Translation Tribulations

BDÜ Übersetzer/Dolmetscher-Treff in Potsdam

2012-02-09T14:39:00.002+01:00

am Donnerstag, den 16. Februar 2012 ab 19.30 Uhr

im Restaurant & Café Heider,

Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 29 (direkt am Nauener Tor)

14467 Potsdam

www.cafeheider.de

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen in Brandenburg und Berlin,

wie schon im Berliner BDÜ Rundbrief mitgeteilt, findet wieder ein Übersetzer/Dolmetscher-Treff in Potsdam statt, zu dem wir Sie herzlich einladen.

Im Café Heider ist ein Nebenraum reserviert, in dem wir uns in lockerer Runde austauschen können.

Informationen zu Speisen und Getränken entnehmen Sie bitte der oben genannten Homepage.

Eingeladen sind Übersetzer und Dolmetscher aller Sprachen und Fachgebiete, die Mitglied im BDÜ sind.

Gerne berichten wir von der JMV im Januar in Berlin oder von anderen Aktivitäten unseres Landesverbandes.

Für Rückfragen erreichen Sie mich unter: Schloemer-Kaerger (at) bdue.de.

Mit kollegialen Grüßen

Bärbel Schlömer-Kaerger

Dipl.-Übers. Spanisch & Englisch

Mitglied des Vorstands BDÜ LV Berlin-Brandenburg e.V.

memoQ support & info: where to go

2012-02-08T16:22:00.001+01:00

I recently had a conversation with a new memoQ user regarding a minor settings issue, but after a long return trip from Hungary, where I picked up my new dog Csővárberki Jámbor, I was too tired to remember even the most basic information about TM settings for fuzzy matches. (That's about on par with trying to pour milk directly onto a saucer, having forgotten the coffee cup and coffee, which is how the day started.) I made a few suggestions for alternative sources of information until my laggard brain return to function, and I was surprised to find that many free and excellent sources of help were unknown. So I would like to list a few of these here, with comments, and I encourage you to add any others of which you are aware. Preferably ones which are not contaminated with advertising.

There is, of course, the legendary Support department of Kilgray, which can be reached at support@kilgray.com by e-mail or via a web contact form even late in the evenings. Most correspondence is in English, but quite a number of staff are reasonably competent in German, at least more competent in German than many German customers writing to them in English can handle the other language. I presume correspondence can also ensue in Hungarian.

Some are reluctant to contact Support for fear of looking "stupid". If there are any stupid questions possible, I've probably already asked them in some state of mental torpor, so take consolation, timid colleagues, in that you won't look any dumber than I do much of the time. I believe it is important for Kilgray to see where the "obvious" is being missed by its users or where real projects diverge from the ideal scenarios of their development concepts, because this provides important clues for future improvements. The support department is a vital source of such information.

Users should not only contact support when things are not going right, but also to ask guidance for best practice. From its humble beginnings as a simple, free tool with just a few features, memoQ has developed in a very short time to become a leader in translation environment innovation, with the unfortunate side-effect that the many options it now includes sometimes obscure the software's essential simplicity and make the best approach less than obvious. (This was the original reason for the workshops I now design and teach.) The Kilgray team have years of experience with many different areas of application, and in relaxed, friendly exchanges with the support team many useful new approaches arise.

Nonetheless, "RTFM" isn't such a bad principle with Kilgray. Time and again, I am surprised by the high quality of the program's help files, though sometimes I can't always understand how to get to the points described. The latest changes to the help files are also online, where comments on the quality of the help information can also be submitted.

PDF user manuals for various translator and server versions are available in different languages here on the Kilgray site.

There is an FAQ from Kilgray here.

On its home page, Kilgray has a sign-up form for the e-mail newsletter, which often has useful information. There are regular, free webinars on a wide variety of beginning and advanced topics, and many of these are recorded and available for viewing and/or download later. There are also free training videos online.

So much for the resources from Kilgray. There are a lot, and I do find it a little confusing to navigate them at times, but there is a wealth of high-quality information available there. I think this information could benefit from a little consolidation of its presentation on the web site, but they get an A for effort and information quality.

The independent Yahoogroups forum for memoQ is an excellent source of advice and support in the larger user community. Just like in the groups for Trados and Déjà Vu, many experienced users share practical experience and solve problems that even the best support department might have a tough time sorting out.

I do not recommend the ProZ memoQ forum as a place to turn. The bad atmosphere on Ze Zite and censorship, including posting restrictions on many of the best CAT tool experts, make the it fairly worthless for timely, reliable information these days. The Yahoogroups forums for all the tools are generally more active, with more good information and an excellent database to search. While ProZ is useful for its periodic group buys, these days it cannot be taken seriously as a source of much of anything else. There are better places to go like those described above.

Other possible sources of information include this blog and a number of others, and in various regions, there are good trainers available for paid training, consulting and coaching sessions. Some of these are listed on the Kilgray web site.

Anything up to date that I've missed?

The Post-editor's Prayer

2012-02-04T09:20:00.000+01:00

Our Future, which art eMpTy,

hallowed be the game!

Thy profits come,

Jaap's Will be done,

not that of Miguel or Kevin.

Give us this day

our Daily Crust

and forgive us our grumblings,

as we forgive stomachs which grumble against us.

And lead us not into transcreation,

but deliver us from freedom,

for thine is the Kingdom

of Imagined Glory,

forever and ever.
Amen.

Berliner Übersetzertreffen in Februar

2012-01-31T17:59:00.000+01:00

Liebe Leute,

hier die Einladung zum nächsten Übersetzertreffen am:

Donnerstag, 2. Februar 2012, ab 20.00 Uhr

Nach kürzerer Pause gehen wir wieder in das:

Gasthaus Figl

Urbanstraße 47

10967 Berlin (Kreuzberg)

U-Bahn: Schönleinstraße oder Hermannplatz

www.gasthaus-figl.de

„Pizza, Bier und Stoffserviette“ lautet das bekannte Thema.

Bis Donnerstag!

Andreas Linke

Translation rates: a modest proposal

2012-01-30T19:37:00.000+01:00

This morning as I negotiated my guest office space and tied my dog to a beam supporting the roof, I hit my head, and as it cracked open, the Light of Revelation poured in. I realized that we translators have been going about setting our rates in an entirely inappropriate and negative way. And the True Path for translation rates lay clear and straight before me, its engraved paving stones making clear that if customers want discounts, they may henceforth receive them in abundance*.
* special rules apply

First off, my base rates have been reformed. My word price will be 2 euros per source word in German. A bit on the high side perhaps, but not after all the discounts that may be relevant. Those who insist on paying by the English target word will receive a 10% discount.

