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This brings me to the two points that I'd like to make (yes, there is a point to all this rambling!):

• Subscription-based models
• Maturity of translation environment tools

Let's start with the latter. While Microsoft Office developers might be pitied for their "enhanced creativity requirements" when it comes to making a mature tool seem more so with every release, the same cannot be said for developers of translation environment tools -- at least not right now.

Ironically, there was a time when it looked different. Take, for instance, Trados 7. When it was released in 2005, its flagship features were better XML support and Indic language support. I remember looking at the press releases and wondering who would even consider upgrading, except for users with those rather specific requirements? Very much like the current version of Office.

That was a time when new ideas had just kind of stopped. Trados was really only competing with SDL's SDLX program (and maybe Wordfast) on the translation side and Idiom (now SDL WorldServer) on the corporate side; the refinement of the technology underlying translation memories had essentially halted; terminology management was just not used very much (at least by Trados users); SDLX had not released its QA module, which would push developments in that area: memoQ was still in its infancy; and the first cloud-based TEnT, Lingotek, hadn't yet been launched. Why bother, right?

Well, things are different today. Very different, in fact, and I'm so thankful for it.

• Competition has multiplied -- and not just by creating quasi-clones, but with new and creative technologies.
• Translation memory usage has been completely redefined -- from a database that holds rarely used potential perfect and fuzzy matches to a repository that can be used on a much more granular level for translation, or for single-language authoring, or to train machine translation engines, and so on and so forth.
• Terminology management has been simplified, resulting in much greater usage (and awareness of its necessity).
• Machine translation has become an integral part of the translation process in ever more creative and intuitive ways.
• Quality assurance is a well-established component of virtually all translation environment tools and is expected to be used.
• Real-time online cooperation within translation teams is supported by most tools, no matter whether they are browser-based or not.
• And talking about browser-based tools: New tools are almost without exception browser-based, and the "old" tools have started to offer the option of using browser-based interfaces right next to their desktop-based environment.

Cool, huh?

I know I've said this a million times, but it truly is a good and exciting time to be a translator.

On to the second topic, subscription-based pricing.

But let's make that a whole new article...

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It has increasingly become the norm to pay for software through subscription-based pricing. With browser- and cloud-based tools, the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model seems to make a lot of sense. Whether it's translation environment tools like Memsource, XTM, or Wordbee of your business accounts for web-based email, the idea is the same: you pay a monthly or annual fee determined by the number of users/accounts or other factors.

The benefit of these models is that they are easily scalable, meaning that you can upgrade or downgrade your subscription seamlessly and that you can also cancel them from one day to the next. Unlike a perpetual license -- the traditional way of buying software licenses -- where you pay a hefty amount upfront and you can use the software for good (or until it's no longer supported by the latest operating system or until a new file type is introduced that your version doesn't support or until the latest version has features that you or your client can't miss or ... ), the SaaS model may offer a better way of controlling your cost, even though you might end up paying more in the long run.

You'll especially pay more in the long run if it's for programs you don't use all the time and you just forget about your subscriptions. Maybe I'm an exception because I look at a lot of software for the purpose of writing about it and then forget to unsubscribe -- until I receive a notification that they can't charge me again because my credit card expired (after having already paid months and months or even more without ever having used it again). This just recently happened to me with "Export PDF," a terrible Adobe PDF conversion service that I tested once and disliked but paid for dearly after I forgot to unsubscribe immediately.

And then there are cases where you have a SaaS-based software subscription for a great piece of software that you're really happy to use once a month or so, but when you stop and look at it objectively, that one-time monthly use costs you exactly $9.95 (or whatever the fee might be). Not really a great investment. That happens to me every month with Moqups, a great tool for website and software conceptualization for which I haven't found a good free alternative, but which ends up costing me a ridiculous per-usage amount.

And then you (or here maybe I really should say, "I") have subscriptions to services like ConstantContact for distributing this Tool Box Journal, which costs you (sorry: "me") $200 a month and is really hard to get out of without losing subscribers (and here I should say "you").

In short, there are some real shortcomings to SaaS plans.

For the various technology vendors, of course, these kinds of software licenses are a great business proposition. They represent a never-ending cash flow.

In 2013 Adobe was the first major software developer to throw out perpetual licensing for many of its desktop applications and replace it with a subscription fee. The benefit of this is that if you use programs like InDesign, FrameMaker, Photoshop, or Illustrator just once in a blue moon, you can purchase the license for that month and unsubscribe immediately after its use. For translators, this holds potential interest because they can qualify themselves for projects that might have a minor component in which one of these programs is used. And that's especially true for those programs that typically used to cost something like $1000 for their perpetual licenses and were therefore only accessible to real specialists. (There's an important flipside to this opportunity: don't sell yourself as an accomplished desktop publisher just because you can now get your hands on InDesign relatively easily.)

