionaries (English, Russian) storyboard

2009-05-07T04:24:39-07:00

To get more familiar with Slanger's word form dictionaries, please, follow this link.

aslangl.com Feature Overview

2009-05-07T04:14:36-07:00

An all-feature overview video and storyboard of aslang.com is launched.

Filer

2009-04-13T03:34:20-07:00

1. A few words about the tool in the system

Filer is a sort of a translator’s dream, and it is not an exaggeration. Filer is a tool, right as it is stated at aslang.com, for whole-file processing. In order to feel the full power of it one has just to upload a file, we call it a source file in the system, pick the direction of translation and push the button. In few moments, you’ll see the freshly baked resulting file ready to download and use in your translation work. That’s the short way to explain what Filer can do for you.

This tool was born due to a constant wish to avoid a routine to look for foreign language words in the dictionary over and over; everyone knows it may take one’s whole life looking for unknown words in the dictionaries, and that’s the most of time spent by the translators at work.

At the moment the key feature of the Filer is easiness; it’s easiness in use, easiness in obtaining and easiness in work process.

2. Navigation

The Filer’s navigation and control are pretty straightforward and any novice is able to manage it.

The outer look of Filer is resembling a well-known file manager interface with two vertical panels listing your files within the disk space of yours: the left panel is for your source files, i.e. files that you upload onto the system, and the right panel shows the bound resulting files upon the system processing.

When you’ve uploaded a text file it’s not bound to any file on the right as it is not processed yet. Right after a source file has been processed you can see its twin in the right panel. Moreover, if you slide with your mouse over the file list, left or right one, the pointer highlights a pair of files – source and target; this feature is needed to avoid cluttering your space: you always know which target file belongs to which source file, and vice versa. Isn’t it handy?

To get use of the tool there’s only one thing you have to do – download the target file, i.e. results of the system’s text processing facility, and all.

Another option you may find extremely useful is to re-open the source file in the Interactor in order to complete translation online, but that’s another story.

3. Beyond UI

Very many things are hidden from the user’s eye and this is the main part of the magic. What happens when you push the process button?

First and foremost, you understand that text processing has never been a trivial task and it is getting more sophisticated when it comes to use two languages at once, especially a couple like, say, Chinese and Russian.

Next, translating from Chinese into Russian is slightly different from Russian-Chinese, you know that, too. The system is not capable to do the job instead of a translator, but it is aware about the language differences, morphology, word and sentence boundaries, etc.

Finally, the system is capable to handle really huge arrays of texts none of humans can for such a short time.

Of course, nobody’s going to explain in details how it goes – stay in touch, keep reading and you’ll get most of it.

4. The source

The source file, as you perhaps already understood, may be a plain text file utf8-encoded and contains the text in Chinese, Russian or English, or any mixture of these. One of the built-in feature of Filer to work wisely with the source text is “to recognize” new line marks in order to split text in more or less understandable chunks of text and process them afterwards.

5. The target

The target file is not a text by itself, but an automatically compiled vocabulary, or glossary if you like it more; and it does not contain any source text, nor translation, just a vocabulary list. We are investing more and more efforts in developing the tool’s features in order to provide more comfortable translation environment.

6. What else

It’s hard to depict very clearly what exactly Filer is: on one hand it’s a file manager, on the other hand it is an annotation tool or a vocabulary builder; we wish to put no limits either on its use or boundaries because there is only one thing we keep in mind: how to make the environment more productive and friendly and the job of the user more comfortable and less annoying. We do hope that everyone who finds it’s useful and enjoys, will find his or her proper name for it.

Interactor

2009-04-13T03:21:56-07:00

Interactor, as it is stated on aslang.com, is a multipurpose language tool which primarily is designed for professional translators working with Chinese, English or Russian languages in any direction in between.

It is a tool and it is not only an online, or just electronic dictionary; and it is not yet another machine translation system with an awkward word-to-word mapping; neither it is an environment for doing some nobody-cares-for-what tasks that one should install on his or her desktop in order to get aware its complete uselessness. Nothing of the kind and that’s the point.

Interactor was born as a basic tool containing all-in-one application connecting to a set of wisely designed back-end programs and databases. It is Interactor that is able to provide a complete environment to do the following:

1) input the source text: at the moment so that to avoid some technical complications we’ve omitted for the future releases the popular text formats like for instance pdf, doc, odt and the like and stick to the plain text UTF8 files;

2) pre-process the input text to make use of it for the features designed to make the translator’s environment more productive: actually, the preprocessing does a lot of job behind the scene and it’ll be said much more later somewhere around – keep looking and reading;

3) query the dictionary databases to make a redundant number of word and word lookups to compile a vocabulary needed to produce the human translation right within a couple of windows;

4) make ready the scalable window: for the translator does not click between a number of simultaneously opened windows “to look for”, “to sort out”, “to pick the right word” over and over again;

5) save the full translation or a part of it in order to get back to it when it’s time to finish a next coffee break;

6) and, of course, get it downloaded to print or email, or hand over to your client;

In case the translator happened to come across a word or a phrase he or she never seen before and the dictionary’s entries do not cover the gap, Interactor may be of a good help with the thesauri for each of the three languages, where there may be an answer found.

Aslang weblogs

2008-12-19T06:31:20-08:00

Here one may ask and/or answer questions about official Aslang weblogs and find out more on how to use this powerful tool in communicating with the community, Aslang team and everyone enjoying using aslang.com.

Techy questions

2008-12-19T06:26:31-08:00

Any technical issue related, say, to connect, use, integration, whatever... whatever related to Aslang is answered here.