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12/21/2010

How to filter a term view in Multiterm 2009

12/01/2010

TIPS: Dropbox (in Spanish)


I found a very good article in Spanish with simple tips about Dropbox:
Dropbox es de una esas aplicaciones que la empiezas a utilizar para una cosa y terminas dándole infinidad de usos prácticos. Como le eches un pelín de imaginación puede cambiarte por completo las rutinas de trabajo. Y cuando además de ti hay otras personas involucradas (trabajo en equipo), el cambio puede ser tremendo... READ MORE

11/23/2010

Problems with Multiterm

While working with a client we had a problem making multiterm work. We were trying to open a Termase and as soon as we tried to do so we were getting the messsage: "error in getting COM class fabric for component with CLSID {5EE7FC2F-BE14-4979-AF01-76271D7EE291}, error 800736b1". In some other machines we were getting the message: "A connection to SDL Multiterm Server unknown could not be established". We were working in windows xp machines with very good characteristics and after some reading we realized we did not have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update installed. All we had to do was to install the package from here and we were up an running right away. It is less common but sometimes you might also lack the 2008 runtime update, which you can get here. It seems you might be able to solve some other problems that may arise with Studio, so it is better to check you have them both.

11/18/2010

Wordfast launches Wordfast anywhere

A few days ago Wordfast launched their internet-based CAT tool application. This is no doubt a step towards this sky full of clouds (if you know what I mean) but at a first glance a very simplistic one. One thing we can say in favor of Wordfast is that they are consistent with their old look, keeping their old followers safe from the riddle of nowadays features-packed CAT tools. One thing we can say against them is that they just keep the pace in the industry, provide no great breakthroughs and really need some help with the design of their interphase. Of course, at some point we could say that the simple the better, but I would say that I'd rather keep it simple and go a little complicated every now and then, but still have the option, than just having to stay simple. The new tool promises to be free of charge, asks for not many details to create an account, and will run from almost any internet-enabled device. This last promise is perhaps the most interesting one. In this days of mobility frenzy, the promise to take care of that urgent translation in the middle of the traffic while heading downtown seems like gold to me. Maybe you can't progress that much, but sometimes a little progress is gold. Picture yourself in the backseat of that taxi, coming back from that downtown meeting you reluctantly attended. You could just take your iPad out of your portfolios and start taking advantage of the time. This is what in my opinion gives value to their offer. The tool is free, so no matter what you use, SDL Trados, Alchemy Publisher, or any other CAT tool, you could just work there, export your TM and then just import it into your local TM. An ideal scenario would be as follows for me (this is only in theory, I will carry out the tests and publish them soon):
You get out of your meeting, rush into a cab and find yourself trapped in traffic trying to find yourself something to do. Suddenly you remember, you are the "proud" owner of an iPad with a 3g connection, you take off your jacket, roll up your sleeves, and get down to work. First you use your logmein connection to get into your iMac at your office, find this urgent file, connect to Wordfast anywhere, upload it and have it ready. Then you just open the Wordfast anywhere website on your iPad and start working. In the middle of your journey through the traffic you get a call and get a request to meet someone else not far from your actual location. You get off the cab, look at your watch and realize you still have almost 2 hours before the meeting takes place. You rush yourself to a Starbucks order a very nice caramel macchiato (you need the sugar right now the calories won't hurt that much), a turkey breast panini and sit in a nice coach to cool down and keep translating with your IPad and your online application. After the 2 hours are gone you rush to your meeting just around the corner, chat with your client, realize this could just have been a phone call, and hit the road in the yellow car again. Unfortunately for you it is rush hour again, but this time you are ready to face it, getting "comfortable" on the back seat of the cab, you wear your headphones, look for some soothing music in your iPod application in the iPad, open the Anywhere website and keep translating. By the time you get out of the traffic it is so late that getting to the office will just be a waste of time, so you decide to just get home. When you arrive home, all you want to do is unwind from the craziness of the day and comfortably sit in your veranda to drink a glass of wine (ok you could also have a cup of Coffee if you think it is to early in the week to drink alcohol). You just take out your bluetooth keyboard, your iPad stand and comfortably sit to translate and enjoy the view (as long as you don't have kids going crazy because you just arrived!). Next morning you get to the office, log into your Anywhere, download your translation memory and import it into your favorite CAT application. How does this sound? It sounds great to me as long as the web-based application is responsive and reliable, as long as my information is guaranteed to be kept as private, and as long as I don't get caught in using just Wordfast, but instead have full compatibility with my current Desktop CAT tool. Well, we shall put this to the test in the next days and keep you all posted. In any case, keep enjoying that glass of wine or cup of coffee and let us do the hard work to provide you with tips and recommendations. Cheers!