As mentioned above, Microsoft has followed the same path with its Office applications. Investors are happy and developers are no longer under the gun to produce new features constantly since the software is always called Office 365 and Microsoft doesn't have to shop upgrades so heavily.

And we? As I said above, it works out OK if you distribute the five licenses to all your college kids (you might have to get going on that front!), but if you pay $100 a year for one single computer, you're paying a lot more than before.

Smaller software vendors have also seen some real benefit in this pricing scheme, and that's exactly what's recently been rubbing me wrong more than any of the other stuff I've talked about.

Here is a great example: I own a perpetual license for a tool to merge files (for example, to combine lots of Word, text, or audio files into one large file). It's called Twins File Merger and it works great for most file formats that I need it for. I actually bought a license a few years ago, but at this point the tool is free and you can just download it.

The other day I was looking to see whether I could find a more updated software for the same purpose that would support more kinds of files with some extra features. I found a SaaS solution called MergeFil.es. Looks like a good tool, but in its free version it's so limited it's virtually unusable. The paid version is $20 a year. What?? For the one time a year when I want to merge files, I'm supposed to pay $20?

There is a real misconception here that underlies this kind of pricing. I'm sure there may be people for whom merging is a daily task. For them it might be an acceptable deal, but for the vast rest of us, it feels outrageous.

Here are other examples (and I hesitate to write about them because I love these tools): the fantastic QA and search tool Xbench costs $100 a year (full disclosure: I was given a free license), and for the equally fantastic IntelliWebSearch I just paid 50 euros for a three-year license. Now, both tools also have an older and free version, so they have a good excuse for charging relatively large amounts for their latest versions. And I would not argue that these amounts are acceptable if they were for perpetual licenses, but for time-limited subscriptions?

I called this journal the Tool Box Journal to communicate the idea that the computer is like a tool box that should be chock-full with tools. Some tools you use all the time and some only once or twice a year. But because you know that the tools are right at your disposal, you can feel confident that you can manage all kinds of tasks. I'm afraid that subscription-based pricing has the potential to throw that concept out of the window. It's just not affordable to keep all those tools around anymore.

Maybe I'm the one who has to change his thinking. Maybe the shift I need to make is seeing the web as the actual tool box with all of its resources at my disposal. But the danger there is that we would need to start from scratch every time a tool for a specific task has to be found. And I don't like that.

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Before taking my summer break, I dedicated several columns to reviewing technologies that deliver remote interpreting services in new ways. This month I want to change focus and take a look at a new electronic glossary platform called Intrakit. (Yes, that's a snazzy little play on words. "Intricate" and "intra" and "kit") Built initially with practicing court and medical interpreters in mind, Intrakit is an app that is preloaded with eleven different topical glossaries (legal, medical, business and finance, weapons and ballistics, drugs, forensics, academia, fashion and textiles, government, tech, and industry), which are all fully available and searchable offline.

The idea of electronic glossaries is not new, and electronic reference materials abound. The problem is that few, if any, are designed for use by interpreters and most require Internet access and a laptop computer to use them the way they were designed. This kind of setup works well for conference interpreters who normally work in a booth all day. But what about interpreters working in the courts, hospitals or other settings where they are often moving from one place to another or even standing up while working and where dependable internet access is not a given.

Intrakit, which is currently available for both Android and iOS, was designed specifically to address these kinds of scenarios. The brainchild of Melannie Lopez, a Kentucky-based certified court interpreter and entrepreneur, this app puts thousands of terms in the palm of your hand in bilingual English/Spanish glossaries organized into the broad topics I've mentioned above.  

How It Works

Intrakit is a simple and relatively small app (approx. 50 MB on iOS and 40 MB on Android). The app has an intuitive interface and does not require large amounts of time to learn how to use it. It really is as simple as opening a glossary and using the search bar at the top of the screen to track down the terms you are looking for.  You can search within individual glossaries or use the "Global Search" feature to search across all eleven specialized glossaries at once.

Once you have found a term you need, you can tap on it and mark it as a "favorite," which then includes the term on a personal list of favorites that can be easily accessed from the main menu before or during a job. This feature is extremely practical and helpful for preparing that short but crucial list of high frequency or key terms for individual assignments. The favorites list can then be cleared and repopulated with new terms as you prepare for the next assignment.

