Christof’s Blog

I’ve never mentioned this before, but it had to be said one day: if you highlight text in MS Word and run a wordcount, the result will show the data for the highlighted portions. But this only works to some extend within a MS Word table: If you simply highlight a few words and run a wordcount, you’ll get the correct count. If your highlighting, however, includes a cell marker (or in other words - if you highlight at least one complete cell), then MS Word counts all words in the table.

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I am just writing an article using Word 2007 beta. While my prediction was that with the next Office version the binary .doc is on the way out, and in comes the flat xml format, I now begin to wonder about it: Word finally incorporated one-click printing to PDF. I hope that doesn’t mean that we’ll see an increase of PDF formats for translation. It is just not a good format for translation as it is not only basically to be treated like hard copy, but also it is very difficult to keep consistency within the document.

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Looks like Skype is heading our way in the language industry. They just announced that they linked up with an interpreting service provider. They provide translators in 99% of cases (for the 30 most requested langauges) in an average time of 45 seconds. The cost is US$2.99 a minute - which makes is more expensive than a interpreting service, but it makes it an interesting tool for “a quick call” to your Japanese customer to quickly check a detail.

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just saw this amusing article about the translation industry
http://newstodaynet.com/17may/ss4.htm - it almost makes it sound like learning a foreign language is the key to becoming a freelancer (though it says at the end that it is a bit more than that..) - but the notion that translation is something that students can do to earn a bit aside is pretty obvious in this article. Well… we do know that it takes a little bit more..

The news are going round that there is a now CAT tool on the market:

MemoQ: Free Download and Trial
Once you download and install MemoQ, you automatically receive two licenses:

* one for the 4Free edition without time limitation, and
* one for the fully functional Translator Pro edition, limited to 90 days.

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www now has gone past the beta stage and the search builder is quite a nice feature. Well.. it is still not google and “even worse” it is Microsoft…