11/02/2010

Towards a European Patent System

A very interesting post regarding patents and translation.

Important tip about word documents

Checking a document that a client of mine had problems to process in SDL Trados Studio I came to learn this:

When Word calculates line length and wraps text to the next line, it tries to break the line at a space or a hyphen--a dash. Sometimes, however, you may not want Word to break a line at a dash. For instance, dashes are used in telephone numbers, and you might not want a line to break in the middle of a telephone number. The answer is to use non-breaking hyphens instead of regular dashes when you don't want Word to break a line at the hyphen. To do this, hold down the Ctrl and Shift keys as you type the dash (this is the same as typing Ctrl and an underscore). Word will then not break the line at that point.

This hyphens are shown in SDL Trados as tags and can become very annoying so we decided to remove them with search replace before processing, as this will not show when translated into Spanish.

10/27/2010

Oferta para los traductores en México

Microsoft ha estado anunciando una buena oferta para los traductores en México. Pueden comprar un disco de instalación de Windows 7 en versión Home Premium y hasta para 3 máquinas por menos de 3 mil pesos. El disco lo pueden comprar en Palacio de Hierro, Office Depot, Compu Dabo y otros.
¡APROVECHEN!

10/03/2010

Translation conferences in the world

Here is a list of some of the translation conferences that will be taking place in the world, start planing and saving for those nice trips!
October 2010
6-8 Oct 2010 New Media – New Contexts, New Translator Profiles? 8th International Languages and the Media Conference and Exhibition, Berlin, Germany
9-10 Oct 2010 Crossroads II, Amherst, Massachusetts
11-15 Oct 2010 Chekhov's Works in Translation to German, Taganrog, Russia
14-16 Oct 2010 Shifting Paradigms: How Translation Transforms the Humanities, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
15-16 Oct 2010 Interpreting in the Age of Globalization, 8th National Conference and International Forum on Interpreting in China, Chengdu, China
15-16 oct 2010 Traduction et Ergonomie, Grenoble, France
16-17 Oct 2010 Plain English Foundation, Raising the Standard - PLAIN's 7th Biennial Conference, Sydney, Australia
18-20 Oct 2010 Computational Linguistics - Applications (CLA'10), Wisła, Poland
18/19-21 Oct 2010 I International Linguistic Conference, Warsaw, Poland
20-22 Oct 2010 Past, present and future of popular culture: spaces and contexts, IV International SELICUP Conference, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
20-22 Oct 2010 ScreenIt 2010 The changing face of screen translation, Forlì, Italy
21-22 Oct 2010 1st International Workshop on Technological Innovation for Specialized Linguistic Domains, Madrid, Spain
21-22 Oct 2010 Voice in Retranslation, Oslo, Norway
22-23 Oct 2010 5º SEMINÁRIO HOT – Hands-on Translation, Braga, Portugal
26-27 Oct 2010 W3C Workshop: The Multilingual Web - Where Are We? Madrid, Spain
27-30 Oct 2010 Annual Conference of the American Translators Association ATA, Denver, Colorado
28-30 Oct 2010 Mediterranean Editors and Translators (MET), Facilitating knowledge transfer -- through editing, translation, coaching, Tarragona, Spain
29-31 Oct 2010 International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting, From Reflection to Refraction: new perspectives, new settings and new impacts, Manchester, UK
29-31 Oct 2010 International Conference on "Music, Poetry and Translation", Barnard College, New York City, USA
31 Oct - 4 Nov 2010 The International Academy of Linguistic Law, Twelfth International Conference "Law, Language and the Multilingual State", Bloemfontein, South Africa
31 Oct - 5 Nov 2010 Association for Machine Translation in the Americas AMTA 2010, Denver, CO, USA

