Christof’s Blog

What are 100% and fuzzy matches – and how would we charge for it?

We all know duplicates – which are sentences which appear more than once within a text. If a translator has a CAT tool, she only has to translate duplicates once and it will be “propagated” through out the text.

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I keep saying this when ever MT comes up: it is not all evil and it is (at least in my view) not a threat to human translators. Look at it from this perspective: the volume of translation required has been increasing like mad since the advent of the internet and spam mail. Being an old philosopher myself, I know how long it can take to read one chapter of a book - so I can not imagine that there are not enough people to read all the content that has been put online on the net. But maybe there are enough companies that think that putting their stuff online in different languages will do their sales good (and they are most likely right). So if you sell you product in a foreign market, you need quite a range of translation services. In that scenario there is enough volume that needs to be done by human translators who know the target culture. But there is also enough content that, if written smartly, can be translated at least using MT to support a human translator.

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Most of the technical pain with FrameMaker translation into or from an Asian language is definitely caused by the fonts. Although FrameMaker is a rather easy to translate format (thanks to focussing a bit more on content than on layout), it deserves raised eyebrows for not supporting Unicode. What you end up having to do is to map the western fonts to a suitable Asian font. What’s good for DTP people creates two problems for a translation provider: one issue you might get with special symbols that your client used (say for bullet points), which may be overlooked by the font mapping process. You often end up with “funny” bullet points or the occasional strange looking character in you publication. The other problem is that you might need translate the whole book if you want to get cross-reference right.

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Sorry for the grammatical blunder in the header - but that song struck me this morning - tough luck. Anyway - I’ve talked before about how MS Word counts words - or to be more exact: how it doesn’t count words but the spaces between the words - or to put it very correctly: MS Word counts how often in a document there is a character or a string of characters followed by a whitespace. Given that MS Word is the mostly used software by clients of translation, you kind of want to be close to their wordcount when you quote for a job.

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I maintain that one of the most under-rated advantages of CAT tools (aka Translation Environment tools) is that they take care of the source text format. My feeling is that the spread of XML will give increasing urgency to this point. The reason for this is that XML has not only lots of options to store data, there are also heaps of options when it comes to publishing this data. One of which is html.

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Enlaso created quite a suit of open-source translation environment tools which are free to use. My favorite over the last few months has been Olifant’s Beta release. Olifant is a TM maintenance and management tool for TMs in tmx, Trados and WordFast txt files and Olifant TMs. So that means that you can also open, say, a TMX TM and convert it for import into Trados. When open, the TM is displayed side by side and you can easily manipulate single entries. Like Deja Vu’s TM maintenance, Olifant offers a wide range of filtering functions. There is a range of preset selections that allows to flag entries according to a (like “entries with duplicate Source” or “Where source is the same as Target”). There is also a SQL query option - which powerfully extends the flagging function. A simple, functional and very useful tool and my first choice for non-Deja Vu translation memories

Last week I asked a few translation students how they would actually “do” a translation of a text in a word document. One standard answer is to create a copy of the original file (to make sure you don’t loose the source text) and then to over type the original text. Another student said that he would open an empty target document in a new window and then arrange the two windows next to each other. Office 2003 actually has a very clever way of automatically arranging the windows on mouse-click (select Window -> Compare side by side with…,).

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Belated by 6 months, the US Department of Justice decided to investigate the “merger” as part of which SDL International bought Trados. According to Mr Lancaster, the CEO of SDL, he wasn’t aware of the investigation - and actually the delay suggests that it is not really a high priority with the Department.

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Recently I found a bit of a “strange” translation in a TM while I was doing some database maintenance. My eye only fell on it because the name of a cartoon character was mentioned - which seemed pretty surprising to me as I was working on a TM of a client in the financial sector. The translation was actually a good laugh (a script of a cartoon movie). Besides having this strange feeling that I just saw something that wasn’t meant to be seen by my eyes, I actually didn’t think anything more about it. At the end of the day it turned out to be just a few fragments of a job which the translator must have done (by accident I assume) with the TM we used for this client.

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xinhuanet and a few other Chinese papers ran a story about the Chinese translation and interpreting industry.

The main issue is this:
The translation industry employs around 500,000 people, including retirees, college students and returnees from overseas universities who work as freelancers. But only 60,000 professional translators can produce accurate translations from Chinese into a foreign language, according to Wang Xin, an official with the Training Center of the China International Publishing Group.
China currently has nearly 3,000 registered translation firms with more than 400 in Beijing, according to the Translators Association of China. But many of them are “briefcase companies” with only a telephone, a computer and one or two full-time employees. The part-time translators and interpreters they hire are not always qualified.

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