Tips 'n' Tools for Translators

This week a customer from an advertising agency I work for sent me a PDF file to translate containing a newspaper article she had scanned. What struck me right away was that the whole article was an image and that it was laid out in a number of columns with a headline and large picture at the top. It looked quite nice as pieces of journalism go, but how did she expect me to make a quotation and translate the text? To be honest, I don't think she realised what she was asking of me; these days it's so common for people in PR, sales and marketing to work with PDFs of glossy-looking articles that they don't realise how tricky they can be for translators to deal with.

One way of handling such image files is to load them into Adobe Acrobat®, a powerful but pricey application for creating and editing PDF documents. You import the file and then process it using the optical-character-recognition feature (OCR). This theoretically "captures" any text found in the image and makes it editable. After doing that and saving the results as a new PDF file, you can export it to an external word-processing application like Microsoft Word® and then check it to see if all the text has been captured and reproduced correctly. It's only once this last step has been taken that you can actually start translating.

If you do most of your translating in a CAT tool, then you may also want to go over the editable file again before doing that using a utility such as Dave Turner's CodeZapper as this can reduce the number of formatting "tags" or "codes" in it, which appear in the translation grid and stop you from translating segments quickly (as you have to insert them in your translation one by one).

Well, after creating an editable Word file from Adobe Acrobat XI and not being very impressed with the outcome, I remembered a blog post that Dominique Pivard wrote a while ago about handling scanned PDFs using a Web-based CAT tool called Wordfast Anywhere®. Dominique has made a large number of short but generally very instructive videos on CAT tools that you can watch on his blog or on YouTube for free, and this is one of them.

I watched the video twice (just to make sure I'd understood everything!), set up a free user account on the Wordfast Anywhere site and then uploaded the original scanned PDF file to it. You need to create a translation memory and set the source and target languages before it processes the PDF, but once you've done that, you're off! The Wordfast Anywhere server processed my PDF file using a powerful OCR algorithm and converted it into an editable file in just a few minutes. It lets you either translate the output in a Wordfast environment directly on the server or download the file and translate it by other means if you wish (e.g. in a desktop CAT tool).

The results of the conversion I got it to do were very good and the file didn't need much fine-tuning at all – it was better than Acrobat's output and didn't cost me a penny.

Many thanks to Dominique for making his video tutorial. If you'd like to watch it, then just click here. (The 4-minute video will start running as soon as the page has built up in your browser.)

Carl

image: Wordfast logo © Wordfast LLC

Related posts: Uses of Adobe Acrobat XI (part 1)

As I mentioned at the end of last month, the Hungarian CAT-tool maker Kilgray recently released a new version of its main product for freelance translators, memoQ, called "memoQ 2013 R2" (the "R" stands for "release", apparently). I've been using this version of memoQ ever since then and have found it to be robust and very convenient thanks to various enhancements to existing features and several brand new features it comes with.

To find out more about this particular release, you can now sign up to attend a free, one-hour webinar by Kilgray on the tool's new features, which is going to be staged later this week: on 14 November at 4 p.m. GMT (= 5 p.m. CET). Click here to sign up.

In Kilgray's own words on the event, the features to be discussed include "monolingual review (to update your translation memory by importing reviewed monolingual documents), PDF file import with full formatting (imported PDF files will keep the layout of the original file and texts can be translated as .doc or .docx files), a start-up wizard (to make configuration easier) and a couple of Microsoft Office Word integration enhancements".

The last point is a very modest description of some major achievements in memoQ: "Use Microsoft Word dictionaries for spell-checking; change fonts automatically in .docx files according to the most widespread fonts when you translate between European and Asian languages (CCJK); comments added to your source document will appear as comments or translatable content in the translation grid, depending on your preference; and comments added during translation can be exported into a Word file", as Kilgray says. (The above outline is just a small part of a more comprehensive summary available on the CAT-tool maker's website – click here to view the whole page.)

