Yeah. Why not? Untaxable, nearly anonymous, low transfer fees, no account "freezes" or "limits" whatsoever. All the advantages of cash, and none of its caveats. Lots of ways to spend, and new ones appear every day. Why not indeed...

Unfortunately there's a catch — exchange between "fiat" currencies (dollars, euros, bahts), and BTC isn't as smooth as one could hope for. Your flexible friend, the credit card, will not be accepted, because bitcoin deals are irreversible, while credit card transactions are very much so: 

Buy bitcoins => pay with card => tell your bank that the card was stolen => ... => Profit!!!

Paypal? It's even worse. While credit card companies are mislead by scammers, Paypal deliberately, and knowingly supports them, and their business to undermine competitor's positions, Google will give you all the nasty details.

So we ruled out two most popular online payment methods. Unfortunately others are either not perfect, or not usable.

Don't get me wrong, you can exchange bitcoins, perhaps even easily, but it will require you to jump through a circle or two — accept the fact that your favorite tools will not work here, find, and implement alternatives. Most people are either too lazy or too busy for that, and prefer old ways. Guys who run companies are also busy, lazy, and reluctant to do new things, plus they face legal, organizational, and devil knows what other barriers. Bottom line — I can't imagine wide acceptance of bitcoins in our industry any time soon. This makes my "accepting bitcoins" announcement a little more than a hogwash. Or not.

Everyone knows about Skrill, arguably the only efficient way to handle ongoing (and annoying) pecky projects that bring 0-250 EU per month. "Industry standard" SWIFT is not an option (obviously), Paypal, and SEPA have regional limitations, and can be expensive, and other solutions are simply not worth mentioning. Skrill on the other hand is ubiquitous, and fees make it perfect fit for both customers, and vendors: flat 0.5 EU to send money, and flat 1.8 EU to withdraw. Jolly good. There is a downside, of course, Skrill can randomly and permanently freeze your account with all the cash for no specific reason, but it is an acceptable risk, as long as your turnover is moderate...

Was acceptable, not anymore, last November flat rates were replaced with percentages, making Skrill more expensive than SEPA, but slightly cheaper than Paypal. And they can still take all your money. Reasons are not important, but I assume that they have decided to pose as "payment gateway", and p2p transfers were sacrificed. Anyway Skrill no longer an option, but there's and alternative. Any assumptions?

Yep, bitcoins could be a perfect solution of micropayment problem, and many others, but first we need to let our customers know that they exist. How? Start accepting bitcoins, and make sure everybody knows J

And one more thing, if you have taken my pitch seriously, and made all the pre-arrangements, such as installing, and syncing the wallet, then you are probably choosing between one of three major BTC exchanges to settle in. You have probably accepted the fact that they will demand your passport, proof of address, and some other random proofs, and report all your transactions to big brother and/or your government. If you think that this approach is killing the buzz, do yourself a favor, and click little ugly banner below. Yes, bitcoins must be anonymous, which means they must be bought with cash.

This post have been making circles around my head for a while now (I mean a long while), mostly because I am lazy, and also because I am not really a fan of "I feel so important, when I state the obvious" posture, which is often seen in professional blogs. In fact Rants never have never become an active blog for these very reasons. Anyway... Even if stuff below seems obvious, the bigger part of freelance crowd never gave it much thought, but they really should.

I am talking about certain international lifestyle (keywords: Perpetual Traveller or Tourist (PT), Sovereign Individual, Six Flag Theory), which implies distributing your life interests across a number of countries (flags), and treating those countries as mere service providers without any patriotic sentiments. Consider your home country as you would consider a phone company, a mobile carrier or an ISP. Does it have all the features you need? Is it expensive? Is it a good bang for the buck? Is it any better than competing providers? How about fine print? Disclaimers, and limitations of service? You can also use one provider for broadband and another one for television, cut TV cable and go on with online services like Netflix, cut your landline wires in favor of SIP, etc. And most importantly, if quality of service goes down, or price goes up, or if there is something else you don't like, you just change your provider. This is a smart way to work with your service providers, and pretty much everyone applies this approach already. Six flag theory/PT is about the equivalent "smart" approach to the selection of countries for various aspects of your life.