If the job contains no handwritten text, there will be a 10% discount. If the job files are not in PDF format or some sort of bitmap or other format which cannot be overwritten electronically and they import cleanly into translation environment tools, there will be a further 10% discount.

Jobs which are not a rush requiring more than 1000 words/day or 200 words/hour will be granted another 10% discount.

Jobs for which the specified source language is in fact standard German from Germany and which contain no more than 1 minor text errors per 1000 words will be given another 10% discount. Specifying my native dialect (US English) as the target language earns 10% more off the base price.

Customers who pay cash in advance get another 10% off. And last but not least, repeat customers qualifying for at least three of the discounts above will get another 10% reduction.

So there we have it: total discounts of up to 80% available for savvy translation buyers. Betcha the Big Lion and my other competitors like BOGOF Translations aren't willing to accommodate clients that much!

A sermon from Ede

2012-01-30T02:12:00.000+01:00

Last September the Association of Translation Agencies (ATA) in the Netherlands hosted a one-day conference entitled "The Future is Here". Previous guest posts have described some of the workshops presented, but I have only now received permission to repost a summary from a private translators' forum which best captures the spirit of said future.

***

And it came to pass that the leaders of the translation industry in the Netherlands did host a gathering where visionaries and evangelists of Machine Translation did come to spread their knowledge to the truly ignorant and preach The Word to lowly translators, whom they knew as ‘workers’, for there had been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Machine Translation.

Those preachers did include the wondersome Renato Beninatto, a self-professed agent provocateur and erstwhile owner of Common Sense Advisory (and truly he is clever for he doth qualify all of his doings with the words ‘but no promises’). And so it was that the great Renato spake unto those assembled before him, to inspire them and let them be informed of the principles of Machine Translation so that they might practice them. And yea, his words fell on them like rain and they did listen to his preachings unquestioningly.

One of his audience spake of quality, a truly reprehensible word, but Renato was not angry and was gentle with him and did explain to him at great length and with supreme patience why the word quality shall not be uttered, for it is verily vanity to speak of quality in thyself: quality is subjective and translators shall not allow the word quality to pass their lips, nor shall they worship at the shrine of quality; he who speaks of quality and Machine Translation in the same breath shall be cast asunder. Many of the assembled throng did agree with him wholeheartedly that this was true.

And Renato was a kind preacher, for he did make no mention of the lowly translator or the need or otherwise for such a loathsome beast. And he did say unto the people before him that when the mighty computer was unable to understand or cope with the complexities of language - such as accents - those complexities would be banished in order that the computer might understand and in order that language might be ‘more present’. For he is truly a prophet and he doth know what the present means and what the future holds.

His disciples did learn from the great Renato that they should practice the principles of simplification and lowest common denominator and they did learn from one of his acolytes that they should speak and write in tongues that the Machine Translation can understand, lest they receive garbled messages.

The mighty Renato did also allow Jaap, another ‘visionary', to spread the Machine Translation gospel and tho Jaap did indeed attempt to extol the wonders of Machine Technology and predicted for those before him that the world shall be unrecognisable in only two years, he was lacking in charm and was unable to equal the persuasive talents of Renato. The translators could not warm to him since he spake of their labours as repetitive and did say unto them that they could not survive unless they worshipped the Machine. He did make them restless with his dire warnings that their translations memories were already obsolete and he did verily cast aspersions on even the most technological of them.

And the translators did mutter amongst themselves, for they were unsure. Whilst they did acknowledge the existence of Machine Translation, they did feel that language is a truly wonderful thing that shall be treasured. Renato had preached to them that quality is a vile word that must henceforth not be spoken and that he who doth use that word should be cast asunder yet they were not persuaded. And so they left the gathering, reassured in the knowledge that theirs is a valuable profession, even though it is not valued by all of those who seek to profit from them.

Yea, that is the task of the translator – that tho his is good work when it goes unnoticed, he shall not be a Doubting Thomas. He shall not be shunned for his belief in the beauty of language, for language is a truly wonderful thing and his is a truly valuable talent.

Put on de Red Pee fo da agency

2012-01-30T01:15:00.000+01:00

When I received a message from a colleague that ProZ had begun "certifying" translation agencies with the dreaded red Plob, I thought she was joking. There are real certifications for serious businesses, verifying that their documented procedures are orderly and traceable among other things. These include ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and the more ambitious agencies usually seek these because they are required for business with some large clients or RFPs. Surely no serious translation agency would feel the need to be "certified" by The Translation Workhouse with its increasingly debased standards. Well, once again, I have learned that human greed and folly have depths which even my cynicism cannot plumb. If one goes to the ProZ home page but is not logged in, the link to these "certified" proZtitution agencies is visible. I followed it and found a list of corporate members, some well known, some with the Plob.

What, I wonder, is being certified here? I am familiar with ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and I can't really imagine a lot of value that would be added here. But perhapZ the SiteStaff have developed important and relevant criteria, such as testing the timeliness of bank transfers for a specified amount. Both end customers and freelance translators would benefit from knowing that an agency using ProZ has been verified as a registered business with a working bank account.

So KudoZ to the phoax at Ze Zite for distinguishing such select translation service resellers (TSRs) as:

Remote presentations and tutoring

2012-01-25T00:29:00.000+01:00

I must confess that I am not really a great fan of remote viewers and the like on principle. The technology has been around quite a while, and about the time my friends in IT tech support developed enthusiasm for doing remote maintenance, I was running from tech support roles as fast as my legs could carry me. And while I appreciate a good webinar quite a lot, even the best cannot, in my opinion, match the value of personal delivery. When I deliver a lecture or workshop I like to see the faces of the participants, read their body language, ask them questions. And software just doesn't do that well in my opinion, even when the features are there.

But... I spend a lot of time on the phone explaining things to people who feel they are experiencing the inexplicable with the translation environment tools. And unfortunately not everyone uses the right descriptive terminology to give me a clear picture of the problem. So one day, while I was getting quite frustrated trying to picture what a user was doing on her screen, one of us thought of using TeamViewer (and it surely wasn't me). The quickie show & tell mutated into several hours of highly productive coaching, which was repeated on a few occasions with this person and others. I wasn't impressed with the quality of sound transmission via my UMTS data connection, but the visuals worked well. More recent tests with Netviewer left me very impressed by this platform's sound quality and features, so I may use this for coaching and remote group instruction.

I still prefer to deliver workshops of several hours in person, even if it means I have to travel across half the continent to do so. I really do believe that is most effective, and I learn a great deal from talking to the participants informally about their experience. That is really missing in the online medium. But I think now when calls for help come in or a colleague needs to see exactly how a particular procedure works, we might all save time and frustration with remote technology after all. That may sound a bit Jurassic, but I really don't like to use technology unless I see a clear benefit to it which cannot be achieved by better means.