Reading about features is a good start, but watching a webinar will give you a lot of visual information as well as being more informative in general. You can also ask questions that may be answered straightaway, so it's a good way of finding out about key aspects of the program quickly. After which you should give it a spin yourself. Download a free user's guide from Kilgray's website and find out how the tool works – and most of all, how (like all CAT tools) it can help you improve your productivity and make sure you use the right terminology consistently as you translate. (More about the benefits of using translation software in a later post...)

See you at the webinar.

Regards,

Carl

image: logo courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies and my own screen shot from Citrix webinar software

Closely related posts: Promising new features in memoQ 2013 R2

MemoQ (pronounced "memo kyu") is a CAT tool that has become very popular among translators, partly because it offers a lot of convenient features and is relatively easy to use; beginners can learn how to set up a project and translate and export texts with the tool in just 1-2 hours. Plus it can process a wide range of file formats smoothly, including Trados 2007's bilingual RTF and SDL Trados Studio 2009/2011 files in XLIFF format. Last but not least, I personally think it's good value for money, especially if you buy it as part of a promotion or group purchase!

A new version of memoQ called memoQ 2013 was released at the end of May and includes lots of enhancements and several new features, including an integrated online dictionary search facility that you can configure yourself using as many of your favourite Web resources as you like. (This is in addition to the Eurotermbank plug-in that memoQ comes with.)

Release 2 of memoQ 2013 is now just about to be launched, and this promises to be a great leap forward in terms of user convenience. For one thing, it has a feature called monolingual review that translators will love! It saves you a great deal of time updating translation memories (TM) when a customer or reviewer sends you the final version of a translation you've done. In most CAT tools, updating a TM to include the latest changes is a laborious manual process, but memoQ 2013 R2 has automated the step for Word® and other documents, employing a re-alignment procedure to update the segments stored in your TM.

Fig. 1: When you import the final version, memoQ opens an alignment window. The green lines mark the segments that have been changed.

Another enhancement is the ability to import term bases straight from SDL's terminology tool MultiTerm®. This is useful if a customer sends you a document to translate using specific terms they work with and have stored in that format. More specifically, memoQ 2013 now enables you to import MultiTerm XML or TBX files, extract the terms and include them in a term base of its own, which you select yourself. This gives you faster leverage of the customer's resources.

Fig. 2: To import a MultiTerm XML file (term base), click on "Import terminology" and then select the format.

There are a number of other improvements as well, some of which concern the DOCX filter for importing and exporting Word® documents. Exporting comments made in memoQ along with a translation has now been implemented. (This has been possible in other CAT tools such as Déjà Vu X and X2 for ages, but not in memoQ, and saves you a lot of time inserting comments into your translation manually after exporting it.)

But to find out more about it, why not attend Kilgray's introductory webinar on the new release? It's going to be held from 5-6 pm CET (4-5 pm GMT) on Monday 28 October. It's free – all you have to do is register in advance. Click here to go to the registration page.

Have fun trying out the program! (You'll be able to download it shortly and can try it out for free for 45 days.)

Best,

Carl

memoQ logo: courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies; screen shots: my own.

P.S. (written on 13 Nov. 2013) A free recording of the webinar is now available on the internet – click here to access it.

Well, the build-up to its appearance on the translation stage was big, as you might expect from SDL Trados! Have you heard the news yet? If you're also a translator and use translation software to help you with your daily work, then you may already be aware that the largest maker of computer-assisted translation (CAT) software tools recently launched the latest version of its key product (on 30 September).

It almost seems to have been a little early in arriving on the market, actually, as it's known as "Studio 2014" ... but then again, I expect they wanted to get a competitive edge over one of their main competitors, the Hungarian firm Kilgray (the makers of memoQ 2013 and other state-of-the-art tools for translators, translation agencies and terminologists).

