Christof’s Blog

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…

Computerworld > Developer leaps data formats in a single bound
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/tech/3E50EF46C4655530CC25715700154A04

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There was this article on DW (which is short for “Deutsche Welle” - which is the international German radio and TV station - a bit like BBC but totally different..). That article (in English) points out that German is the single language mostly spoke in the EU (with 25%) compared to French, Italian and English with 15% each. Now the German government argues that there is no obvious reason why English should become the official language for EU documents.

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Are the days gone where language service providers would look critically at the client’s needs before deciding about an appropriate workflow? It seems that there is a trend for a new market: hosting translation oriented CMS and brokering translation requests. There is a challenge in this trend to keep the translators and checkers/editors in mind with your solution.

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SDL Desktop Technology has launched the SDL TRADOS Certification Program ( http://www.sdl.com/certified

this is very interesting. We can safely assume that SDL is not really heading into the “educational” sector too?
Whatever qualifies a translation tool manufacturer and Language Service Provider to become a certifier of proficiency is one question, but besides that I found it quite interesting to follow the developments since SDL bought Trados. One emphasis could well be identified in the increasing focus on more after-sales revenue. In the “good old days” you had to put up with whatever support you could get by your tool provider. Usually Usenet groups or yahoo groups of tool users were one good way of getting your issues sorted. Of course the tool manufacturer are right into those groups as it is a great bug reporting tool. Nowadays you buy your tool and a 1 year backup service (as if they expect you to have problems with the tool). The interesting bit is that of course SDL is a LSP too and thus on a certain level a competitor of every single translation industry client (freelancers and agencies). Of course they are not going to use their position for anything untoward. So if you are a freelancer, using SDL or Trados, and you have a problem with a file that you cannot retrieve from your tool, then good on you for having a support plan with SDL. Just send the relevant files to SDL and they will help. Never mind the admin data contained in your file, like client name, subject area and maybe even your whole TM. How much do you have to trust SDL not to use this information? Is this an argument for freelancers and agencies to buy their translation tools from other sources like Atril, or Idiom, rather than Start Transit or SDL (who are both LSPs too)? Is L10nbridge now going to review their abandoned tool sales activities?

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I came across this software localisation project and had to write up a few instructions for our Asian translators as they worked on a out-of-context file. I thought the hot-key issue was interesting, because the ampersand (used to define the hot-key) is handled differently for Asian languages. In the translated strings, the hot-key is entered it in brackets after the translated word (without a space). For example:

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A file is not a file and this is particularly true for files that can do more than displaying stuff. We all know that text written in text boxes can be difficult to detect for CAT tools - some never find it (like Trados sometimes do) and some double up (which seems to be Deja Vu’s problem at times). But do you also remember the last file that had a word count of 2000 but you didn’t see a single word - I’ve seen it all (not): hidden fonts disappear in the print-preview, text disappears behind text boxes or even the famous “white font on white background” failed not to impress.

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