As PT you spend the most of your time in a country that is good for living (your idea of good... from small, but dignified gingerbread town in the mountains to untamed seaside resort with blooming nightlife), legally reside (pay taxes) in a low or no-tax country, use a current account in the easiest banking jurisdiction, and keep your savings in safest one. You also carry your business in a top business haven, and acquire citizenship that gives you the widest travelling opportunities. And it's easier than it sounds, believe me.

PT lifestyle is generally applied by the lucky few, who can afford to move freely around the world — rich layabouts, international/online business owners and some C-level executives, but it is also available for your average middle-class fella (or gal), given that he (or she) is a freelancer. We are mobile, we can take our laptops, and go any place with a broadband, and stay there as much as we want, then go somewhere else. This kind of mobility is a basis of PT. Obviously a spouse can make things harder, and kids will make them discouragingly difficult. But nothing is impossible.

So... Which of the following applies to you:

• You live in a country with very high cost of living, and find yourself with only 30 or 40% of your wage after all the bills are paid.
• You live in an oppressive police state. They have come for your neighbor yesterday,and tomorrow they might come for you. Torchlight procession is just outside your window.
• Taxes are unfairly high, and you don't know what are you paying for, because the place is a total mess.
• Your country is just too dull, and far from everything you like, and you feel that boredom is killing you slowly.
• Your government is very snoopy, and gets snoopier every day. Have they banned Tor? VPN? Are they planning to ban encryption altogether? What can they ban next? Window curtains?
• Your government is very greedy, and gets greedier every day. Simply no comments, getting greedier is what governments do.
• Your political views/religious beliefs (or the lack of thereof)/sexual orientation/idea of fun are prosecuted, or discontented in your country.
• Your home country is dangerous/undeveloped/futureless for you and your kids.
• You just feel like getting out for no specific reason.
• You just feel insecure for no specific reason.

A lot of matches, huh? Despite the fact that you live in well-fed Western/Central Europe? If you are from a corrupt post-communist oligarchy like myself, the list probably got you slightly depressed. Relax, muslim countries are even worse, and USA is the worst of them all. Anyway the above bullets represent the reasons why people choose to become PT.

Before talking about what you can do, let's discuss some theory. First of all PT is a philosophy, and state of mind, not a cookbook or a checklist. For me it's about personal sovereignity, and freedom as libertarians view it, as well as invisibility, security, and privacy that come from being everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. Some people talk about world citizenship and cosmopolitism, others praise the untamed, unregulated capital, etc. There is something for almost everyone. If you care for some advanced reading to form your own view on the subject, start with H. G. Hills's PT, and The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson. Bye-bye Big Brother (BBBB) by Grandpa is another title worth checking out.

So... without further ado six flags are:

1. Citizenship/passport of a country that doesn't tax your worldwide income, and has a good visa-free list. If your current citizenship fulfills the requirements, then you are lucky. Otherwise you might want to get another.
2. Legal or tax residence. It should be low-tax or no tax jurisdiction. Countries that tax only local income are also good.
3. Business haven. For a freelancer (self-employed, private entrepreneur, etc.) it merges with p. 2, because you probably work under your name, pay (or don't pay) taxes as a private person. If you have a full-blown business with suppliers, sexy female secretary and other goodies, make sure it operates in a friendly low-tax jurisdiction. So called "classic offshores" look like an easy, and obvious solution, but there are implications.
4. Banking haven. This is easy — place to keep your money, away from Europe, I would say. Obviously away from US.
5. Playground, one or more. Places where you hang out. You probably already know what your playgrounds are (the place on your desktop wallpaper), but I'll give you some options to play with. What do you think about Amsterdam, Paris, Rio, Pattaya, Hong Kong? London perhaps? Montevideo? In case if you are wondering, my preference is South-East Asia.
6. The Cyberspace to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. All things online: Your communications, web presence, collaboration, cloud, etc. You might want to keep those out of NSA's (or anyone else's) reach. Can also be the place of your primary and/or secondary online business.