November 2010
1-3 Nov 2010 Translation and Interpretation in a Multilingual Context, First International Conference on Translation and Interpretation (ICTI), Bangkok, Thailand
3-5 Nov 2010 tekom Jahrestagung 2010, tcworld conference 2010, Wiesbaden, Germany
3-5 Nov 2010 10th International Language, Literature and Stylistics Symposium, Ankara, Turkey
5-6 Nov 2010 Synergise! 2010 AUSIT Biennial National Conference, Fremantle, WA, Australia
6 Nov 2010 "Image, Music, Text…?" Translating Multimodalities, Portsmouth, UK
6-8 Nov 2010 Sixth FIT Asian Translators Forum, Transtation and Intercultural Communication: Past, Present and Future, Macao, China
11-12 Nov 2010 Voice in Theater and Film Translation, Oslo, Norway
11-13 Nov 2010 LEXIS The study of lexicon across cultural identities and textual genres, Verona, Italy
15-17 Nov 2010 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics, Madrid, Spain
17-19 Nov 2010 NorDIsCo 2010 Nordic Interdiscplinary Conference on Discourse and Interaction, Aalborg, Denmark
18-19 Nov 2010 Translating and the Computer 32 Conference, London, UK
22-23 Nov 2010 Community Interpreting in Turkey, Istanbul, Turkey
25-27 Nov 2010 2nd International Seminar on English and ESP Lexicology, Alicante, Spain
26 Nov 2010 GlobE 2010 Prosody and discourse, Warsaw, Poland
27-28 Nov 2010 Diverse Languages for Diverse Audiences, 3rd International Conference on Applied Linguistics (ICAL), Chiayi, Taiwan
29 Nov - 4 Dec 2010 Spring School for Translation Studies in Africa, Stellenbosch, South Africa
30 Nov - 2 Dec 2010 Translation: Science, Art, or Skill? Amman, Jordan

December 2010
1-3 Dec 2010 5th International Conference on Multimodality, Sydney, Australia
1-7 Dec 2010 Action for Global Information Sharing AGIS-10, New Delhi, India
2-3 Dec 2010 I International Conference on Translation and Accessibility in Video Games and Virtual Worlds, Barcelona, Spain
2-3 Dec 2010 International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation, Paris, France
2-4 déc 2010 FRANCONTRASTE 2010 - Le Français en Contraste : Langue et Culture Francophones dans l'Espace de la Communication, Zagreb, Croatie
2-4 Dec 2010 Standardized Language Testing in Teaching and Research, Modena, Italy
3-5 Dec 2010 Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World, Leeds, UK
4 Dec 2010 English across Europe, Brussels, Belgium
7-9 Dec 2010 Translation: a World in Constant Evolution, Seventh Symposium on Translation, Terminology and Interpretation, Havana, Cuba
10-11 Dec 2010 Contexts of Language: How to Analyze Context? Helsinki, Finland
10-12 Dec 2010 International Conference on Interpreting & Translation ICIT 2010, Vlora, Albania
11-13 Dec 2010 Writing past each other? Literary translation and community, International Conference on Literary Translation, Wellington, New Zealand
15-17 Dec 2010 The Fourth Asian Translation Traditions Conference, Hong Kong
16-19 Dec 2010 International Conference “Role of Translation in Nation Building, Nationalism and Supranationalism”, New Delhi, India
18-19 Dec 2010 Translation and Interpretation Research: Global and Local Contexts, Hong Kong