You can also build your own glossaries with Intrakit and store them in "My Library" but you must type in terms one by one, which can be a little tedious on a smartphone. I'd love to see a feature in the future where you can easily drop existing glossary items into personal glossaries with just a couple taps of the screen.

One feature that deserves a hat tip is the adjustable font size. My middle-aged eyes are most grateful for the larger fonts. Each glossary has small +/- buttons at the bottom left of the screen to increase or decrease font size.

Room for Improvement

Although well designed and useful, Intrakit is still rough around the edges. After a few interactions with it, I found a few glossary entries with mistakes, mainly spelling errors, but this should not be seen as a deal breaker. The mistakes are the kind that I have seen creep into the personal glossaries of many an interpreter (including my own). If anything, they speak to the authenticity of the source material created by interpreters for interpreters. They will be ferreted out and corrected over time. This is not the fruit of terminologists working in isolation on the latest edition of a Webster's or Oxford dictionary, and that is a good thing because what's in the glossaries, is just what you need while working.

There are also a few bugs that are inevitable with the first iteration of any app. For example, the alphabetized side index does not always take you to the desired location in some glossaries, and there is a slight delay when the glossaries are loading on the iOS versions and when you use your finger to scroll through the list of entries. The folks at Code Switch Media have assured me that they are aware of the bugs that I found and that they are busy working on getting them fixed.

Future Plans

You can download a fully functional copy of Intrakit and try it out for seven days to see if you like it. Code Switch Media's current business model is to sell the app for a flat fee through an in-app purchase after the trial period. This fee includes all future upgrades. However, Melanie told me that in September 2016 they will switch to a monthly subscription model. All apps purchased before the switch will be grandfathered in and will not have to pay the monthly subscription fee.

The reason for the switch to a subscription model has to do with big plans in the works for Intrakit such as synching of glossaries across multiple devices and the ability to share glossaries with other users in the Intrakit community. Currently the app is available only in the English-Spanish combination. However, in the coming months they will release an English-only version with all the terminology of the thematic glossaries that will allow interpreters of other languages to begin building out their own glossaries in the language combination of their choice. I'll take another look at the app in a few months to see how those plans are going.

I applaud Code Switch Media's efforts to put out a useful tool for interpreters to use in their professional practice. Fact is, interpreters should welcome this kind of reality-based innovation by colleagues from within our field. I encourage you to check it out and support it, if it proves valuable for you. Otherwise, these kinds of apps will disappear and there will be little or no incentive for further innovation.

Intrakit is available now in the App Store and Google Play.

Do you have a question about a specific technology? Or would you like to learn more about a specific interpreting platform, interpreter console or supporting technology? Send us an email at inquiry@interpretamerica.com. 

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It's about the small British company Iceni Technology that specializes in preparing PDFs so they can be edited almost like a normal document in their own Infix PDF Editor. At its core, it's a tool that opens any PDF and lets you format, edit, or add text -- which is displayed in resizable text boxes -- and manipulate and replace graphics within the PDF without performing any conversion to another format.

Theoretically it's possible to also translate within Infix, but since you want to use a translation environment tool for text of any appreciable length, the tool also offered "CAT Export" and "CAT Import" features that allowed you to export the text elements into an XML format that could be processed in any kind of TEnT that supported XML. And translators took note. Kevin Lossner, for instance, wrote reviews on using Infix for translation in 2009 and 2014, and others took it upon themselves to contact the developers at Iceni and teach them what translators really want. And that's really where the story starts. Iceni listened. Infix PDF Editor's version 7, which was just released three or so weeks ago, has made definite and clear inroads toward making this tool an option that translators need to be aware of and possibly use. SDL's Paul Filkin made this very clear in his recent blog post and accompanying video on the tool.

In the newly introduced Translate menu, you now have options like Export as XLIFF and Import translated XLIFF because, as Iceni's Guy Bushnell told me, they only started to realize what translators really wanted after they started talking with them. The XLIFF file will be converted at the TransPDF.com site, which is Iceni's cloud-based part of the offering. If you watch Paul's video you can see how things happen simultaneously in the desktop tool and the cloud.

One of the reasons why this is important has to do with its licensing model, and it fits really well with what I mentioned in the other article about subscription-based licensing.

Infix PDF Editor comes with subscription-based licensing. It costs $9.95 a month, or about $100 a year. This might be a good deal if you work with PDFs all the time and have to process dozens a month. But if you're more like me (and my kids would plead with you not to take me up on that), you only run into a PDF file for translation maybe a couple of times a month. Ten bucks for those PDFs seems pretty steep, and the old perpetual licensing that Iceni used to offer for $160 would have been a much better deal (though you wouldn't of course have access to the latest version with its improved XLIFF conversion).