Before you decide that this move would be too drastic, note (again) that PT is not a checklist. You can employ any number of elements, start small and move forward at your own pace... or start small, and stay small. No need to take any irreversible steps, such as selling your apartment or denouncing your current citizenship. In fact you can even physically stay in your home country, if you are fine with it, which might not be such a bad idea after you secure your business and assets offshore. Nothing is fixed, and specifics depend on your own situation — citizenship, goals, tolerance to risk, etc., however there some common common principles. If this post generates any interest, I will describe my own experience and findings on the subject in the series of posts, one for each flag. Please subscribe, use Share block on the right, or add a comment. This way I can assess the level of public interest to the subject. Bottom line or what was it all about:

• Living in paradise (your idea of it)
• Ditching taxes legally (four-zero amount directly to your pocket y/y)
• Getting off the your oppressive, snoopy and greedy government's hook
• Decreasing your cost of living radically (if I told you, what are the monthly food-and-lodging costs in Chiang Mai, you would call me a liar)
• Stashing your hard-earned cash in a really safe place, away from the imminent storm, as well as sticky-fingered bureaucrats (for example Russians were robbed to the cleaners twice by their banks and government within last 25 years)
• Reaching that elusive thing they call freedom... or something very similar
• Personal feats — higher self-esteem, broader outlook, dense and diverse experience and impressions... all these will make you wiser, and more relaxed, driving away whatever brain bugs you might have
• Did I mention women? I do now J

January is a strange month for L10N crowd. December is traditionally hyperactive — every translation buyer and reseller is eager to make it by Christmas no matter what, getting rid of all the loose ends, accumulated for the whole year of indolence. And all the tin soldiers, including yours truly, are expected to run the extra mile for the common good, so that GPM, and the team could go on holiday with an easy mind, and considerable bonus.

But we don't mind, more work means more cash, and annual December tsunami of crash jobs transforms our pupils to dollar signs, when it comes to invoicing.

But then suddenly it's all over. Christmas and New Year holidays are followed by [relatively] lethargic January, but we are still in high-throttle mode. Bored, and agitated, we are desperately looking for occupation to channel all that energy. Computer games, blogging, moving furniture, sex with strangers, extreme sports... You name it.

For me January 2013 was a month of web tinkering. I completely reworked visual part of my site, and made some major changes in its content. It was fun, though not nearly as much fun as sex with strangers would be. Here's how it looked before:

Look around and compare. B&W rules, is it not?

On content side there's a Dashboard (hit Googies button on the left, for now it includes Acronym Finder and Multitran scripts, as well as a couple of interesting links), Freelance L10N Quote of the Day page, and snippet (more on that later), various dynamic elements across the site, and modified messaging. Yes, that was a marcom speech.

Note that it's still WIP, so expect minor hicups. Suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. Did I say that black and white rules? I guess I did...

First of all, being an active [inter]national standard, this document is mandatory, and you are formally  obliged to follow it, at least for technical translation.

At the same time, it contains huge amount of outdated, unneeded, unrealistic, and controversial provisions, that nobody follows these days. Obviously, this opens a wide array of abuse possibilities for a willing reviewer. Here's some examples:

• You can't use any acronyms, unless they are outlined in National Standards.
• You can't use minus sign (-) in the continuous text, type the whole «minus» word or die.
• Table of contents title should be centered.
• You can't use borrowed words, if Russian analog exists (:trollface:).
• Table column is actually called «графа», my friend.
• A zillion of conventions for tables, UOMs, external, and internal references, you are definitely violating all the time.
• Etc.