Now that I have "the bug", of course, a number of useful possibilities are seeping into my mind. "Teaser demos" of presentations usually delivered in person in a longer format, for example. Whatever I end up doing with this, I am far more optimistic about the technology than I was. Have you used it as a presenter or participant? What advantages and drawbacks have you experienced?

A NIFTY method for legal terminology

2012-01-18T22:29:00.000+01:00

Practical corpus linguistics has been a personal interest of mine for a long time, as it constitutes one of the best methods for developing specific domain terminologies in an efficient manner. Since I first laid hands on "Working with Specialized Language: A practical guide to using corpora" by Lynne Bowker and Jennifer Pearson (ISBN 0-415-23699-1) I have enjoyed great benefits from this approach. So when a discussion thread on a private translators' site mentioned a follow-up to a talk last autumn on legal corpus utilization for terminology research, my attention was drawn to it immediately. The information is reproduced here in slightly modified form with the permission of the person in charge of the project. The blog mentioned in the text is worth a look as well.

Dear fellow translator,

At the Lisbon Tradulinguas conference in October, I ran a workshop on terminology, presenting a methodology that I am testing - called NIFTY - which applies to all language pairs. This message is addressed to people who attended the workshop, those who tried out the method using the conference CD, or anyone who would like to try it out now.

I would really appreciate any feedback that you can give me - it's really important for my project to have input from professional legal translators - this is NOT an ivory tower experiment! Of course no names will be cited in any reports of the results - participants will remain anonymous.

If you could spare a few minutes, there are two alternatives:

1) I have set up simple online forms that are really fast to complete.

First you just complete some basic questions about your profile (it can be anonymous - just use a false name if you prefer) - this helps me to understand what sort of translators find the process useful or not.
http://protra.wufoo.eu/forms/nifty-participant-information-registration-form/

Then I will send you by return a participant code, which will give you access to these two short forms:

About compiling the NIFTY corpus:
http://protra.wufoo.com/forms/nifty-corpus-compilation-feedback-form
About using the NIFTY corpus:
http://protra.wufoo.com/forms/nifty-corpus-use-in-translation-feedback-form
2) You can give me your feedback by email in extended text form.

Of course I am here to help if you need any assistance or advice on using the NIFTY tools.

Lastly, if you are interested, I have launched a blog since the conference, where I post tools, resources and news that might be of interest to legal translators: http://wordstodeeds.com

Thank you for taking the time to read this message.

Kind regards
Juliette Scott

N.B. The survey platform is fully compliant with the US-EU Safe Harbor Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information from European Union member countries.

The PhD project itself has been reviewed by the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee.

Filling out the initial form indicating interest is a relatively painless process; it took about 5 or 10 minutes of my time. I am curious to see how her methods differ from my current practice and what I can learn here.

Keeping up with changing English usage

2012-01-18T01:11:00.000+01:00

“Every professional language user should be aware of current usage options and changing conventions.”
-- Professor Mike Hannay, VU Amsterdam

“English is a first language for many different language communities across the world and is changing all the time. So many people use English for so many different purposes every day that it is not at all surprising that at any one point in time there is massive linguistic variation. Indeed, ‘Englishes’ rather than ‘English’ is the name of the game, and anyone responsible for preparing English texts ready for publication needs to be aware of this variation in usage, so as to be able to make appropriate decisions and produce stylistically balanced texts which are fit for purpose. Often, however, people are uncertain and conflicting stories abound.

“At the same time, there are also matters of usage that seem to be a perennial source of contention. They may relate to opinions about what is correct and not correct, in whatever form of the language, or they may relate to what is considered stylistically preferable, in terms of readability. What are these issues, and is it really clear what is correct and incorrect, and what is good?”

These are the topics that Mike Hannay will be addressing in his one-day course on March 9, 2012 for which registration is now open. Apart from looking in detail at specific usage issues (based in part on your own experience and suggestions), Mike will also be examining how translators and editors can best deal with matters of language variation. The venue is Regardz Eenhoorn Amersfoort. The course lasts from 9:45 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. and qualifies for 6 PE points. The usual early-bird discount of €50 applies (until February 13).

Please see http://www.teamwork-vertaalworkshops.nl/events/evenement.php?id=43 for full information.

Are professional organizations worth the bother?

2012-01-17T19:32:00.000+01:00

There are two broad categories of professional organizations potentially of interest to language professionals such as interpreters and translators: those which are intended specifically for providers of language services, such as freelance translator and interpreters, and those which are not. The latter, which would include chambers of commerce, business clubs, technical societies such as the American Chemical Society and so on are clearly of great value. They are a means to stay abreast of new developments in areas of interest (perhaps an earlier profession) and perhaps to meet potential direct clients.

What about the other kind, professional associations for editors, translators, interpreters, terminologists and other language-slinging rabble? Well, as one reader from Putinland commented on my post about finding good translators, she saw no single benefit to her membership in that country's largest translators' association. She was aghast at the idea that someone might cancel a ProZ membership, because she assumed that corporate clients would not look for professionals but instead would only work with agencies, and these agencies in turn would cast their nets at The Translators Workhouse. (I looked up Cravy's profile at The Workhouse and when I saw the wealth of information there, it was hard to imagine how agencies would not be dueling each other for the opportunity to offer her work. But that is not the right profile - see the comments. That is an ongoing problem with ProZ and other portals - anyone can set up a profile under nearly any name or pseudonym, with no verification that the person behind the registered e-mail address is real. This is why the portals are often playgrounds for scamsters.)

Fortunately, the real world isn't quite as Dickensian as that, though perhaps a bit darker and more Satanic at the wordface in some parts of the world. But King Henry's sockpuppet is partly right: all organizations are not created equal. They exist in a particular social context of the countries in which their members live or do business, and they are very much dependent on the efforts of their members.

The professional translators' organization of which I am a member, the German BDÜ, can be a real mixed bag at times; one fellow I know who places enormous value on professional conduct quit his local chapter in disgust a few years ago, referring to it as the Hessian Housewives' Association. Since then, however, he has come back and contributed to the serious business focus of his state chapter, and across Germany the organization offers first-rate continuing education seminars, free legal counseling, affordable liability insurance, an excellent private forum for members to exchange information and job requests, a superb online search tool for translators and their specialties and more. To say that I get my money's worth out of membership would be a huge understatement. I don't have to like everything the BDÜ does, but I applaud a great deal of it.

