Tips 'n' Tools for Translators

If you have a valid support & maintenance agreement for memoQ, you are entitled to download the latest release of the software (either a build or a major upgrade) and install it on your PC. After doing that, however, you may find it doesn't do some things quite as well as your previous version, and if you come across enough of these shortcomings, you may want to go back to your old version and carry on using that for a while until the shortcomings get ironed out by the software development team. How do you get hold of that older version, though, now that it's been replaced by the latest one on your computer?

If you haven't had the foresight to save the installation file beforehand, don't worry – all is not lost! All you need to do is go to a page on the memoQ website and download the right installation file from there – it's https://www.memoq.com/en/downloads.

The versions of memoQ you can currently find here go back all the way from the newest one to memoQ translator pro 4.2, which was released several years ago.

Download the file, save it to your desktop (for example) and double-click on it to install it over the existing installation. The next time you launch memoQ, this earlier version will be used automatically.

And that's all there is to it!

Best,

Carl

ABBYY, the software company behind FineReader, arguably the best OCR software package in town at the moment, is currently offering two of its products, FineReader 12 and PDF Transformer+, at a 25% discount until 31 December.



FineReader scans paper documents and images and turns them into digital files, which you can save in one of various Windows or Mac formats. Its optical character recognition ('OCR') is highly accurate and can be used on a host of source languages.



PDF Transformer+ is an easy-to-use program for editing PDF files and converting them into editable file formats like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Open Office Writer. It also lets you scan paper documents and create editable PDF files.



Both of these programs help translators transform documents that customers send them on paper or as PDFs into digital files that can be processed in common word-processing packages and then translated with CAT tools, for example.



To find out more about this offer, click here to go to ABBYY's website. You can watch short videos there that show you what the programs can do and download a trial version of each program as well if you want to try them out before buying them.



This special offer has been running for a while now and is only valid until 31 December, so be quick! (I bought PDF Transformer+ recently and thoroughly recommend it; it does its job well, is easy to use and is great value for money in my opinion.)



Regards



Carl

Did you know you can use a range of different fonts to display segments in memoQ's translation grid? You don't just have to stick to one, but can customise the appearance.

Many translators probably don't even consider using a different font to display text in their CAT tool, but it may well be worth your while to try a few other fonts out from time to time. You may even want to change which font you use in the course of a day as your eyes get tired.

I find that sans serif fonts are particularly easy to read on screen. These include popular fonts such as Calibri and Arial. MemoQ allows you to select a different font from a drop-down list and pick a different size as well. To do this in memoQ 2014, you need to call up the 'Options' menu from 'Tools' in the main menu ...

... and then select the item called 'Appearance' in 'Category'. The dialogue below will then be shown.

To pick a different font, go to the 'Editor fonts' section in the top half and pick a font from 'Font family and size' (click on the downward arrow in the font box to open a drop-down menu listing all the fonts available on your computer). Separate font families are listed for Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Apart from adjusting the font you'll see in the translation grid, this dialogue box also lets you switch the colour of the text – to do this, move down to 'Editor colors' and click on the box to the right of 'Text color'.

After making your new settings, activate them by clicking on 'Apply' or 'OK'. For some specific help on the options available here, just click on the 'Help' button on the far right.

To call up the 'Options' menu in memoQ 2015, go to the dark-blue 'MemoQ' tab at the top left of the screen, click on it and then move down to 'Options' near the bottom of the list, which will display various items. Pick the 'Options' item (the three cogs) to access the settings in the dialogue.

More details are available in the help documentation or on Kilgray's website.



Regards



Carl

Related links



Paul Filken's blog post on making similar adjustments via the 'View' menu in SDL Trados Studio 2014

Translators' platform Proz.com is going to be staging its 7th annual virtual conference shortly, in celebration of International Translation Day on Wednesday, 30 September 2015.



This conference is actually one of two training events for translators running over two whole days starting from 29 September.

• 100+ hours of scheduled and on-demand sessions and content


• 30+ hours of LIVE content including Q&A sessions, panel discussions, chat rooms and more


• Panel discussions on “Terminology management” and “Customer relationship management”


• Exhibit booths where you can chat live with exhibitors and software vendors (including prize giveaways)


• Earn 10 ATA CE credits for attending


• Save up to 50% on popular CAT tools including SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, Déjà Vu and more

Here are some of the topics that are going to be discussed according to Proz:

• How to find direct clients and run a business that you love


• Translation or Interpreting? & the Emerging Market for Hybrid Communication Models


• Getting in the game: a 'how to' for translation beginners


• The beauty of machine translation


• 10 essential tips that are most helpful for a professional translator


• Where to find clients and how to approach them and do the follow-up without sounding too pushy


• Glossary & terminology management


• Panel discussion on client relationship management


• Panel discussion on leveraging voice-recognition technology for greater efficiency.

View the full programme here, after which you can click here to register as an attendee. (It's free!)