Have fun.

PS: <Serious mode on>Those who are making their first steps in this business, and aim for hardcore technical translation, should learn this this paper by heart, as well as all other relevant standards. We have all become too relaxed, too casual with all that MS Office apps, CATs, search engines, and online dictionaries around us. Being uncompromisingly rigorous, and precise in the world casual Margarita-drinking dabblers may become one's real competitive edge. Note however, that this path is tough is unrewarding for most.<Serious mode off>

PPS: I'd like to know more about applicability of government-imposed National Documentation Standards to real word translation work in different countries. Have you heard about those? Are they relevant? Usable? Feel free to post a comment, if you have something to say.

Today I will publish a very special reference that will allow a peaky, sore, or simply bored reviewer to soundly fail any Russian translation in technical domain. No kidding!

I am also poring over a couple of big posts, that will most likely make their way here:

The 1st one is about stepping above, and beyond the limits of freelance career. Our means to evolve are quite limited... Or are they? Think about it. I know one thing: when I am fourty, there should be no crunches, or floods in my life.

The 2nd one is based on several online discussions I followed, or took part in. Quite a lot of people are upset about low rates, unfair agency practices, competetion... and they seem to think that translation market can, and should be regulated to solve these problems — mandatory translator accreditations, forced rates, more demanding unions... What a bunch of pinkos. Nyet, Molotov! Not a chance!

Stay tuned!

Oh, one more thing. According to successful bloggers, one should engage their audience into discussion to become established. Soooooooo... How do you like Mass Effect 3 ending?

This may sound unobvious, especially for a conservative bunch, skeptical about all that gadgetry, but Android qwerty slider is arguably one of the best productivity/GTD tools a Freelance Translator can get. I am pretty sure, that Windows Phone 7 devices can also do the job with different tools and methods, and so does Blackberry, but I don't know much about those two. And no, iPhone is not an option here. Give it to your kids. In this post we shall cover capabilities of Android phones in context of Freelancer's life, and workflow.

Mail Client with Push notifications

All your customers naturally want you to reply their emails ASAP, and you want to comply. From my experience, reaction time is one of top Translator's qualities from PM perspective, 20 minutes during your business hours is a good figure, and in case if you think that it would be like "conforming to a customer", you are right, that's exactly what it is.

Why Android? Because of its integration with Google Apps, and specifically Gmail. You are getting immediate push notification on incoming emails, the phone can vibrate if necessary. When you receive such notification, you simply swipe the screen, and type your reply. The experience is as smooth as with your regular texting.

Why slider? Onscreen keyboard would make it much slower, and more painful. Trust me, you don't want to try that.

Your phone provides seamless access to your business email when you're away from home, AND when you are on your couch, in your kitchen or your garage. You don't have to attend your desktop to check the email anymore, which is a good thing. Spending 10-30 minutes less per day in front of the monitor can actually help you live longer.

Wi-Fi Tethering

Any freelancer needs a backup Internet connection. Period. If you don't think so, wait untill you loose a customer because of missed deadline. Android phones can tether (share) their 3G connections via USB or Wi-Fi, which means that all your Wi-Fi devices will stay connected during the outage, and switchover will be relatively transparent. I know, that there are lots of smarter/more efficient/cheaper ways to get a backup connection (you can buy a USB 3G/LTE modem, or a router with two WAN inputs), but this one is good enough to stay online, use email, and various online resources. Besides, if you already have the phone, you don't need to buy anything.

The feature is called 3G Mobile Hotspot, and it's available with all newer versions. There should also be unofficial mods/apps with the same functionality.

Getting Things Done

Another great feature is project tracking/GTD across all your devices: tablets, laptops, PCs, etc. At any point of time you may have 4 to 10 and more projects on your shoulders with deadlines ranging from "ASAP" and "in 3 hours" to "in 5 weeks" and "whenever you have time" (the worst of them all). Even seasoned translators make mistakes here, forgetting about very small tasks with very large timeframe, confusing "Noon" with "EOB", and "EOB our time" with "EOB your time" (happened to me recently).