January 2011
6-8 January 2011 Culture in Translation: Reception of Chinese Literature in the World, Hong Kong
6-9 January 2011 Narrating Others' Lives: Translation and the Construction of Transcultural Memory, Special session at the 2011 MLA Convention, Los Angeles, CA, USA
13-14 janvier 2011 Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction Technique: Des ponts entre le français et le portugais, Paris, France
17-21 January 2011 XII International Symposium on Social Communication, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba
21 January 2011 The Role of Legal Translation in Legal Harmonization, Amsterdam, Netherlands
26-28 January 2011 Rhetoric in Society III, Antwerp, Belgium

February 2011
5 February 2011 "Building Culture(s): A New Era in Translation Studies/ Construire la/les culture(s) : une ère nouvelle pour la traductologie", Toronto, Canada
11-12 February 2011 Rhizomes VI, Other Words, Other Worlds: Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in a Globalising Era, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
16-18 February 2011 V Congreso de la AIETI Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación, Actualidad e Investigación en los Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación, Castelló de la Plana, España
17-19 February 2011 Videoconference and remote interpreting in legal proceedings, London, UK

March 2011
8-10 March 2011 3rd International Conference on Language, Literature & Translation, Meeting the Challenge of a Globalised World, Bahrain
8-10 March 2011 Translation in Contexts of Official Multilingualism, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada
15-16 March 2011 Современная славистика и научное наследие Самуила Борисовича Бернштейна / Modern slavistics and scientific heritage of S. B. Bernstein, Moscow, Russia
16-18 March 2011 Archi-Cultural Translations through the Silkroad, Istanbul, Turkey
17-19 March 2011 Hegemony and Singularities: Orchestrating LSP, Dijon, France
24-25 March 2011 III Advanced Research Seminar on Audio Description, Barcelona, Spain
24-26 March 2011 Second International Conference on Interpreting Quality, Almuñécar, Spain

April 2011
2-4 April 2011 British Association for Slavonic Studies Conference BASEES 2011, Cambridge, United Kingdom
7-9 April 2011 Languages at War: policies and practices of language contacts in conflict, International Conference, Imperial War Museum, London, UK
8-9 April 2011 Monterey Forum 2011, Innovations in Translator, Interpreter and Localizer Education, Monterey, CA, USA
12-13 April 2011 Exploring the Theories and Approaches Used in South-East Asian Inter-Lingual and Intra-Lingual Translation, Seminar on Translation of South East Asian Languages, Penang, Malaysia
13-14 April 2011 Critical Reception of A Thousands and One Nights, Mafraq, Jordan
13-15 April 2011 Future in the Present: Public Service Interpreting and Translation in the Wild Wired World, 4th International Conference on Public Service Translation and Interpreting & 8th International Meeting on Translation, Alcalá, Spain
26-30 April 2011 Dialogue and Representation, 13th International Conference on Dialogue Analysis, Montréal, Québec, Canada
29 April - 1 May 2011 Research Models in Translation Studies II, Manchester, UK

May 2011
5-8 May 2011 Interfaces III, Canterbury, Kent, United Kingdom
7-8 May 2011 Expanding Horizons, Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) Conference 2011, Birmingham, United Kingdom
12-14 May 2011 1st International Conference on Translation and Interpreting Studies TRANSLATA 2011, "Translation & Interpreting Research: Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow", Innsbruck, Austria
13-14 May 2011 New Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Tarragona, Spain
16-28 May 2011 Nida School of Translation Studies, Misano Adriatico, Italy
24-27 maj 2011 Lexikografi i Norden, Lund, Sverige

7/24/2010

SDL Trados Studio Video

Translatorstraining.com seems to be avery good source of information and tools for the translator's community and in my opinion they are specially good in analyzing the characteristics of TM based translation systems in the market. If you are looking for a TM based translation software and do not know what to buy yet, go to their website and you will see very nice comparison and analysis videos for free. Happy translations!

7/21/2010

And it is proving worth

SDL announced the acquisition of Language weaver a few days ago, so it seems that statistical translation does work and does represent a very important resource for the language industry. The interesting part is that this kind of translation empowers the companies to reach other markets maybe not reached by some companies YET. You can read the article about the acquisition and hear interviews on the matter here. I'm sure you will find them very interesting. Still this is a topic that calls for a lot of analysis and discussion, so I will write a more detailed article in the next days.