N.B. If you attend at least one live event, this will give you free access to recordings after the event, which you can watch any time for a period of at least 90 days.



For events concerning CAT tools on 29 September, see the special programme here. This will include the following talks:

• Free Tools for Translators


• Technical translation: is it really about terminology?


• Setting up an MT system


• Managing client expectations


• Economics of pricing for the translation industry


• Panel discussion on meeting clients


• Panel discussion on machine translation


• Medical documents for academic publishing: creating English content with precision, accuracy and style


• How to participate in EU tendering procedures for translation services.

I'm sure you'll find something worthwhile as the topics are very varied. There are also quite a lot of pre-recorded webinars to accompany the two-day event that you can watch on demand, i.e. whenever it suits you.

Regards,

Carl

Related links



FIT (the International Federation of Translators) on International Translation Day



The British Library's day-long programme of events on translation in London on 2 October ("An opportunity for translators, students, publishers, booksellers, librarians, bloggers and reviewers to gather and debate")

Some of you may already have heard of Heartsome, a firm that produces computer-assisted translation software. Its two main products these days are TMX Editor and Heartsome Studio, a suite of translation tools. The company is based in Hong Kong and has partly been catering to the Chinese-language market in Asia and partly to speakers of English. What's unusual about it is that it's about to close its doors for good. And it's making its products available for further development in an Open Source environment.



Heartsome says it's doing this in the hope that other software developers will pick up where its own developers left off and make the two tools more helpful to translators and agencies (see the farewell note on their website [which may get discontinued]).



Development and technical support at Heartsome is going to stop tomorrow, on 31 July. This is an unusual move in the CAT-tool industry, or at least one that doesn't happen very often. But like any business, if the sales figures just won't offset your business costs, you can only keep going for so long before drastic action is called for. Other companies in the field have seen bad times, too (like Atril, the makers of Déjà Vu), but they may manage to consolidate their business and carry on (which Atril did with a French financier's help).



I'm sorry to hear about this step as the more producers there are on the CAT-tool market, the better, at least in terms of competitive product development and pricing in the interest of users. It will be interesting to see what becomes of Heartsome's products in the future. I also hope the Open Source move is a positive one and that competent developers will step in and not let development stagnate.



Anyone who wishes to try out Heartsome Studio 8.0 and/or TMX Editor 8.0 now (à la Heartsome) can do so by downloading them from the GitHub site Heartsome has set up (see below) or from other trustworthy software platforms (even so, please make sure your PC is well protected from web-based viruses before downloading the packages; the software links are sound as far as I can tell, but you never know...).



The products can run on several operating platforms: not just Windows and Mac OS, but also Linux, for example.



I haven't tried out Heartsome Studio yet, but I know it can create bilingual XLIFF files, which can be easily modified for importing into other CAT tools (such as memoQ and SDL Studio 2011 or 2014). For more details about the Heartsome Studio suite, check out the features listed on GitHub.



I'll have a go when I get a chance and see what it's like in terms of usability. As for TMX Editor, that's a useful program you can use to edit and modify TMX files created by other CAT editors if their own TMX editing features are lacking. Why not try them both out and see what you think?



Regards,



Carl

images: © Heartsome

Related links

- blog post in German by Torsten Rox-Edling: "Heartsome wird Open Source"



- Dominique Pivard's short e-training video on how to translate using Heartsome Translation Studio 8 (it lasts 8.5 mins)



..........................

The other day I happened to stumble across a job advert by SDL plc, a well-known producer of software tools for translators, one of which I reviewed here briefly last autumn. The position was being advertised via monster.de, the big job portal on the internet, and looked as though it was in nearby Munich, which was why it initially caught my attention. It turned out it was actually an internship as an English to German translator. On closer reading, I found that the post was over in Sheffield (in the UK) and that SDL expects the person who is fortunate enough to get the job to work for what I would call peanuts – the National Minimum Wage in Britain, a stunning £6.50 an hour (7.85 euros at today's exchange rate).



Here's the top half of the ad, showing an appealing picture of a young team of professionals around a laptop, presumably to put you in an enthusiastic mood:

Looking at the job description, it sounds like an interesting position for a qualified translator. You would be working with a variety of CAT tools (obviously, since that's what SDL produces) and doing translating and editing work that can be demanding (post-editing machine-translated texts). You'd also have a degree of responsibility because you'd be checking software to find any mistakes or problems with it, testing websites (presumably how well they work) and doing terminological work, which means building up and possibly verifying and editing terms in a terminology database, no doubt for other members of staff (= translators) to use.



You need an educational background in translation or terminology for this job, as SDL specifically requests, and very good skills in two languages as well:

What do you think about this advertisement? My first reaction was one of disbelief; I asked myself why anyone with suitable qualifications should want to undertake work like this for a pittance? After all, it's a full-time position, even if it's only for six months (apparently with no option of being taken on properly afterwards).