You can register your project emails as events or tasks in Google Calendar, and access your project schedule from all your devices — PCs, tablets, laptops, et cetera. Even from Internet-enabled TV, if you have one.

This will work not only for your projects, but also for other stuff your need to do at some point as a business, or house owner (financial reporting to government, paying your bills, and taxes etc.), and even as a partner/spouse/parent/child (birthdays, and other important dates, school events, you name it). Adding GTD to one's lifestyle requires a major change of habits, and it is not for everybody, but anyone will benefit from using this approach for production, and bookkeeping.

There are plenty of free, and paid apps, that synchronize with Google Calendar. My preferences are Gtasks, and Pure Grid Calendar.

Social Media

I am only starting to use Social Networks for marketing, my Twitter account is like 2 weeks old, so I don't have much to say on the subject. Pretty obvious however, that it makes much more sense, if one maintains their social influence (tweeting, retweeting, answering comments, etc.) on a small screen, and while doing something else, like travelling in a subway, or waiting in some kind of line. There are plenty of native and 3rd party clients for your social accounts. Things to try: Hootsuite, Twitdeck.

Conclusion

To sum up: qwerty phone improves your relationships with your customers, ensures peace of mind as a backup connection media, helps to maintain your schedule, and bookkeeping, as well as to stay away from your monitor. In the end it saves great deal of time. Worth a try, don't you think?

I have probably missed one or two interesting use cases, so comments/additions are welcome. I also encourage WP7 owners to describe their solutions for issues above.

Part 1 can be found here

As we have found in Part 1, Translation Workspace is a business model based on charging your suppliers for the privilege of working with you. It was never intended to act as a "real" CAT tool or tested as such. I don't think that TW developers have ever heard about such illusive ideas as productivity, ergonomics or user experience, and even if they have, they couldn't care less. The result is major usability flaws, which make Translation Workspace even better target for our devoted hatred. I wanted to make a numbered list, but I couldn't decide which flaw is the worst to put it on top, so it's unordered bullets.

• Repetition handling. Surprisingly, Translation Workspace doesn't save a segment to TM immediately when you close it. I think it happens once in several minutes, so if your file contains considerable amount of reps, you'll have to retype them, use copy-paste or save the file before opening each repeated segment. Major waste of time.

• More on repetitions. "Master" TM overrides your changes no matter what. It means, that if a segment is present in Master TM and occurs in a file more than once (imagine 20 instances), and you need to edit it, you'll have to go with retype, copy-paste or find and replace. In the ideal world, where nobody is hungry, everyone is using solar power, and can date Megan Fox or Johny Depp if they want to, Master TM would contain only perfect, thoroughly checked and approved translation units. In real world however (goodbye, Megan) Master TM is the legacy of the time, when nobody cared about localization for developing countries (Russia in my case), content was sourced to very cheap local sweatshops and published without any checks. Being a professional, you have no choice but to correct all that is wrong, so even more of your precious time goes to waste.
• Stability. All facets of Translation Workspace are highly unstable on my scrupulously clean finely-tuned working system with the best broadband you can get (believe it or not, I can watch a 1080p movie from Netflix server on the other side of the world without any hiccups). Every 30 minutes or so Translation Workspace hangs. Sometimes for good, sometimes it returns to normal in 10+ minutes. And no, I am not the only one with this problem. Guess what it does to your precious time?
• Latency. Moving between segments is always accompanied by a delay. It can be anywhere between several seconds and half a minute based on the server workload. Having delays like this for such a small packets of data is a major failure in the world of Telepresence and MOO shooters. This is bad for two reasons. First you loose ~2h per 1000 segments compared to any real CAT tool (This is big. 1000 segments may often correspond to ~2000 adjusted words which take approximately 4 hours to translate in a normal tool. 4h+2h=6h => ~50% overhead). The second reason is described in the next bullet.
• Pop-ups. Lots of pop-ups. Obviously, the process of translation implies strong concentration. Open the segment -> Type your translation -> Place tags if needed -> Move to a next segment > Go on. Carefully set up hotkeys, no pauses, no distractions. For experienced translators it develops into a meditative state of mind, in which one almost completely ignores the external irritants, which may include TV, construction work outside or your wife saying something about supper or taking away the garbage. Loosing this concentration is painful, and that's exactly what happens when continuity the process is interrupted by a pop-up window. "Are you sure that you are freaking sure sure?" Pop-up when you move tags in a fuzzy TU, pop-up when you're closing a segment with different spacing around a tag, pop-up when "new segment is coming from TM" whatever that means, pop-up for no-specific-reason-just-for-the-fun-of-it, etc. I haven't used Logoport for a while, so this list may be incomplete. Anyway you work slower, and guess what, waste your time.
• XLIFF editor doesn't support any export. Yes, it's true. Not only poor souls have to buy Logoport, they actually must work in it. No choice at all.
• Various minor, but still irritating bugs. For example, hotkeys may just stop working for reason unknown. It can be solved by restarting the application, but given the exhaustive five-step login process, it converts to even more time waste.