As I was compiling the list of professional organizations for freelance translators and interpreters which provide online search tools for potential clients to find a service provider, I was a little shocked at how parochial and unprofessional some of these venerable organizations appear on the Internet sites. In a discussion of that list on a private site, one colleague commented that it is a shame there isn't some sort of meta search engine to serve up the data from a great number of professional sites around the globe. I'm not really sure that would be a good thing if it were possible, and a quick look at the search tools for a few of the association sites quickly makes it clear that a programmer attempting such a task would soon turn to the bottle. There is no consistency at all in the lists of specialties used; some organizations simply list members in a given region with no statement of the types of text they feel they are fit to translate. Appalling.

I think that attracting an international clientele is important to many translators in this age; for those living in countries with developing economies, this is one of the keys to the best rates. But in order to do that, it is necessary to offer the site in languages which are probably understood by potential international clients. The Germans do it. So do the French. The Swiss and Italian associations I looked at failed this test. If you are a member of a professional association for language service providers, has your association given due attention to this point? If not, get out the thumbscrews or find and organization that does. (That's called "voting with your feet", an option familiar enough to some who live in parts of the world where that is the only effective vote.)

Linking online search engines for the associations would require using the same list of specialties or at least subsets thereof to be effective. But what chance of that is there with an organization that feels it is important to list beekeeping but nothing to do with chemistry or chemical technology? Quite a lot, I'm sure. Unifying and merging search tools might be a good project for groups like the Canadian umbrella organization I listed. I was not happy to see that I would have to go to each individual state organization to do my search. Really!

This is the 21st century, but some organizations for language specialists seem to be stuck in the 19th. The disorganization one can see in some areas, even in developed countries where one might expect better, make it obvious why even a highly flawed commercial portal that many serious professionals avoid like herpes can be a "success". But fortunately, there are some organizations, big ones, that get it and offer a hunting ground that is generally happier than the portalZ with their spotty or non-existent identity verifications for members and silly aliases. Mind you, I eventually adopted an alias myself on ProZ, but that was to avoid having information I wanted to present about myself or my business get buried in spammy pages repeating my commentary for Tamil, Swahili, Tagalog, Urdu and other languages at the center of the world stage.

So are these professional organizations for language service providers such as freelance translators, interpreters and editors worthwhile? Definitely. If you choose the right one.

The Great Firewall of Washington!

2012-01-17T16:58:00.000+01:00

Slowly I am beginning to understand the association of the color red with the Republican Party in the United States. Before the 2000 presidential election, red and blue had no fixed association with Democrats or Republicans, and when I thought of the color red at all in the years after that I was usually seeing red because of Republican policies designed to dismantle the country or all the blood, foreign and domestic, which Republican lawmakers and Republican wannabes like "blue dog" Democrats so happily see shed. But slowly the truth is emerging from the fog of the Bush wars: the Chinese connection. Ol' Shrub & Co. happily financed their military adventures with Chinese money, now it seems that Republican lawmakers, following the lead of their Red Chinese masters, want to erect a Great Firewall in Washington to strangle free expression. Beijing disapproves of dangerous ideas like the First Amendment to the US Constitution, so their eager Red Party students in the US House of Representatives and Senate SOPA and PIPA respectively to set things right, based on the hollow premise of preventing copyright violation. President Obama has stated his opposition to the legislation now proposed; let's hope he doesn't roll over and play dead for the Reds as he is wont to do.

As part of the protest against US legislators' attempts to strangle free expression through unconstitutional preemptive restraints and other measures, Wikipedia will be blacking out its English pages worldwide tomorrow. Wikipedia, like any other Internet-based platform exists within and is affected by the framework of laws, and I find it entirely appropriate that this otherwise neutral platform stand up and take a position in this matter. Details regarding the blackout, scheduled to begin at 5:00 am UTC on January 18, 2012 and continue for 24 hours, will be found here.

We as translators depend very often on the public availability of information for our work. Intellectual property should have appropriate protection, but the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate are not the way forward. If you are a US voter, please make this clear to your erected representatives.

Januar-Übersetzertreffen in Hohen Neuendorf bei Berlin

2012-01-17T14:01:00.004+01:00

Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

zum etwas verspäteten Start ins neue Jahr treffen wir uns am:

Donnerstag, 19. Januar 2012, ab 19.00 Uhr

Wir gehen noch einmal ins:

Gasthaus-Pension Strammer-Max

Schönfließer Str. 16 a

16540 Hohen Neuendorf

S-Bahn S1 und S8 Hohen Neuendorf

Das Gasthaus befindet sich direkt gegenüber vom S-Bahn-Ausgang auf der anderen Straßenseite und ist nicht zu verfehlen.

Hier die Speisekarte (ohne Preise):

http://pension-strammer-max.com/auszug-aus-der-speisekarte/

DIE ÜBLICHE BITTE:

Sagt doch kurz Bescheid, ob ihr dabei seid oder nicht.

Bis Donnerstag!

Andreas Linke (andreas [at] vll [dot] biz)

BDÜ workshops (German): technical documentation & journalistic/advertising translation

2012-01-13T13:14:00.001+01:00

Im März veranstaltet die BDÜ Weiterbildungs- und Fachverlags GmbH zwei interessante Workshops zu den Themen Professionelle Textproduktion für technische Dokumentation in deutscher Sprache (02.-04.03.2012) und Übersetzen journalistischer und werblicher Texte (30.03.-01.04.2012)

Aus dem Programm "Professionelle Textproduktion für technische Dokumentation":

- Einführung: Anforderungen an technische Dokumentation

- Textanalyse und Textproduktion: Fremdtexte bewerten und verbessern

- Sicherheitshinweise: normative und rechtliche Anforderungen

- Terminologiearbeit

Die Referentin Susanne Murawski arbeitet seit 25 Jahren als Technische Redakteurin, Projekt- und Abteilungsleiterin für Technische Dokumentation.

Aus dem Programm "Übersetzen journalistischer und werblicher Texte":

- verschiedene journalistische Darstellungsformen

- Text- und Übersetzungsanalysen

- Übersetzen vs. kreatives Texten/Copywriting

- interessant und verständlich Schreiben - Regeln und Tipps

- Übersetzungsübung eines journalistischen Fachartikels

Die Referentin Jutta Witzel ist Fachjournalistin, Projektleiterin und Trainerin. Seit 2004 ist Jutta Witzel hauptberuflich Fachjournalistin für die Themen Sprache, Interkulturalität und Diversity Management. Die journalistische Qualifikation erwarb sie durch Seminare beim Deutschen Journalisten-Verband, dem Deutschen Zeitschriftenverlegerverband und der Bayerischen Akademie der Presse.

