The latest Tool Kit contains a nice description and details about importing the newly-available
Microsoft Terminology Collection into the translation environment of your choice. If your tool does not support the TBX format, however, you will have to transform the data into the proper format (e.g. CSV) before importing it.
The Tool Kit suggests using the excellent XBench for importing the TBX terminology file and exporting it into a comma-separated file. It also warns that XBench drops the “definition” field which, in my opinion, contains very useful context information. So in this case I’d say XBench is not the way to go.
By digging into the memoQ user discussion formum, I found this useful tidbit of information by Denis Hay:
True, we don’t have official support for TBX yet, but just add ".xml" to your file, open in Excel 2003 or 2007 and save as Unicode text. You will easily be able to import that into any memoQ termbase, picking only those columns you want.
Excellent. This should solve the problem and make the TBX easily accessible even if your favorite translation tool does not support this format natively (as is currently the case with memoQ).
Another solution that I tried and found to be working flawlessly is using Wordfast Pro, which supports TBX out of the box and allows you to export an imported glossary to CSV format. Wordfast Pro is available in a free trial version, which has some limitations. I’m not sure if the free version will allow to import and then export the whole Microsoft glossary, but my guess is it will.
There are some recurring terms in software localization which do not seem to have a well-established Italian translation, even if their meaning is very clear and they should be treated as 1-to-1 correspondences.
One of them is “system tray”, a commonly-used term that refers to a “portion of the taskbar that displays icons for system and program features (…)”, according to Wikipedia.
On the same Wikipedia page, we learn that
The notification area is commonly referred to as the system tray, which Microsoft states is wrong, although the term is sometimes used in Microsoft documentation, articles, and software descriptions.
What this means is that the term “system tray” should be avoided in English documentation that refers to Microsoft operating systems. If found while translating, you may want to warn the author to change it to “notification area”.
If we take a look at Microsoft’s own glossaries, here are the results for system tray. The term is not displayed in the blue “Microsoft Terminology Database” area, indicating that it may not be an official Microsoft term. The in-context results displayed in the orange area contain several inconsistencies. The Italian translation that seems to be used in the newest products (Windows 7, Vista, Server 2008) seems to be “area di notifica”.
A quick search for notification area reveals that this term is also translated as “area di notifica” and that this is an official Microsoft term (contained in the Microsoft Terminology Database).
Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The aim of this study is to learn about the community’s perception of terminology management systems integrated with translation environment tools as well as to find out more about the approaches taken regarding their use.
via Use of Terminology Management Systems Integrated to Translation Environment Tools.