No big conclusion here, sorry. Just one thing: time is money; everyone who wastes your time is as good as thief and should be treated as such. Feel free to post your experiences here, I am sure I have omitted something.

Dixi

A transcreator would take the concept of sexiness in English and turn it into something that was as relevant, as impactful and would have a similar impact on my target audience in that other territory as my concept of sexiness would in English© John Dalziel

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/localization/rants

It provides seamless one-click subscription for pretty much any reader, sparing a few moves, so make yourself at home and hit the fancy  button on the right.

Cheers!

No, I am not scared.

Really, I am not.

I can't help but notice two curious trends on modern L10N market. They may look unconnected, or even opposite, but I think they represent two sides of a single market polarization process at its earlier stage.

On one hand we see the marching Mighty Translator (MT), which is said to produce decent results in some pairs. Evangelists even predict that it will completely take over certain segments within few years. I am not sure about that, hyped statistical MTs are still useless between EN and slavic languages... algorythmic/rule-based systems are slightly better, but they don't get much investment. Anyway the trend exists — researchers are researching, customers are asking for case studies, GPMs are launching pilot or even production projects, CAT developers are implementing MT plugins... A lot is going on the scene and behind it, and many find it disturbing.

The 2nd trend is more subtle. The populariy of Transcreation concept has been growing for last few years. It was mentioned much more often in 2011 than in 2008, when I received my first Transcreation PO. Bloggers are writing slick posts (<envy mode on>What can I do to make my English that slick?<envy mode off>), theme discussion groups appear all over the Web, companies and freelancers quickly change their positioning or at least tune it with new idea. It happened with two good customers of mine, whose specialization has mutated from "marketing and communication" to "transcreation" within 2011. This is not a hype, but you surely can't miss it.

Now to the point. MT is a logical development of Henry Ford's workflow-oriented "more eyes see more" approach to localization. Supplier chains are long, resources are cheap, but sloppy, quality is "normalized". Customer is supposed to be protected by a long sequence of steps with multiple feedback links that looks fancy on the whiteboard. Every step is supposed to improve quality, though usually it does not. Good news is that nobody will ever read the bigger part of content produced this way. So if you replace the initial node (cheap human translator) with MT, nothing changes. Price drops a bit, and that's it.

But the whole workflow thing has never worked for marketing and advertising copy, and majority of translation buyers have learnt this lesson hard, harder or the hardest way. That's why agencies, who specialize on such content, are applying different approach: do it right the first time. There is one qualified translator, and one qualified editor, both not cheap. They usually work in close contact to produce a fluent copy that sells stuff. Imagine a CIO reading an MTed collateral for six-figure product.