7/13/2010

Problems with PDF files processing in SDL Trados

As you all know, processing files in PDF format is a whole world on its own. I personally hate PDF's but it is an unavoidable truth. It is argumentum ad populum that in most cases dealing with a PDF is easier by OCRing it than trying to convert with Solid PDF converter, SDL Trados Studio for translation, or any other tool. Still not all cases are lost and sometimes the famous pretweaking error can be caused by other factors. Go here to find one of the solutions.

Support for SDL Trados

I have seen that sometimes people get into trouble while trying to install and/or license the software, which in my opinion is just a matter of getting familiar with the way this particular software handles the task. So if you have problems on this regards please refer to this site

7/06/2010

CAT and Statistical Methods are again proving worth

Many years have passed now since we started hearing from this technological marvel called Computer Aided Translation -CAT- (although in some countries it is still to be acknowledged), and the best is yet to come. We have seen many companies come and go, others come, grow and stay, and translation memories (TM) have completely stopped being a luxury or just an aid to completely become an asset. On an even more foggy side of the mirror we every now and then see automatic translation (AT), which had a boom some years ago promising to deliver Star Trek like translations, and then fell into oblivion for some for some parts of our ever-growing producing and consuming society. These two sides of the mirror are frequently mixed or misunderstood in many countries, generating a total rejection in most of the cases towards CAT. I have been and IT consultant in the language industry (although some years ago that seemed more like a hobby than a job in Latin America), and most of the times I have heard things like: CAT? sorry, computers can't translate; translation memory? a database? that is making translation work even more complicated; or my favorite, oh yes yes, I know about CAT, I use word and Babylon, going beyond that is useless and expensive. Nothing further from the truth. CAT has generated a brand new way to see translation and an amazing tool to recycle and reproduce translation work, still, as with all technological tools, this is a double edged knife. If you reproduce trash, you will only get trash. If you have a bad TM management, usage, and maintenance then you are just making the monster of chaos bigger. In the same way, AT is not the ultimate tool, it is not capable of substituting a human being, and will not be in most of the cases still for a long time; however, it is a great tool to deal with some parts of texts, especially when there are short simple sentences, lists, tables, amongst other types of text. This two technologies have finally met in the crossroad and will take the next step together. We have recently seen many companies include the possibility to apply a TM and then an AT engine when there are no relevant results with the first one. Thus leveraging translation tasks and reducing work. Even with all this, there is still a lot of resistance in many countries to put this two forces together to make a huge difference.

So, the verdict would easily be that some selected gurus have grasped the whole potential of these technologies and are using and taking advantage of them, while the rest of translators are still fighting with their Windows Me, or Vista (they were identically bad to me), trying to understand the new distribution of the elements in the awkward office ribbon that substituted the traditional menus, hoping to migrate to MAC for a better land of stability, learning to blog, tweet, use the Proz website, subscribe to forums, synchronize calendars, and a long long list of etceteras.

When amidst this craziness, another breakthrough in technology catches us uncovered, machine translation using statistical analysis seems to have finally evolved to start growing and being a useful tool. But what is the difference between old fashioned AT and ST? well, mainly that instead of only following certain rules to translate it compares thousands of translations between two languages and makes a "best guess". And this is where CAT and AT meet, because there is no better source of material to compare than a well segmented and populated translation memory.

The ongoing project on this regards (called SMART) will no doubt impact CAT and the language industry, but for obvious reasons (and some fear) it will impact the social stratum before the commercial one. Still, convergence between these two strata is not difficult to find. For example, a well organized translation department in a company which has been producing high quality TMs could use them to feed their internal ST engine, which could deliver in turn, with an end-user interface, quick "high quality translations" to end users that just need to know the essence of a text to move on with their work, instead of having to wait until the translation is sent, approved, done, and returned.

