Christof’s Blog

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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Beginning on the 1 August 2006 the reformed version of the reformed German spelling rules needs to be applied. Only 8 years after the reform this reform is aimed to restore the spelling peace in Germany.

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Seems like earlier in July Unicode 5 has been released. Here is a bit from the press release:

“The Unicode Consortium announces the release of a significant update of its widely-used Unicode Character Database (UCD). The new version, Version 5.0, defines more than 99,000 characters for the languages of the world, and provides the detailed properties needed for computer software implementations. This latest level of the UCD contains all the information needed to update software to support the characters and algorithms that are the foundation for all modern computer programs — including the latest data for Unicode security mechanisms, collation, and locales.”

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It sounds pretty much like MS Vista’s delay has some interesting consequences. Even though SP3 has not yet been released, it appears that Microsoft is already working on SP4. Rumours have it that it will be released in mid-2007. It is supposed to be a massive update for XP, and one wonders if this is going to be the last one Windows XP before Vista hits the market.

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The commonsense advisory pointed this out http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/news/global_watchtower_one.php?wat_id=282 but it is worth a look if you speak German. Nike’s German site has been localised with a rather dodgy result…

When translating power point presentations and software strings, there are often character restrictions. If, for example, you translate a English source text PPT slide with bullet points into German or French, then you will have deal with the expanding translation. This usually means that after translation there is an additional step required, which means that you would have to view the presentation to check that all text still “fits” on the slide or if it overflowed the text box and parts of the translation simply does not feature. A similar issue can be encountered when translating GUIs - the English “cancel” is translated “Abbrechen” in German, which of course might mean that you have to re-size the button or the characters don’t fit.

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Just heard (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/support/endofsupport.mspx that Microsoft ends the support for Windows 98. From the 11 July 2006 there will be no more patches and security updates available. I wonder if that means that it will be more secure?

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All good CAT tools have ways to let you specify what text you want the tool to ignore. Of course you need this kind of function, because sometimes the client sends documents which contains stuff that doesn’t need to be translated. For example an Excel file contains columns or rows with structural data. Word Documents may include instructions or already portions that are translated. One way, of course is to simply not translate those portions and copy the source text to the target (if you do this, make sure not to send the translation units to the TM, because they are a bit useless). But since you usually have to quote for the job anyway, you’d have to fall back to the options that the tools provide. Trados, for example allows to exclude strings that are formatted in a particular style. So all you have to do is to create a style in Word (good idea to call it “non-translatable” or so), format all portions that you don’t want translated in that style, then tell Trados to explain the style (in the workbench go to “settings” and work your way through the interestingly named menu “Non-translatable Paragraphs”. Deja Vu has import options for each format. For example in Word you have the option to ignore hidden characters or for Excel you can ignore red text. So in Word you’d have to format non-translatable portions as hidden text or use red fonds in Excel.

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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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