Die Seminare finden in Berlin statt. Der Frühbucherpreis beträgt für BDÜ-Mitglieder 525 Euro pro Seminar (Der Frühbucherpreis ist gültig bis zum 2.2.12. für das Seminar zur technischen Dokumentation und bis zum 1.3.12 für das Seminar zum Übersetzen journalistischer Texte).

Im Preis enthalten sind Tagungsgetränke, Kaffeepausen, Mittagessen (inkl. 1 alkoholfreiem Getränk), Skripte sowie die gesetzliche Mehrwertsteuer.

Weitere Informationen sowie die Möglichkeit zur Online-Anmeldung finden Sie auf www.seminare.bdue.de

Finding good translators

2012-01-11T23:40:00.000+01:00

Over the past decade I've spent many hundreds of hours helping clients and colleagues find suitable translators to collaborate on their projects, mostly involving German and English, but occasionally venturing into other languages such as French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese or even Vietnamese and Sinhalese. Unfortunately, it can be said that "many are called [translators], but few... [should be] chosen." For various reasons.

In desperation, many turn to public commercial portals such as ProZ aka PrAdZ aka The Translators' Workhouse or perhaps more benign incarnations of the same concept. Some of these pretend to screen "professionals", but as in another old commercial profession, the main criterion in proZtitution is to see if a trick can be turned and a Google Ad dollar made or the like. One of the Zertified Red Pros I've seen on PrAdZ is well known to me from the twenty hours I spent preparing an expert opinion for possible legal action by his client due to gross incompetence and damage to business relations; others are of similar caliber. Yet many translation agencies continue to drink from those soiled troughs, where anyone with an Internet connection and a knowledge of the URL http://translate.google.com/ can hang out a virtual shingle as a translator; occasionally a corporate client unknowingly falls in and drowns as well.

Mind you, there are still a few very good translators to be found in such places, but they are getting fewer and fewer, verra hard tae find. The few grains of wheat are buried in a mountain of chaff and bird dung.

Many clever translation buyers (translation agencies, corporations great and small, law offices, and individuals) know the open secret to finding a better class of translator: professional association directories. Sure, you can find rotten eggs in those nests too, but on the whole, these are far more serious professionals, most of whom actually make a living as translators and perform to standards that will enable to keep them doing so as long as they like. Not the desperate unemployed, the frustrated actors or journalists who can't get enough work to pay the rent, starving studentZ or bored house hubbies.

Where do you find contact lists for these professionals to find the "right" one with the special knowledge you need? Here. I'll keep a running list of professional organizations around the world and links to their online directories. I know only a few myself, because my interests are limited to a few languages and countries; some of these have been kindly provided to me by international professional colleagues who know the organizations intimately and are in some cases involved with running some part of them. If you are looking for competent people, certified or otherwise, these are very good places to start your quest. It is more likely to have a happy end or a happy working relationship for the years ahead.

Note that while I list these organizations by country, most or all have international members and language combinations that go beyond those one might expect from that country, so even if you are in Mexico, it might pay to browse a French directory for a Russian to Italian translator :-)

I'll add listings as I receive them and perhaps a short comment by members I know if they care to share them. When these organizations mention certifications, it means something more than a little red pee.

Australia
AUSIT - home page - online directory search (badly designed form, no specialty selection possible)
NAATI - home page - online directory search (see the note in the comments)
WAITI - home page - online search directory (odd search wizard, no specialties)

Austria
Universitas - home page - online directory search (in German)

Canada
CTTIC - home page
Here there are links to the regional organizations and their directories (print or online). It's a bit fragmented; the group in British Columbia, for example, has separate directories for "certified" and associate members. Too bad they can't offer a nationwide directory in this modern age, but as they say, "seek and ye shall find", and the findings are surely better than what one would typically turn up at a commercial portal without standards.

Finland
SKTL - home page - online directory search (in English)

France
SFT - home page - online directory search (in English here)

Germany
BDÜ - home page (in English here). National scope. The site's programming is primitive (still uses HTML frames!!!), so the directory will have to be accessed from the home page. You can't miss it though: a link with a big magnifying glass at the top of the page and large, bold words that say "search online for interpreters and translators". The cream of the German crop will usually be found here.

ADÜ Nord - home page (in German). More focused on the northern region. The online search form for translators is on the home page, impossible to miss. There are great language service providers to be found here.

VÜD - home page (in German) with an integrated search form for translators and interpreters at the top

Ireland
ITIA - home page - online search form

Italy
AITI - home page - online directory search (mostly in Italian, unfortunately - appalling, incomplete localization)

Netherlands
NGTV - home page - online directory (unfortunately all in Dutch still; I really expect less parochialism from my colleagues there! Still, this is a good place to find quality)

Bureau Wbtv - home page - online register search for sworn and certified translators(in English)

New Zealand

NZSTI - home page with a search box at the top

Spain

Asetrad - home page - online search with specialties (in English)
MET - home page - online search (this organization includes language specialists for all aspects of English)
APTIC - home page - online search - the English pages for the association of translators working with Catalan

Sweden
SFÖ - home page with online search form by language combination & subject (in English)
Kammarkollegiet (authorized translators) - info page - online directory search (in English)

Switzerland
ASTTI - home page - online directory (the links here are to German pages, but the site is available in Italian and French as well)

United Kingdom
ITI - home page - unfortunately, these Brits are just as primitive with their HTML site structure, so the online directory must be accessed in a frame on the home page. Still, the link is at the top of the page and easy to find, and there are a lot of excellent translators to be found here.

IoL - home page - online directory

USA
ATA - home page - online directory search

How low can ProZ go?

2012-01-09T23:16:00.002+01:00

Since The Great Moderator Purge at ProZ a few years ago, things have continued to get curiouser and curiouser, and The Translation Workplace has evolved into more of a Translation Workhouse, or as some colleagues from former Iron Curtain regions who have the historical background to comment authoritatively might put it, a gulag. One from which, thankfully, most serious translators in the major language pairs have escaped to a better life. After being gagged there for several years and dealing with other nonsense, I stopped being a paying member of the site in 2011. The experience of this German colleague provides further confirmation that I made the right decision. For years, there have been rumors, some quite plausible, others less so, of corruption in the Blue Board ratings, and for some, access to this data remains one of the few justifications for membership. But if the ratings themselves are skewed by arbitrary actions... let her story, posted on another translators' forum and reposted here with permission, speak for itself:

Hey folks,
I know I don't need to tell you how bad ProZ is for the industry, and I don't want to turn this into a discussion about that site, but if you need a little story to convince others to stop supporting ProZ with their money, here's a funny one from today.

