Christof’s Blog

I just had a post Christmas Google search on “translation workflow” (http://www.gala-global.org/blog/?p=16)- (I wish I’d knew what drove me doing this on such a sunny day here in the Waikato). However, it looks like there is a brand new blog on GALA about the topic of sourcing a translation workflow either from the shelve or building a custom-made one. Not much has been posted to this blog yet. One comment basically says that although there is a lot on the work-flow side of things, the integration of budgeting, supplier selection and invoicing (including controlling) is lacking in off the shelve products. That particular commentator mentions as best know tools LTC Organizer, SDL WorkFlow, TRADOS TeamWorks, and Idiom WorldServer and to a lesser extend open-project[ and Across. Interestingly Office 3000 is missing in that list - which concentrates on the book-keeping side of things.

Read the rest of this entry »

I felt reminded of the days when I stared for days at the “very big” client file thinking how we can possibly translate this. One of the problems was to figure what was there to be translated and what was not (we had to find the 1.2 million words in a 3 million word documents). Anyway - this Excel file today was a bit like that. A list of God-knows-what - about 140,000 words are there besides all the admin data. Obviously a lot of repetition. After creating a DV project (which took a while) I learned that there are 56290 words to translate in order to do this job. Unfortunately other tools didn’t deal with the file, so there was no comparison. However, there were a few problems with the source file: I found some English, French and German source text scattered in the file and (more importantly) the text seemed somewhat incomplete.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you deal with a TM delivered to you as a 47MB csv file? Well - of course you open it (using MS Excel). That doesn’t really work because it obviously has more than 65536 rows (and if it opens there’s nothing to see because it doesn’t t have the correct character page anyway). So what about importing it into DV (thinking that is the easiest to create a TMX). That worked well for 6 hours but then DV collapsed (though it imported about 1/3 of the file (maybe just around 65536 rows?). Next try is MS Access - which worked fine - but then what?

Read the rest of this entry »

A good online tools seems to be exegenix (as pointed out by Jos). I’ve tried one of my favourite pdf2word conversions (a long, long manual which we received and had done without CAT tool support - which was a pain back then, because the client didn’t bother about layout anyway (he did his own final DTP work) but he gave us another version later which would have had huge repetitions and matches if we have had the first one done in a CAT tool. But even aligning those files was a pain because the PDF conversions were so bad. Ecegenix would have been a solution for this – it creates a very nice and useful xml and even copes extremely well with segmentation problems. Certainly a good way to convert PDF to XML to build up a TM or a CMS (enough abbreviations for today)

I remember vividly a discussion about if a scanner is an essential part of the “translator’s workstation”. Back then, the answer was – “sure, why not, but don’t expect to much”. The idea was: if I scan a hard copy, then I don’t have to spend time re-creating the layout and I can work by over typing the word document (or can do it with my CAT tool).

Read the rest of this entry »