The previous version of SDL Trados's tool, Studio 2011, has been around for a while and become widely used among freelance translators and agencies alike, partly because it supports bilingual file formats created by its much earlier predecessor, Trados 2007, which many agencies once invested in and weren't prepared to drop when Studio first came out.

Studio 2014 is based on the 2011 version, but the interface has been enhanced to make it easier to use. One of the main changes you'll notice is that a ribbon-based interface has now been adopted, organising related functions in tabs in a similar way to the programs that come with Microsoft Office 2007/2010. So if you're used to working with the latter, you ought to find it relatively easy to get to grips with Studio 2014. In addition to that, new areas have been added to the interface for training purposes – you can now access training videos directly from the program, for example – and you can access additional "apps" for Studio from here, too, by following an internal link to SDL's OpenExchange platform rather than having to call up the page separately in your web browser. So users can get information faster and more conveniently, which is great.

Apart from this, the sales people at SDL Trados have been listening to user feedback and passing it on to the developers, who have consequently come up with a number of "new" features such as AutoSave (to save your work automatically), Track Changes, Real-time Preview, a fast alignment tool (to replace WinAlign), QuickMerge (for combining individual files to speed up translation) and a customisable editing environment with user-defined short cuts for specific functions. (These are certainly enhancements in Studio, but they have actually been around in memoQ for a while.)

A few of the new features really are novel, however:

• enhanced concordance search, i.e. terms are looked up automatically in your translation memory (TM) if a search at segment level fails to find anything there, and partial matches are shown, which can help you come up with an appropriate translation
  
   


• InQuote, which is a new OpenExchange app that can be installed in Studio 2014 to generate quotations from project statistics. These stats can be output in Word or Excel or copied into another application or e-mail from your Clipboard to send to a customer, for example.

Well, that's the rundown so far. I'll learn more about it once I've tried it out myself. Hope it's not too buggy, being a new release...

To find out about the software suite yourself, you can watch various short videos that SDL Trados has produced. Click here, for instance: SDL Trados Product Tutorial Video. (N.B.: there's no sound in the video.)

The presentation below is also informative and it's spoken at a reasonable speed (unlike various other videos they've made, which are too short to be of much value and are narrated much too fast for non-English speakers):

• Studio 2014 - Getting started; a quick tour, by Daniel Brockmann, SDL Trados (lasts approx. 15 mins.).

This video is actually one of those that are accessible from the training tab in Studio 2014. Dominique Pivard has been kind enough to provide the individual links on his own blog, CATguru's vlog, so anyone can watch them in a browser and get an idea about using the CAT tool that way.

In sum, I'd say Studio 2014 looks like a very promising, mature tool, even if many of its new features aren't pioneering ones. That said, I'm keen to see what the forthcoming version of memoQ 2013 ("R2" aka "6.8") will be like, which is due out at the end of October and is said to include several new features that will make our work more convenient – like the ability to incorporate final changes made to translations into your translation memory once the texts have been exported (e.g. customer changes). Studio can already do this to a degree if the translation is converted from SDLXLIFF to Word beforehand, but this new solution may go much further. And be a real time-saver!

Best,

Carl

images: spotlights © Rainer Sturm/pixelio.de, memoQ logo © Kilgray Translation Technologies, Studio 2014 logo © SDL plc

• Related posts: Useful extensions for Studio on SDL OpenExchange
  
   


• multifarious, SDL's blog on its CAT products, written by Paul Filken. Click here to view a recent post on customising Studio 2014 using OpenExchange apps
  
   


• Emma Goldsmith's blog post on features of Studio 2014 for "beginners" (she was a beta tester)
  
   


• To sign up for a free 30-day trial of Studio 2014, go to the online form here. (Update: although the form's available online now, I've just been told by a sales rep here in Germany that the trial version hasn't come out yet [it's 15 October now!], so we'll just have to wait for it a bit longer, I guess. Maybe until 2014 after all...!)