A while ago I did one project for an agency that turned out to be a typical broker. Absolutely no QA, low rates (earlier, they were looking for a 50K legal translation within 2 days for 0.09 USD/word - without adding any value to the project themselves), and so on. The project was small enough for me to use as a test to determine if I wanted to continue working with this guy. After all, he had 30 5-star ratings on the Blue Board.

But as it turned out, my initial feeling was correct: he sent me three emails way before the deadline asking me when I would deliver, but when it came to paying me with equal speed after timely delivery, the excuses and bossy behavior began. He said I should be happy about getting paid after 30 days because that is supposedly "GREAT" in our industry, and he declared that he was under no obligation to pay me when I wanted to be paid, etc.

So, long story short, I went to ProZ to leave a negative rating. My review included all necessary information and described my experience. I didn't mention any names, nor did I use foul language or similar.

First attempt: my review got censored and deleted without any explanation. I sent a support request and asked what was going on. Got a reply that told me to resubmit my review.
Second attempt: I resubmitted my review, and removed the word "arrogant" from it, just to be sure. It got censored and deleted again, without any explanation.
Third attempt: I simply selected one star and added "Not recommended." to the comment field. It got censored and deleted again. This time, I received an email telling me that I was not allowed to add any comments and should only indicate my WWA rating.
Fourth attempt: I simply gave a 1-star rating and added no further explanation. [This was finally let through.]

WTF?? If you see a bad rating, don't you want to know why the rating is so bad? Leaving a bad rating without any explanation makes the translator look bitter and vengeful. And why are comments allowed for the good ratings then?

Anyway, I'm happy I don't waste my money on Proz, and I'll cheer for everyone who stops paying for their membership. If you want to share this story with paying members, feel free to do so. :-)

Verra interesting.

United Nations General Assembly resolutions: 6-language parallel corpus

2012-01-09T00:35:00.000+01:00

Thank you to colleague Christian Taube for pointing me to another interesting public dataset, the parallel corpus of UN General Assembly resolutions available in TMX format in English, Russian, French, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. All six languages are in the same TMX file. Altogether there are over 72,000 entries. Not a big collection compared to the EU DGT data, but possibly of better quality and certainly useful for those whose translations relate to the subject matter and involve pairs drawn from these six languages.

Importing into a CAT tool is a fairly simple matter: when the languages of interest are specified, the respective tool will extract the data desired. I tested this in memoQ (53 K entries imported) and SDL Trados Studio 2009 (48 K entries imported) with English and Russian, and the process was quite painless. I presume the difference of about 20,000 translation units read and the number imported have to do with redundancies and memoQ and SDL Trados Studio interpret these in a slightly different manner, but I don't really know. I also tested OmegaT, but unfortunately it chokes on the file when copied into the TM directory:

To use this data in OmegaT, the desired language pair must first be extracted with another tool to create a bilingual TMX file (as opposed to the hexalingual one). I exported the data I had brought into memoQ to make an English/Russian TMX and it then worked fine in OmegaT.

The following suggestion was offered by Yves Savourel on the Yahoogroups OmegaT list:

If you work on Windows, you can drop/drop the TMX file in Olifant (the "old"
.NET version: http://sourceforge.net/projects/okapi/files/)

That will show you the 74,070 entries in 6 languages in it.

Then do "File > Export", select the output file name, and then the 2 languages
you want in that new TMX file.

This tip is good for everyone, of course, not just OmegaT users. The Okapi tools are excellent and free for maintaining TMs when the tool providers can't be bothered so far to offer decent facilities for maintaining the data in their software (not naming any names here, but you know who you are....)

Translation tool concordances compared

2012-01-08T00:35:00.000+01:00

A recent experience when tutoring a new memoQ user started me thinking about the way concordance searches work in various translation environment tools and how the results are displayed. The user, who was quite experienced with OmegaT, kept telling me that memoQ could not find examples of a term's use in the TM and she had to do all her searches in OmegaT. I was somewhat puzzled by that, and when I looked at her screen with the memoQ concordance dialog, I saw something like this:

The memoQ version 5 concordance dialog

Looks like the term ("Inverkehrbringen") was found. So what was the problem? For years she had looked at this concordance view:

The OmegaT concordance dialog

The differences in layout and the lack of highlighting of the key term (which was aligned in the center of the memoQ concordance window in the ancient KWIC display tradition) were unexpected and confusing to the new user.

This inspired me to have a look at how various other tools display concordance results. I was not very happy with some of what I discovered, especially with some of today's leading commercial tools. I took a look at the TWB translation memories in SDL Trados 2007, concordancing in SDL Trados Studio 2009, Wordfast Pro (very limited test due to a demo license and my inability to load my TMX test data), memoQ and OmegaT.

In terms of overall performance, the best results were obtained with OmegaT and "Trados Classic" (2007). Searching a huge TM gave results in a flash. Concordance searches with SDL Trados Studio 2009, on the other hand, really sucked with a big TM (EU data, about 400,000 TUs). I vacuumed my entire apartment and fed the dog while I waited for the result, and I wasn't even told how many hits were found. Unfortunately, my favorite working environment, memoQ, performed worst with the same big data set: it simply gave an error message. Further testing revealed that this error was due to the very large number of hits. (This would have been obvious had I paid enough attention to read the dialog title in the first place.)

memoQ error message from too many concordance hits

So it looks like some development attention may need to be directed here. (Update: Kilgray's develops are actively working to remove this restriction.) Of all the tools I was able to test with a large concordance, memoQ was the only one to fail this way. My personal TM with about 10 years of my work in it is nearly as long as my German/English EU legal test database, but concordance searches in it using memoQ are not unduly slow.

Other concordance views looked like this:

The concordance in SDL Trados 2007 - hits limited compared to OmegaT (see above)

SDL Trados 2009 - perhaps the easiest to read, but slower than molasses

Wordfast Pro - format not bad, but the test was limited due to the demo license

The Déjá Vu X concordance hasn't changed significantly in appearance in the latest version (DVX2). Once again, Victor Dewsbery was kind enough to provide me with screenshots of the two "scan" options for searching the translation memory. The initial scan produces only fairly close matches, while the "power scan" is more like the usual concordance with the term embedded in a larger body of text (the non-matching parts being crossed out)


DVX2 scan (first click)

DVX2 Power Scan (second click)

I do have a license for the older version of DVX, but I didn't attempt any stress testing. While its performance with large TMs has always been good (my personal "Big Mama" is about 330,000 TUs), import and export of such data volumes are painfully slow. We're talking overnight. I hope the new version is better in that respect. There I must really give kudos to the OmegaT developer: loading the TM was even faster than with Trados Workbench, which for me has always been a benchmark of speed to aspire to. All you have to do to add a TMX file to the TM of an OmegaT project is to drop it in the "TM" folder of the project. Very nice :-)

I also received a screenshot of a search in Transit NXT from colleague Hans Lenting in the Netherlands. He searched the term "Inverkehrbringen" in the German/Dutch EU dataset from the DGT:

STAR Transit NXT concordance search

As you can see, there are many ways to display data from a concordance search. Which do you find easiest to deal with? Personally, I love the insertion features of the memoQ concordance, but for readability I think some of the other tools are better. And I do like to know how many results I can expect from my data, and I might even want to view them all.

