Christof’s Blog

The Viacom-Google fight over copyrights makes one wonder about the issue of copyrights in Web 2.0 kind of TM tools that share TMs. Ligotek, for example, provides users the option to use their TMs privately. However, when testing the software I didn’t see an option to create a private index. I am not sure if that necessarily means that the index will be public, but it makes me think what TMs I can actually use without infringing on NDAs that I signed or - without infringing on copyrights.

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A student pointed out to me that Across is giving away its CAT tool for free to freelancers. I heard about that a few months ago but thought it was a satelite version - the kind of thing that all tool producers give away and which can only deal with projects that one gets send by agencies or other people who have the full version of the tool.

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Not everybody is going to buy Office 2007 right now, but many will need to be able to open the new file formats that it creates.

Microsoft offers a tool to help users of Office 2002 and Office XP to convert the new file format into something readable. Might be a good one to download when you find a minute…

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Who ever looked at the best statistic based Machine Translation (and Chris from LinearB is adament that it is LinearB) will know that their MT process strongly suggests a post MT human editing step. We also know that Google is using statistical MT for some languages. So put those two together and you won’t be surprised at all that Google now allows a post translation editing stage for their “beta” languages - i.e. those that are done by statistical MT (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian). So what that means is that you can suggest a better translation if the MT is not accurate enough or, for example, mixed up nouns or stuff like that.

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It always happens: you send the English to Chinese translation to your client and they come back to you saying that the document only contains squares or question marks. The advice to the client in such a case is to install Windows’ Asian language support (which, by the way, is very greedy on hdd space). It seems that this is now coming to an end: Vista has all language support files installed by default - which means that it should not only support Asian scripts, but also right to left scripts. I was about to say “well done, Microsoft”, but I am actually not sure how well they have done, because my Vista upgrade pack is currently “in the mail”, and I am actually not too sure yet, if I’ll install it, considering the history of glitches in the first release of MS OS. - we’ll see.

I just installed a new computer, which is always a good time to sort out software that is useful from the piles of stuff that I have tried once and which didn’t work. One outstanding one is still Enlaso’s Olifant - a TM editor for TMX and Trados txt files - it is just very handy and a great way to do some basic TM management tasks. So obviously it was one of the first ones back on my new laptop.

Besides that it is a quite anonymous site and that some of the links have rather old fashioned targets (like the CAT tool comparison), this particular page is rather cool actually. A list of more than 400 languages and dialects and (if applicable) their Microsoft language codes (e.g. en-us), MS locale id (e.g. 1033), the ISO two (en) and three (eng) letter abbreviations as well as the character set (Western) and the Unicode range (…well.. Western…)

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http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/survey/index.php

This has been going for a while but still runs to the 15 September - so if you feel like wanting to win something (and receive a summary report of the results) then off you go.

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Just came across an article by Sean Lee about Korean localization (with z) in the last Multilingual. One rather interesting item mentioned in the article are the Sun localization style guides which are available for download on the GNOME Localization site. Those guides are the ones that Sun provides the translators with (and obviously also some technical authors, because there is an English document too), but overall they are fairly generic so that they can be used for other localization projects too. The languages available are:
English guide to writing for Sun, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Not what I would call a compelling read, but certainly very interesting for any translator working in the field.

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This is a dream coming true - the Microsoft glossaries have been revamped and are now available as a CSV formatted download from http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/MILSGlossary.mspx

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