The good thing about e-learning is that it is generally done at your own pace rather than the speed set by a teacher, it's done at a time of day and a location that you can generally choose yourself, and in some cases, you can even tackle the subjects that are covered in the order that suits you best. So it's a very flexible form of instruction, which helps to make it effective.

If you're new to memoQ or already have some experience with it, but feel it would be good to get a structured overview of Kilgray's CAT tool, then why not consider taking the introductory e-learning course offered by the firm behind the translation tool? This course consists of 10 lessons:

• Lesson 1: Setting up a project
  
   


• Lesson 2: Translation 1 (opening a document, translating, saving it)
  
   


• Lesson 3: Translation 2 (adding a doc to a project, analysis, tags/nos./non-translatables)
  
   


• Lesson 4: Terminology
  
   


• Lesson 5: Quality assurance
  
   


• Lesson 6: LiveDocs (document corpus, text alignment, add to TM)
  
   


• Lesson 7: Understanding memoQ (projects, resource console, etc.)
  
   


• Lesson 8: Tracking changes and exporting files
  
   


• Lesson 9: Working with packages
  
   


• Lesson 10: Working on online projects.

Kilgray recommends participants to do two lessons a week, so it would take you five weeks to do the whole course. (You might want to do more than two a week and get through it faster, which is doable.) The lessons vary in length, but are all around half an hour long with a brief summary at the end of each one in the form of short questions with three possible answers. The style of them is like a webinar in which the tutor talks as you watch their presentation (some user interaction would make the lessons more dynamic in my opinion, even if it's just physically ticking the right answers to questions).

Once you've worked through all the lessons, you can then do a final multiple-choice test with 30 questions to see what you've learnt. Kilgray will give you a certificate on completing the course and passing the test (to do that, you'll need to get at least half of the answers right).

More e-learning courses to do with memoQ are currently being developed by Kilgray's training partner Loctimize GmbH, which is a German company specialising in (international) CAT-tool training. The memoQ course they are working on right now is intended for project managers working with translators in a memoQ Server environment.

The 10-part introductory ("level 1") course outlined above is free for anyone who already has a valid memoQ licence (you'll be asked to key in your licence number when you register). Otherwise it will cost you 90 euros + VAT (which is a very reasonable nine euros per lesson).

To sign up for access to the course, just click here: registration

If you have any questions about it, please contact Kilgray by writing to their sales department (sales [at] kilgray [dot] com).

Have fun! I'm quite an experienced user, but still found the course interesting and I picked up a number of new things, so it was certainly worth doing.

Regards

Carl

images: e-learning / freeimages.co.uk, Kilgray logo & memoQ: courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies

Related links

Kilgray's blog post announcing the first course in January 2013

My review of Kevin Lossner's e-book on memoQ 6.0

If you are a translator who uses one of SDL's computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools (e.g. Trados® 2007 or one of the newer versions of Trados® Studio (2009 or 2011), you will probably already have heard about the firm's relatively new software-development platform SDL OpenExchange.

OpenExchange is an interesting idea as it is a way of enhancing the functionality of SDL's products by harnessing the intellectual power of 3rd-party developers. In the words of SDL:

"By offering a range of plug-ins and associated applications that will extend and augment the product feature set, we aim to see our users achieve a greater return on their SDL investment, while offering developers a stage to showcase themselves before the industry’s largest translation professional community." (quoted from their website)

In addition to this, SDL is using the platform to seek suggestions from users of its products regarding further potential enhancements. In this respect, it currently seems to be ahead of the competition, although other CAT-tool manufacturers such as Kilgray in Hungary (the maker of memoQ) have also started creating user platforms that can partly be employed to exchange software resources (see Kilgray's new Language Terminal, which can be accessed directly from memoQ 6.2 and memoQ 2013).

