Translator's Shack

SDL Passolo Upgrade “Amnesty” for users of versions 3 and 4 of the localization tool

http://view.exacttarget.com/?j=fe6b15757761067f7715&m=fef815707c6c01&ls=fde911787261017572167173&l=fe911671726007797c&s=fdea1573706c017a7c16757d&ju=fe2e1578766406787d1270

SDL today announced a so-called “amnesty” upgrade for users of older version of their recently acquired localization tool Passolo. Quoting from the announcement:

We continue our offers with an upgrade amnesty for all the PASSOLO veterans, still working with PASSOLO 3 and 4: Upgrade now to one of our special offers such as SDL Passolo 2007 Professional for only €840 or $1,192 (instead of €1050 or $1,490). Get great savings with a 20% discount off our list price representing savings of minimum €210 or $298 and more, depending on your specific edition. Upgrade to SDL Passolo 2007, and:

Localize your HTML help files as well as many other file formats

Take advantage of the unique and fully integrated SDL Passolo and SDL Trados technology

Automate your localization processes

Increase your productivity and save time with great new features

Reduce your costs by shortening the process time and costs of creating multilingual software applications and related supporting documentation

Improve consistency by receiving direct access to existing translated content and approved terminology

And finally, don’t worry, SDL Passolo is still very easy to use! Hurry! Offer only valid until 30th June 2008!

However, as pointed out by Riccardo on his blog About Translation, SDL’s choice of the word “amnesty” will undoubtedly raise some brows.

SDL Passolo Upgrade Amnesty

Translate.Net

This software is a free multi-lingual aggregator of several on-line machine translation services, among which translate.google.com and Systran. The download and installation are pretty straightforward, but in our experience the interface was not very intuitive and the check boxes tended to be rather unresponsive. However, the software works well (if your expectations of machine translation aren’t too high) and fast. Here are some screenshots:

Paste the source text into the bottom pane. The “Services” tab contains the translation engines that are available, based on your language combination and topic fields (see further below).

The “Languages” tab contains all the language combinations available. The availability of any given combination, however, depends on the choices made in the next tab, “Subjects”. Not all translation engines are available for all languages, so your best option may be to select the subject first and then check if your language combination is available in the “Languages” tab.

The “Subjects” tab contains specialization fields that you can choose based on the type of source text you need to translate. Unfortunately, “Law” seems to be available for Italian, but if you select it the language combination becomes unavailable, so we had to stick to “+Common”.

After you’ve figured out your best options based on the language combination and subjects, click on the “Translate” icon on the bottom left corner. The top pane will contain the translated text delivered by the available translation engines. You may get error messages, for instance if a service is currently unavailable or if your source text is too long. In the screenshot below you can see the EN->IT translation of the Apache 2.0 license from the Google engine.

The excellent freewaregenius offers an in-depth review with descriptions of the program’s features.

Translate.Net home page

MemoQ build 2.3.13 available

The excellent MemoQ TEnT has been updated. Here are the links:

http://kilgray.com/memoq/MemoQSetup.2.3.13.zip
http://kilgray.com/memoq/MemoQSetup.2.3.13.small.zip

(The small download does not contain the .NET redistributable.)

Here ‘s the changelog:

Altogether there are 22 fixes in this build, the most important ones have to do
with RTF export (corrupt characters). The others include:

An error that appeared for some users when opening a translation document

Improved TRADOS compatibility of our statistics export

Typing Latin characters on Japanese Windows

More robust preview for very tricky files, and preview going empty after pre-translation

More informative error messages when importing a bilingual DOC fails because the DOC is not well-formed

100% is exported instead of 101% in TTX files unless the row is locked in MemoQ

MemoQ: Translate better, cheaper, faster

Translated.net Labs – Terminology Extraction

We all know how important glossaries are for making sure that a translation is accurate, and most of all, consistent. There are several tools for managing glossaries on the market, most of them stand-alone applications.

Terminology extraction is one important phase of glossary creation, during which the key terms for the glossary are selected. Until recently, this has been a lengthy process of hand-picking the most significant terms from the source documents. However, there are some automatic terminology extraction tools available. This is a simple, web-based tool that can be used from a browser.

In this example, I have pasted the Apache 2.0 license into the field. The service created a list of 12 key terms. This process could be performed for creating a glossary before starting a new translation. Just paste the source text into the field, click on Terminology Extraction, copy the list of results into your favorite TEnT and translate the glossary before starting the actual translation work. This glossary could be saved as a term base and/or reference TM.

Translated.net Labs – Terminology Extraction

Lingotek

This looks like a promising free service that seems to offer all the benefits of a good TEnT, but delivered through a Web 2.0 interface. Visit this link for a full list of features.

There is a short review about Lingotek on Translator Support.

One concern with this service, however, is that you cannot export your own TM’s, so if for any reason you have to switch your project to another tool, all you can do is export single documents in the XLIFF format. If you want to export the whole TM you are pretty much stuck.

The Tool Kit

A great newsletter about translation tools and the translation industry in general. Available in the free or premium version. Receive tips and information about the translation industry and details on common and not-so-common translators’ tools and services. Highly recommended. Quoting from the website:

A biweekly newsletter for people in the translation industry who want to get more out of their computers

Tool Kit comes in two versions:

The Premium edition, which costs just $15 per year, is the complete newsletter, packed with technical tips and tricks of the trade.

The Standard edition of the Tool Kit is a FREE subscription and includes at least one less article or feature than the premium edition.

Also, anyone who purchases The Translator’s Tool Box automatically receives a free year’s subscription to the premium Tool Kit.

The Tool Kit – A biweekly newsletter for translators