Social media: a waste of time?

2012-01-07T22:16:00.002+01:00

In the past few years, a number of friends and colleagues have informed me quite indignantly what an utter waste social media are, a few implying that participation in platforms such as blogs and Twitter is simply filler for those without work. I'm sure that may be true in some individual cases, but my personal experience and observations tell a very different story.

My involvement began some years ago in translators forums while doing research for writing projects and expanded to blogs and private forums when the deterioration of ProZ as a public forum for professional discussion drove most of the serious professionals away or gagged them. While Twitter was still derided as a tool for keeping the world updated on your breakfast and bowel movements, I discovered that it was fast becoming one of the most efficient tools for the quick exchange of tips and professional tidbits among serious professionals. Facebook? Well, I don't like the shifting ground of the company's information policies, but used judiciously, even that platform has socially redeeming value.

The value of all these platforms will vary according to one's goals and the overall balance sought. But let there be no doubt: social media are valuable and sometimes surprisingly effective. I've had a very large number of financially worthwhile projects result from the the time spent sharing information, but more importantly, I have been able to get to know great professionals in distant places, sometimes help them and receive help in return. Maybe some day I'll throw out a few statistics or examples from my experience, but today I would like to share an inspiring example from two colleagues in the US and Austria, the Jenner twins.

At Christmas time, they issued an appeal for assistance for the co-founder of the Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association, Álvaro Degives-Más, who has given so much to help others in our profession. Hoping to raise a few hundred dollars to help him and his wife defray crushing expenses from uninsured surgeries, in two weeks, the generosity of colleagues and a few companies has yielded over 7500 dollars. A small part of the total bills, mind you, but an impressive achievement nonetheless, made possible through the power of social media. Read the update here, and if you are able to, please consider doing a small bit to help these people see a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Understanding memoQ's term extraction stopword codes

2012-01-07T13:29:00.000+01:00

Recently I shared a link to a small stopword list for a minor language, which I had set up as a memoQ resource for a friend, and another translator questioned why I had coded the stopwords as I did. My answer was truthful: no good reason. I had simply copied the practice in Kilgray's default files for other languages. As I looked further into discussions of term extraction and stopwords on the memoQ Yahoogroups list, I realized that I was not the only one who had a hard time getting a clear picture of how things actually work. So I decided to learn by experiment.
First I created a stopword list with nonsense words having every possible coding combination. A memoQ stopword list is a test file with an XML header and *.mqres extension, with a structure that looks like this:

<memoqresource resourcetype="Stopwords" version="1.0">
<resource>
    <guid>2b077cde-8c10-4ee1-86db-14eb42f010cc</guid>
    <filename>KSL_test-stopwords_EN.mqres</filename>
    <name>KSL_test-stopwords-EN</name>
    <description>For testing only</description>
    <language>eng</language>
</resource>
</memoqresource>
gak    111
unga   101
munga 011
kunga 110
fra    000
blu    100
bly    001
bla    010

The entries in the stopword list (here the nonsense words gak through bla) are each followed by a tab and a three digit binary code. The first digit of this code controls whether a phrase is excluded from the list of candidates if it begins with this entry. (Kilgray calls this "blocks as first".) The second digit of the code controls whether a phrase is excluded if the entry occurs within it (not at the beginning nor at the end, Kilgray calls this "blocks inside"). The third digit controls whether a phrase is excluded if the entry occurs at its end ("blocks as last").

A "1" means yes, "0" means no. So "011" means

allowed at the start of the phrase,
not allowed inside the phrase
not allowed at the end of a phrase

Thus kunga will cause a phrase to be excluded if it occurs at the start of or inside the phrase, but not at the end. Phrases ending with kunga might appear in the list of candidates.

My test file contained the sentence

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

repeated four times in three blocks for each test stopword, with the stopword substituted at the beginning, inside and at the end of "over the lazy dog":

The quick brown fox jumped unga the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped unga the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped unga the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped unga the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumped over unga lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over unga lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over unga lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumped over unga lazy dog.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy unga. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy unga. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy unga. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy unga.

After the term extraction, the following four-word phrases from the text chunk of interest were found with the stopwords:

fra The lazy dog
bly The lazy dog
bla The lazy dog
munga The lazy dog
over unga lazy dog
over fra lazy dog
over blu lazy dog
over bly lazy dog
over The lazy kunga
over The lazy fra
over The lazy blu
over The lazy bla

All these occurrences follow the defined rules as you can see from the stopword list above. None of the stopwords occurred singly in the extraction candidates, of course. So entering "000" as the code for a stopword will exclude that stopword alone but not in any phrase.

How is this relevant in practice? In English, for example, words like in, the and first are uninteresting by themselves and belong in a stopword list. But a phrase containing them, like "in the first instance" might indeed be of interest. In cases like that, the proper code for these stopwords might be "001" or "101" (allowing inside in both cases, at the beginning as well in the first case) might be appropriate. These are matters of judgment that will differ for each language. One user commented that he finds it more useful to be very restrictive in the extraction ("111") and add phrases during the actual translation, and I am inclined to follow this practice as well. Where one discovers exceptions, the stopword rules can always be edited in various places in memoQ.

EU (DGT) translation memories for DE-EN, DE-NL and NL-EN

2012-01-04T17:54:00.000+01:00

As part of some testing efforts, I had occasion to download the gigabyte+ of translation memory data the EU's Directorate General for Translation (DGT) made publicly accessible from the body of EU law. Aside from being massive (hundreds of thousands of translation units for most pairs) and good for stressing a translation environment tool, I find such data useful for looking up official names of directives and organizations. The English (and possibly other language text such as German, Dutch, etc.) is, as some of my British friends might say, very courageous, but if one needs to access the actual text in a target language for an EU law being quoted in the source language, this data source is perhaps a time-saver.
If anyone has a use for the German/English, German/Dutch and Dutch/English language pair TM data from this organization, here are some links to the extracted data I prepared for my tests:

DGT TM data for German and English (about 530,000 TUs)
DGT TM data for German and Dutch (about 306,000 TUs)
DGT TM data for Dutch and English (about 500,000 TUs)

And in conclusion, to honor the EU's commitment to quality in what they call English, I offer the following Frank Zappa classic:

Chris Durban offers two workshops in the Netherlands in February 2012

2012-01-04T12:28:00.000+01:00

Translation guru Chris Durban and award-winning translator Ros Schwartz will be bringing their much-acclaimed one-day workshop on the nuts and bolts of good writing to Amsterdam on Friday, February 10, 2012. Style Matters is a one-day workshop for English translators: "The ability to produce polished prose, no matter how uneven the original text, is one factor distinguishing top-end translators able to command high fees from bulk providers and bottom feeders." Most examples will come from French, but knowledge of the source language will not be required as the focus will be on writing good, clear English.

