Having done so much work for a large client in the travel industry with very (very, very, very) large quantities of translation, round-tripping almost sounds like a holiday. But it is not in the context of translation. It is actually right at the core of translation environment tools (aka CAT or TM). When confronted with a translation in any format, we always look at two items: the content and the file format and the actual formatting of each single word. CAT tools are poised to extract the translatable content, segment it into smaller portions and present everything to the translator.

ASK translation services acquired The Total Translation Company Ltd on February 1st. With offices in the Netherlands, Frankfurt and New York, The Total Translation Company Ltd has greatly contributed to the national and international expansion of East Anglia-based company ASK.
The managing director of ASK declared that this million pound deal is supposed to quadruple ASK’s Bury St Edmunds-based workforce over the next three years.
He is convinced that the combined resources of the two translation agencies would help the recently created company meet the needs of every marketing sector.

One of the issues with TMs that I found interesting are their different philosophies when it comes to terminology quality assurance approaches. While they all work in a similar way in supporting the translation workflow, the QA is a different matter. While translating, all tools basically help you to maintain a terminology list in (normally) two languages. The tools search the source text for a term that is in the list and then in one way or the other flag that sentence.

SDL has recently announced the release of SDL Translation Management System 2006 and SDL TeamWorks 2006, their latest global information management applications.
SDL Translation Management System 2006 stands out by its richer metadata support, the enhanced web services and its new capabilities for enterprise administration and integration, including LDAP for user authentication. Another plus is its interoperability with SDLX 2005.1, SDL TRADOS 7.1 for translation memory and SDL MultiTerm 7.1 for terminology management.

It is always when it comes to terminology management that I run out of time when teaching that electronic tools for translators course. It is such a shame, because the argument is so compelling: what are the tasks you spend most time on when doing a translation? Usually one of the most time consuming task is terminology research.

Following the latest collaboration trend in the translation industry, GPI started a partnership with ON24 Inc.
With an experience of over 18 years in the multilingual information industry, Globalization Partners International is a provider of software, website and documentation translation services. Together with ON24 Inc (a webcast and multimedia communication solutions provider) they have recently launched the Webcast Translation Services. These services include translation of registration pages, lobby pages, Power Point slides, as well as audio scripts with dubbing, captioning and hosting.

It pays to go back to those good old bookmarks from time to time to check if they have changed (wasn't there a service that does that automatically for you?). Looking for XLIFF related tools, I checked out Martin Wunderlich's site again on

TermsCafé is the new terminology data management tool released recently by TranslatorsCafé.com. Having 15,334 entries in 23 dictionaries in 10 languages, TermsCafé enables translators to manage multilingual terminological data easier. All data is stored on the TermsCafé.com server but one can both import and export data from his personal computer.
TermsCafé is Unicode-compliant and supports all widely spoken languages.

World's leading XML content creation and collaboration solution Blast Radius has recently announced that its upcoming release of XMetaL Author and XMAX will include bidirectional support for XML content creation.
This realease encloses the support of Middle Eastern languages (Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew) and it is directed to the organizations serving audiences in those languages.
Due to the newly introduced localization systems and through parallel and componentized authoring and translation, the XML-powered content localization projects enable companies to save both funds and time.