The logical development of this "do it right the first time" approach is Transcreation, which is [IMHO] about giving a translator more freedom and responsibility to produce a copy suitable for local audience expectations. No more source limitations, the goal is to sell stuff, not to stick to the original. Do whatever you want with idioms, wordplay, and overall emotional temperature. Do whatever you want, as long as they buy it. Such translation is essentially a new copy, [loosely] based on the original with all that it implies.

So let's return to the beginning of this post — polarization thing. Here's my layman's prediction: High-volume technical projects with low to medium level of sophistication (high-volume software, consumer manuals, tender docs, etc., you name it) will be slowly moving to human-edited MT. It's happening already. Sad but true, sorry MS translators. The change will be driven not only by costs, but also by volume of translatable content.

At the same time Trascreation wave should rise for stuff with higher fluency/creativity requirements, particularly marketing and games (hopefully), training materials perhaps. May be they will even be selling MT under the Translation label, and rename regular professional human translation to Transcreation. And I don't know, who will make more cash per hour, MT-editors or Transcreators [hehe]... Think about it.

Traditional technical translation should remain under some name for highly specialized texts, which require hands-on experience in the narrow field. I won't tell why — tired of typing.

One more thing, I wanted to use "Transcreation equals Translation in hipster glasses" joke, but couldn't fit it in the main text, so I'll just put it here.

Cheers

The order is reversed — the reply comes first.

From: Vadim
Date: 2010/11/2
Subject: Re: Urgent and Important -- Your Immediate Support Required

Dear Didier

I must say, that I find your idea fresh, and inspiring. Really, I do. I have even decided to aply the same policy to the local grocery store. You can find my draft preposition to them below.

First of all I'll tell them about my problems. There is no doubt, that these will be of utmost interest for them. Why wouldn't they?

- The weather has been lame lately

- I have recently aquired a cat, and forced to suffer its operating costs, which are quite high these days

- They have cancelled Caprica, my favorite TV Show. Can you believe that? I am sooo sad...

- The rash on my back is getting stronger, I need to do something about it

Given the above, I'll require the grocer to provide me 10% discount for the next two years (they have no choice indeed, because I am such an important client. I come there every day, and buy a baguette, a couple of croissants, and sometimes a pack of tea, and even a bottle of wine. Very important.) I'll also throw a remark, that I might become a habitual drunkard someday, and start buying wine every day to gild the pill.

When they accept my kindest offer, I'll approach to other shops and providers I am attending, starting the from the energy company, and the ISP. What do you think of my plan?

Unfortunately negotiation with all those suppliers will leave me no time for Huge Evil MLV projects for the next two months.

Thank you so much for inspiration

Warmest regards
Vadim Poguliaev  

Huge Evil MLV Vendor Management – IMPORTANT – DO NOT REPLY

<pmagyar_listsender@hugeevilmlv.com> wrote:

Dear Vadim Poguliaev,

The global economic downturn of 2008 and 2009 affected all of us. Together, as translation partners, we weathered this challenging and uncertain economic environment and demonstrated our value to clients worldwide. Today, while some economies are showing some signs of improvement, the overall demand environment remains fragile and volatile:

In today’s uncertain economic environment customers expect all of us to deliver “more for less”. To remain competitive, we are all demanding more from ourselves to meet these challenges.

Against the backdrop of this negative economic context, effective November 1, 2010 through January 1, 2011 we require all our partners to provide a 5% discount on all Huge Evil MLV projects. This discount is independent of any other agreements we may have in place with you.

Huge Evil MLV is not taking this step lightly and understands the effort it represents. Please keep in mind the following points:

• In most markets, Evil MLV bears the full burden and risk associated with exchange-rate fluctuations; as a USD denominated company this means we have effectively seen our outsourcing costs rise by approximately 6% in the last month alone;
• Huge evil MLV continues to put tremendous effort into securing new and existing customers and markets, effectively providing for our and YOUR future revenue streams;
• .