Naturally, the subscription allows you to convert as many PDF files as you want. However, if you deal with a PDF file only every once in a while, you could also use the free trial version of Infix, upload your PDFs to TransPDF.com, and then purchase them for 50 cents a page. Then -- and this is where the offer becomes interesting -- you could use the full set of Infix features once it's translated (Infix will recognize the purchased status of the PDF and unlock itself).

Now that we've talked about the licensing questions, what about the quality of the actual conversion? It's pretty good. Not fantastic, but you'll need to keep in mind that we are dealing with a pretty darn frustrating format. The files that I ran through as a test were relatively heavily formatted, and though I would have had to spend some time in Infix to fix them in the direct PDF-to-PDF conversion (with the XLIFF interim format in-between), it was certainly better than expected. Much better.

One problem is the PDF-to-PDF conversion. While this sounds great in general, I think it would be very helpful to also have the option to output the file into a word-processing format (RTF or DOCX) so the client can do some editing, proofreading, or whatever with the file as well. Kind of a no-brainer, I think, and Guy has already started to work on it.

The other is that, while Infix does have an embedded optical character recognition (OCR) engine -- by Nicomsoft -- for about 20 Latin and Cyrillic languages, it works (so-so) only on pages that contain only images (so no mixing of some textual elements and images), and as far as the conversion for translation, it does not work at all. So there is some definite room for improvement right there.

By the way, the tool's user interface comes in a number of languages, but unfortunately the documentation comes in English only -- with a Google Translate button at the bottom of each page. Ouch. Not really a way to catapult yourself into the hearts of translators, but maybe I'm just being nit-picky now.

It is awesome that Iceni is planning for a number of integrations into translation environment tools. The development of an SDL Trados plugin will be launched soon, they've done what needed to be done for an integration with memoQ (and are now waiting for Kilgray to do its part), and another yet-to-be-named TEnT will have it fully integrated in its next release.

Guy made an interesting comment about the different ways of integrating into the tool: "It's nice that with SDL we'll actually be able to do it all ourselves and won't have to rely on the release schedules of others!"  

Yes, I'm being a little facetious. I've always had a strong dislike for terms like l10n or i18n, but that did not dissuade me from looking at l10ntrain.com or Localization Training and liking what I saw.

I've talked about the project with Martin Güttinger, one of the founders (the others are Angelika Zerfass and Gary Lefman, all three of whom are super-experienced l12s -- aka localizers -- as well as two unnamed silent partners), and they have some very interesting plans.

But, first, what is it now? It's a platform (p6m) (okay, I'll stop!) that hosts a number of localization training and informational videos. The informational videos are mostly free (many of them are from Welocalize, describing their translation management system and machine translation efforts), whereas some of the training content has to be paid for.

I went through the training course on the latest version of Passolo, conducted by Martin himself, and I have to say that I was impressed with the high quality of the in-depth training and particularly with the challenging tests at the end of each unit. You actually have to have gone through the coursework to answer the questions rather than simply relying on common sense (as is so often the case in such video-based tutorials).

What does passing the test entitle you for at this point? Nothing, really, except that you can use it on your résumé, I guess, but it should really put you in a good position to work well with the tools or subject covered.

Eventually, and this is where we come to the future plans, there will be official certificates issued by Localization Training (2017), and ultimately there will be a way to become a certified localization professional on the site (2018/2019). The team plans to cooperate with other organizations and programs for this certification.

I asked Martin how much material they hope to have before they offer an encompassing certification, and he figured that there would have to be between 80 and 120 hours of high-quality content.

I admire the kind of long-term vision that Martin, Angelika, and Gary have for this project.

Some of you might remember that I partnered with Italian translation company Intrawelt a number of years ago to build up a site called TranslatorsTraining.com. While the goal was never to offer a certification like Localization Training does, we also offered a large number of video-based tutorials of translation environment and localization tools that were primarily aimed at helping users make a purchasing decision by being able to compare the different tools without investing an extraordinary amount of time. The site ran for about two years and got great reviews from all kinds of people (it was really good!), but we never found a way to monetize it properly. Since we had to invest an obscene amount of time into keeping the site and videos current, we eventually decided to shut it down.

Hats off to Martin et al for having more patience and vision. I hope they will succeed. Be sure to check it out and continue to come back to see what's new. 

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