On the other hand, these systems are also used to retrieve information in very effective ways, so another interface could be implemented within CAT software in use to make a very fast research on each sentence and deliver pertinent results without the translator leaving his translation interface (if the software developers do I hope they give me the credit and maybe another job he he he). This interface could work in a simple way by retrieving statistically relevant information in the same language or by cross-referencing the original sentence with a TM, obtaining relevant results, then analyzing in turn the equivalent sentence in the target language to finally retrieve relevant information on this. Thus, the translators would have by the best-guess method relevant sentences to help them contextualize terms in a matter of seconds (omg I don't know if I should be writing or patenting this hehehe).

This all takes us to draw one conclusion, on the end-user side, technological tools are very important, useful, and needed by the translation community. Still, unless we want to go crazy and spend more time in configuring solutions than translating, we always need to choose those that are more relevant to us, that do not provoke a hazel in our desktop, and that are more cost-effective. While on the developer side, we need more resources embedded in one solution, TM, ST, AT, Glossaries, and autotexts (and all the others you can think about). Also, we have to be aware that this could make this solutions more expensive, but still, let us be fair, how much have you saved or gained by leveraging your work with CAT or AT? The answer, I'm sure, would be a lot, and even when I'm a supporter of open or even free software I have to say that I will put my marbles in the best bag. So be it, and may the best fighter win in this CAT solutions battle. In the end the only winner would be the final user. For more info go to GOV MONITOR or SDL Trados website
Licencia de Creative Commons
CAT and Statistical Methods are again proving worth by Rodrigo Vasquez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

6/24/2010

Some info about Mr. Becerra

Go to this link http://www.worldservicesgroup.com/members-locations.asp?action=pro&n1=1956

Congress update

Just a quick update, Mr. Becerra will be teaching a workshop at the congress. Quite an opportunity! So don't take to long to register, we have limited admission for the workshops.

Welcoming a new contributor

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm completely delighted to announce that we will have a new contributor to this translation blog, Mr. Javier Becerra, the best well known authority in legal translation in Mexico. He is author to the best dictionaries on the subject. Once more welcome Mr. Becerra!

6/22/2010

Amazing paper on translation and different realities

We found this very interesting work form a translator and researcher in Mexico. http://www.esletra.org/Jean_Hennequin.pdf

Translation congress in Mexico

ITICEX translation congress powered by SDL Trados Studio has opened registration for the congress and the workshops. Get your tickets on-line today.

6/17/2010

SDL Trados Studio in your Mac

We have been working hard for some days now doing a lot of testing to make sure we can publish about this topic. Finally we did it and hassle-free! I will publish the results and guide in the next days but we would like to know you if you would like to see this posted. Please grade the post with the options at the bottom so that we know.
Thanks a lot

6/15/2010

Great calculator for translators using CAT

We found a very nice piece of software Match Calculator, a freeware for freelance translators and translation agencies. The program helps the users of CAT software to calculate the amount to be invoiced or quoted with multi-tier pricing structure for repetitions and fuzzy matches. To get thesoftware click here.

6/08/2010

How to license and activate SDL Trados Studio 2009

Finally a good video about activation and licensing

Translation congress in Mexico

After 8 years of constant improving ITICEX finally comes to the international scene with the support of SDL Trados. Visit their website to register. I still need to see the program, but in general I have never been dissapointed by the warm feeling of this congress.

5/25/2010

More videos with tips and tricks on trados

http://www.translationzone.com/en/landing/studio-campaign/downloads.asp

Awesome videos with tips & tricks about for SDL Trados Studio 2009


Top languages in the world


Nothing like a goos interpreter

She interprets into 7 languages!

Branding yourself as a Freelance Translator

Please take a look at this very interesting article to very easily learn how to make your name a well-known brand.

Autosuggest in SDL Trados

This is maybe one of the best features in SDL Trados new software, it saves a loooot of time after you have been translating a long text and makes the terminology database a wonderful asset. Also, don't forget that Autotexts can now be created. Enjoy!

5/24/2010

English monolingual dictionary from Longman

A basic but good dictionary:

How to create a new project in SDL Trados Studio


We found some very nice videos for our users. Here is one to show you how to create a new project in SDL Trados Studio.