SDL's 3rd-party development platform currently contains around 80 enhancements in the form of plug-ins and apps. Some of these cost money (quite a lot in some cases), while others are free. Among other things, they include:

• Auto-Suggest dictionaries in a variety of language pairs
  
   


• conversion software (e.g. SDLTM to XLIFF for proof-reading in a different tool)
  
   


• file-type definitions so that Studio can process further file types (such as PO files or DTP formats like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign)
  
   


• glossary converters (e.g. for converting an Excel glossary to a Studio or MultiTerm term base)
  
   


• Microsoft terminology collections in various languages (converted for use in MultiTerm)
  
   


• machine-translation plug-ins
  
   


• and even instruction manuals for Studio 2011 in various languages.

To find out more about these and the other apps, check out the OpenExchange site. I would also recommend you to read a recent blog post by another translator, Tuomas Kostiainen, a Studio user and trainer who has taken a closer look at five of the products available there.

As an aside, I noticed that some of these optional plug-ins are actually included in memoQ's functionality; they are there if you want to use them and just have to be activated by ticking a check box - there's no need to download and install them, let alone pay for them. Instruction manuals for memoQ and other CAT tools made by Kilgray are available from Kilgray's own website for free and are also in a range of languages.

Still, a number of the Studio and MultiTerm plug-ins and apps do look interesting and provide enhancements that are still lacking in memoQ. In the course of time, however, memoQ users may find that a growing number of these are being offered on the Language Terminal. Let's wait and see how it evolves...

Carl

images: Kilgray's logo and Language Terminal courtesy of Kilgray Translation Technologies. SDL OpenExchange: my own screen shot

Earlier this year, an American colleague of mine, Kevin Lossner, published an e-book on memoQ, a CAT tool that has been around for a number of years and is developing at a break-neck pace. I read the book as soon as it came out and found it to be well-written, interesting and, most of all, helpful (which is what you'd expect a guide like this to be, but isn't necessarily the case). Well, I liked it – his way of presenting the material is a good one: using short-but-clear explanations with lots of screen shots to make the outlines and instructions easy to follow.

The book is around 200 pages long, so it goes into some detail, covering a wide variety of situations that memoQ users are likely to encounter in their daily translation work using the current version of the CAT tool (v6):

• Initially, Kevin describes how to install memoQ correctly and set up memoQ projects that include TMs, term bases and other useful language resources such as LiveDocs corpora (= reference material). Setting up a spelling checker and rules for segmentation, auto-translation and auto-correction are also discussed. Covering these basic points was a wise idea because they affect how smoothly and accurately you can translate once you get started.




• We then come to the essential topic of preparing source files for translation and pre-translating them automatically in memoQ. Good file preparation can reduce the number of tags that appear in a file after importing it into memoQ, but it can also protect sensitive formatting information by turning it into non-deletable tags (using the Regex Tagger) as long as the file is in memoQ. The next section discusses how to import and translate specific file formats: PDF, HTML, XML, bilinguals DOCs/RTFs, TTX, (SDL)XLIFF and other CAT-tool formats, plus Microsoft Office files containing embedded tables created using a different Microsoft application (e.g. Excel charts imported into Word).




• Kevin also looks at internal quality-assurance checks and various ways of exporting translations and comments to file formats that external reviewers can check, edit and return for easy re-importing into memoQ (see the sections on collaboration and delivery). After this, the translation can be finalised and sent off to the customer.




• Having finished an assignment, the translator may want to edit his/her term bases and TMs or align source and target texts in LiveDocs. These areas are covered in respective sections on managing resources.

So as you can see, the author has tackled memoQ's entire workflow from a practical viewpoint. (Congratulations on doing it so clearly and succinctly, Kevin.) This is a sound compendium of practical information that ought to be of value to anyone who uses version 6 (and probably the next version as well, "memoQ 2013").

Copies of the e-book are currently available via lulu.com.

P.S. Kevin also writes posts of his own on his excellent blog, Translation Tribulations.

Carl

image: courtesy of Kevin Lossner