Is it reasonable for an employer to expect this kind of work to be done by an intern, do you think? I could understand them offering the internship for a shorter period, say three months, but six seems a bit steep to me under these circumstances. On the other hand, it's become quite common for young people, including recent university graduates, to try and get some work experience in business fields that interest them even if it means them not being paid anything at all – it's the experience that counts for them rather than their earnings. (Think of the media, for example – TV and advertising.) In that respect, this particular position could be regarded as a particularly attractive one since you'd be getting paid all the time in addition to being given the opportunity to learn a lot about modern translation technology.



Still, I must say I find it unsettling to see low-paid positions being advertised that require skills that not everybody happens to have. Although the person's manpower would be tied up for half a year and the work they'd do would benefit the employer's own web marketing, they'd only be offered a token salary. Something's not quite right there, is it?



Carl

Proz, the international translators' portal, is going to run a series of free webinars for registered users in March.

According to the programme of events now available here, the sessions will mainly be covering computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools:

• Wordfast Pro 3.3
  
   


• memoQ 2013 R2
  
   


• SDL Trados Studio 2014
  
   


• Déjà Vu X3 (aka "DVX3")
  
   


• Fluency
  
   


• and Wordbee Freelancer.

In addition, you will also be able to learn more about utilities like WordFinder, a web-based dictionary suite, and Translation Office 3000, a package for managing your translation and proof-reading assignments, your customers and your accounting. Several of these programs are now available in brand new versions with fresh interfaces.

There are also going to be two sessions on getting in touch with potential customers via Proz's own web platform. At the time of writing this post, places were still available for the session on 20 March.

To participate in any of these events, all you have to do is register to attend them. If you aren't a registered user yet, sign up for free or take out a paid subscription, depending on what features you would like to use.

Proz.com regularly stages training events for translators and interpreters, not just giving them an opportunity to learn about the latest software tools, but also to improve their knowledge of subject areas they work with such as legal contracts, interpreting in court or for the police, medical translation, tourism and travel, software localisation and audio subtitling, to mention just a few examples.

Some of the events are recorded and can be viewed any time, albeit at a small cost. These are known as "on-demand courses".

The training Proz offers isn't just in English, but that does seem to be the main lingua franca used. Sometimes presentations are held in other languages; some of the events in March are going to take place in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian or Chinese, for instance.

Quality-wise, the free webinars and "virtual conferences" I have attended so far have generally been reasonable to good. Not brilliant, but generally interesting. Some were a bit too commercial for my taste, but still, you learn to pick out the cherries after a while...

Why not take a look at the events lined up in March and see if there are any that interest you?

Regards,

Carl

images: screen shots taken from Proz.com

Déjà Vu is a versatile software suite for translators that has been on the market for twenty years now, ever since 1993. An established CAT tool produced by a European firm called Atril, it has a loyal following among its users thanks to its flexibility and robustness, not to mention the speedy and helpful technical support Atril provides.

A new version of the software called "X3" is going to be launched this year. Two free "sneak preview" webinars will be held on it in the second half of January to give translators an idea of what enhancements and innovations they can expect. These are going to be on 23 Jan (7-8 pm CEST) and on 28 Jan (4-5 pm CEST), the company's website says.

Version X3 comes with a number of enhancements and brand new features compared to its predecessor DVX2. These include:

• a completely overhauled user interface for easier access to features (a ribbon approach)



• live previews for Microsoft Office documents: Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from customers' Office 2003, 2007, 2010 or 2013 suites can now be displayed without Office having to be pre-installed on the translator's PC.



• as for all file formats not supported by the live preview, DVX3 will display "live source context", thus providing code information in development formats, for example



• WYSIWYG inline formatting in the translation grid ("What you see is what you get")



• better quality assurance, including a dynamic inline spell-checker (with the possibility to add your own dictionaries)



• enhanced file filters (IDML and Excel, specifically) for quicker import, fewer embedded codes, additional compatibility and interoperability and better handling of Quicksilver files



• automation (e.g. automatic update notification).

If you would like to attend one of the webinars, all you need to do is sign up for it in advance on Atril's website at www.atril.com. You'll see the two links on the right of the page in the section called "Training", as the screen shot here shows.

This CAT tool is worth taking a look at despite the fact that the translation market appears to be dominated by various products made by SDL plc. In fact, if you looked behind the scenes at the software tools we translators use, you'd find that many of us are actually employing CAT tools that are not SDL's, but are compatible to them – and often more convenient to use (many of them are less expensive, too).

What matters at the end of the day is that customers get the translations they request in the file format they ask for and that using other tools to achieve these aims doesn't cause them any extra work. Déjà Vu is one of these compatible alternatives. It has some ingenious features that can help you translate texts faster and produce work of a more consistent nature. It is capable of tapping several external machine-translation engines and also works well in conjunction with speech-recognition software, which means you don't need to use the keyboard or mouse all the time. (With a bit of practice, you can even work at a higher speed.)

Hope you find the preview interesting.

Regards,

Carl

images: courtesy of Atril