The workshop venue is Regardz Zilveren Toren, right next to Amsterdam's main railway station. Please see the Teamwork website for further information and registration: http://www.teamwork-vertaalworkshops.nl/events/evenement.php?id=41.

The following morning, Chris will be in the nearby town of Amersfoort giving two fascinating talks on translators and the translation business. The Mystery Shopper is a report on an experiment where Chris posed as a translation buyer and commissioned a number of short translations from different freelance translators and translation agencies – "one of the highlights of the recent ITI Conference” (Blogging Translator). In Finding and Working with Direct Clients, Chris reveals the secrets of finding better - and more profitable - clients. The talk concludes with a case study and a Q&A session. The workshop venue is Regardz Eenhoorn, just opposite the railway station in Amersfoort. For further information: http://www.teamwork-vertaalworkshops.nl/events/evenement.php?id=46.

There is an early-bird discount for both days, by the way, until Monday 9 January. Both days qualify for PE points for certified translators and interpreters registered with the Bureau BTV in Den Bosch (Netherlands). The two events are being organized by Tony Parr and Marcel Lemmens of Teamwork.

ODT files in translation environment tools

2012-01-02T18:16:00.000+01:00

After an interesting afternoon with a friend who was a bit frustrated with the behavior of her translation assistance technology with an ODT (Open Office text) source file, I decided to have a look at how a variety of common tools handle this format. I created a small test file which contained some of the troublesome elements and saved it as *.odt for testing. The test file looked like this:

The ordered list was created using the numbering feature.

When the file was imported to OmegaT, the segmentation looked as follows:

Fairly clean, though the segmentation is a bit off due to the encoding of the space after the end of the sentence in the second block of text. Nine segments where there should have been ten.

With memoQ, the result was:

Altogether there were a dozen segments after import. The part with the hyperlink was segmented incorrectly in three parts instead of one. However, memoQ did handle the space tag after "tool." correctly and start a new segment at "Here". Once can, of course, use the segment joining function to correct the segmentation until Kilgray gets around to fixing the segmentation on the hyperlink tag:

Update 9 January 2012: The developers at Kilgray have informed me now that this quirk in the ODT filter has been corrected and will be included in the next build released.

When I tried to test my SDL Trados Studio 2009 license, at first it refused to joint the party:

Never a dull moment with SDL as we all know. Of course SDL Trados 2007 was in fact installed, but when I upgraded to Studio 2009, of course it trashed my 2007 installation, and I had been too irritated to do anything about it for over half a year since I don't use Trados for anything more than file preparation and compatibility testing anymore, and I was still able to do that for my projects with the damaged installation. However, when I discovered that the ODT file caused TagEditor to run and hide without even saying goodbye, I sighed deeply and wasted half an hour reinstalling SDL Trados 2007. At least I didn't have to go through that insane check-in/check-out license procedure online. I trusted in God and my Windows Registry entries, and the location of my license file was remembered, so all was well.

The second attempt at SDL Trados Studio 2009 was much better:

Same segmentation problem as OmegaT, and examining the tags reveals where the issue might be addressed in a tweak of the filter.

I haven't got the latest upgrade, but someone was kind enough to run my test file through SDL Trados Studio 2011, which appears to offer the best results for filtering ODT (the settings were slightly different, with the URL included, but that is also possible with some other tools):

SDL Trados TagEditor also worked after re-installation. The results were:

Oh dear. Well, it works, but if I still used TagEditor, I would run, not walk, to the much cleaner interface of OmegaT for this sort of thing if I didn't have the good sense to upgrade to Studio or something else commercial. Note the same segmentation issue and the need for filter modification.

Victor Dewsbery was kind enough to import my test file to the original Atril DVX and the newer DVX2 and send me the results:

DVX import of the test file

DVX2 import of the test file.

I also tried to test SDLX, Wordfast Pro and Wordfast Anywhere. The first two tools don't support ODT. Wordfast Anywhere claims too, but went nowhere, with the following status message displayed in my browser for about half an hour before I gave up and went to lunch:

Of course I canceled. I had a blog post to write and a New Year to get on with. Anyone who wants to try the test file in another tool (to compare apples with apples) can get it here.

Wordfast Pro: Translating memoQ bilingual RTF tables

2011-12-27T17:46:00.001+01:00

After a recent crisis an agency friend of mine experienced when a translator did a large job of some 22,000 words and was unable to incorporate corrections by a reviewer (resulting in a rather creative but stressful rescue effort involving memoQ LiveDocs), I resolved to have a look at WordFast Pro myself and see if there wasn't some better, easier way to work with translators who have this tool.

The current version of WordFast Pro doesn't support XLIFF, so that's out as a possibility. However, it does read RTF files, so I tried the same techniques which have recently proved successful for improving the interoperability workflows with Trados TagEditor and SDL Trados Studio among others. And indeed this approach was successful.

A view of the memoQ bilingual RTF file imported into Wordfast Pro for translation.
By hiding the red tags with the mqInternal style, the tag content is protected in Wordfast Pro

To prepare content in memoQ for translation in WordFast Pro, do as follows:

Copy the source to the target for the entire text.
Export a bilingual RTF file.
Hide all the content of the RTF file which is not to be translated.
Use the search and replace function in your word processor to hide the dark red text for the tags, which are marked with the mqInternal style. The settings for the dialog in Microsoft Word are show below and are set using the Font... option (marked with a red arrow in the screenshot) in the Format dropdown menu of the Replace dialog.

The font color to hide will be found under More Colors... in the font colors of the font properties dialog:

In this way, the translation can proceed without the risk of damaging the text constituting a tag, and the QA features of Wordfast Pro can be used to do a tag check before delivery.

After the translation is completed and the tags have been checked, export the RTF file and unhide all the text. If there is a comments column available, any comments which are added to the table will be importe back to memoQ for feedback.