In closing, I want to reiterate Huge Evil MLV’s commitment to increasing market demand for translation services by providing the industry’s most innovative, efficient and high-quality services that enable clients to extend their global reach. As our translation partner, your success is tightly aligned with our success. I want to personally thank you for the services you are providing to Huge Evil MLV during these challenging times and I look forward to extending our partnership in 2011 and beyond.

Thank you,

Didier

C-level guy from huge evil MLV

I have seen plenty of bad CAT tools, and only two or three really good ones. Some were particularly ugly, like IBM Translation Manager or Multilizer 4.0. (I have translated several thousand words in fourth version of Multilizer in 2010. Since then I prefer to call it Mutilizer [HA-HA]).

However I have never had any emotions about those, working with bad proprietary tools is a part of the job. When you manage to export files to something you can open in your favorite environment, you win. When you don't, it's like whatever. Ultimately all CATs are the same.

But this tolerance failed me when I became familiar with Logoport/Translation Workspace. I hereby admit that I hate it from the bottom of my heart. Reasons are not entirely clear even for me, but I'll try to analyze them for your amusement. So...

First of all it's Logoport's shameful history, which started when SDL swallowed Trados. Lionbridge became dependent of one of its dire competitors, and felt somewhat uncomfortable. For SDL on the other hand this situation opened wide array of exciting opportunities. So Lionbridge went shopping, and bought small unknown company with unknown undeveloped downright useless copy of Trados macro, which communicated with server instead of local TM. Note that it was long before the cloud hype, so Liox can be considered kinda visionary from this perspective.

Then the fun started. By moving projects to Logoport Liox earned some hard cash and lost what was left of their goodwill among translators, because of "optimized" WC algorithm: Similair (but not equal) no match segments within the same project were considered fuzzy. The basic matching mechanism was also "improved" compared to other tools on the market, for example Introduction -> Implementation is considered a high fuzzy, because those two words are so much alike. Don't you agree?

The more, the better. Logoport remained free for a few years, and everyone got used to it. Just another ugly proprietary CAT. Then someone in Lionbridge came up with a brilliant idea: Let's charge for it! Our suppliers will have no choice but to pay, if they want to continue working for us, and our suppliers' suppliers will also have to pay for the same reason. Free cash! And free cash it was. Some good translators left, but SLV agencies who received over 50% of their work from Lionbridge had nowhere to go.

As you can see, greed is the only reason this tool exists. It was purchased to avoid paying SDL for Trados license on their conditions, and used to rip off vendors in several ways. Noone ever cared about insignificant stuff, like usability, testing, or customer care. Cash keeps flowing, and most "clients" don't have a choice, but to buy and use our "product". Why bother? The result: user experience nightmare.

This leads us to Part 2 of this story — technical/usability reasons why I hate Logoport.

Shocking Truth! Russian VO with EN subs.

The easiest examples are Apsic Xbench, and Apsic Comparator. I won't be telling you, how great, and useful they are, this is not the subject of this post, but if you don't have them, go get them here right now.

Another thing worth mentioning is search/replace tools, which are essential when you revise a project that contains hundreds of files. My choice here is Text Workbench, which supports binary Office files unlike the competitors.

I can go on, but that's not our subject again. To the point:

Recently I have learnt about the tool, which seems to be just as useful as Xbench for certain kinds of jobs, more specifically liguistic QA of localized web sites, and applications via screenshots, or browser. The idea is very simple — the tool consists of two panes. You open a source screenshot or web page on one side, and a localized target one on the other. Then you compare them, and go to the next pair with a click of a single button.

The tool is opensource, and thus it is flighty, and unstable, but it's still much better than two browser, or image viewer windows.

URL: http://webwalker.sourceforge.net/

You can also download the compiled file here

Can't wait to try it for "big" web application testing. Great addition for my roster.