2017 is coming to an end and we hope that you have had a happy and productive year.

The demand for professional translators and the amount of information that needs translating will no doubt continue to grow in 2018 and we would like to be your partner along the way.

To start the New Year why not download a free resource from our extensive library or give SDL Trados Studio 2017 a try.

Yours, SDL Trados 

At the end of last month Kilgray released memoQ 8.3, one of its quarterly "minor" versions of the full product. I had a chat with Gergely Vándor, memoQ's Product Designer Team Leader, about the update and how it fits into the overall strategy (you can read a review of the previous version in edition 279 of the Tool Box Journal).

This surprised me the most as I was talking to Gergely: The term "machine translation" is nowhere to be found in the new and improved feature list (see here). Clearly this is going to change again in the next few memoQ releases, but looking and talking about this new version of memoQ felt like a breath of fresh air. Especially because one of the three major cornerstones of this release has to do with terminology. And to this I say: Hurray! (That rhymes!) Though I know (and you would likely agree) that many of us are not really exemplary when it comes to using terminology resources and tools to their full extent, we also would agree that proper terminology is important to successful translation, and that's particularly (and maybe somewhat ironically) true in the age of a heavier use of machine translation resources.

MemoQ's new push in terminology is two-pronged (and will continue in the next 8.4 edition): Unlike its competitor SDL Trados, neither the regular version of memoQ nor memoQ server comes with a full-fledged terminology tool. It does have a termbase feature but, unlike SDL MultiTerm, it was not built with terminologists or corporate terminology departments in mind. Instead, it is primarily targeted to the "regular" working translator who is interested in access to multilingual termbases and the ability to add new terminology on the fly as she or he progresses through the translation project.

The tool that is more comparable to the high-powered MultiTerm is Kilgray's QTerm which is a separate product. While QTerm probably never realized Kilgray's aspirations in the market, it is used by some high-profile users alongside memoQ server and, according to Gergely, is more and more used as a standalone tool for corporate terminology management that does not necessarily include its multilingual capabilities. You can read about some of the updates in the current version right here.

There you will also find information about improvements in terminology usability for the "regular" termbase module included within any version of memoQ. What I particularly liked here was an easy, one-click way to add context to any term in a new display panel at the bottom of the Translation results pane:

The term extraction module included in memoQ has seen some usability upgrades as well. Still not available -- and I'm not sure why -- is an automated bilingual extraction based on existing TMs or bilingual document pairs.

Enough said about terminology.

The other two areas of improvement include the browser-based WebTrans translation interface and connectivity with CMSs (Content Management Systems, i.e., the databases that hold the data for most modern websites and other publishable content).

The WebTrans interface can now load all rows of a translated file (often the Achilles' heel of browser-based translation tools) and offers essentially the same filtering capabilities as the desktop tool. Like any primarily desktop-based tool, Kilgray is aware that some of the browser-based competitors have managed to build highly usable interfaces and does not want to lose out on that front. SDL and Across are doing the same with their efforts in that area as well.

For CMS support, memoQ has taken the second of three (planned) steps. memoQ's last version fully supported the XLIFF files of WordPress, the most popular CMS by far for smaller to medium-sized sites. The 8.3 version now offers full connectivity to WordPress so you can pull content out, push the translation data back into the WP database, and have the project manager manage the process in between.

Considering that WordPress has more than half the market share among CMSs, this is clearly good news, but it doesn't mean there aren't many others to support. This has been a long-standing problem for makers of translation environments: How do you justify the expensive development of a dozen or more well-built connectors to content management systems? This is why solutions like Clay Tablet and Beebox, which build middleware between the CMS and the translation environment, entered the market -- but at least the former of the two has gone very quiet since it was acquired by Lionbridge a few years ago.

Some tools, like Memsource, Smartling, and XTM Cloud, offer support for a relatively wide range of CMSs (click the respective links to see which systems are supported), but memoQ has decided to go another route. After having now finished the full WordPress connector, the next step will consist of building the "framework" to allow third parties or CMS developers to develop their own connectors. My logical question to Gergely: Is this going to be in the form of an app store where connectors can be shared or maybe even sold? Nah -- not really, he said. Kilgray might offer some platform to exchange these connectors but not a real app store, at least not for now.

(If you'll bear with me: WHY NOT?? I think SDL's app store has been one of their smartest moves in the last few years. It allowed them to focus on what they thought was essential to their tool while creating some excitement around new apps without bloating their tool with features that are only used by a handful of users. I wish other companies would follow that model. Admittedly, you have to have a large enough user base to make this worthwhile, but if there is any company aside from SDL for which that is true it would indeed be Kilgray.)

Anyway...

The above really is only part of the story for the memoQ server CMS support because there's also a third-party tool that integrates with it. In edition 256 of the Tool Box Journal, I wrote about iLangL, a smallish and very agile company specializing in building connectors between translation environments and CMSs. They have already built an interface for Memsource and MultiTrans TMS and now also for memoQ.

I caught up with Sergey Yuryev, iLangL's CEO, who told me that the memoQ integration is "a really big thing for us" and that the "memoQ extension is more application than connector."

That makes sense because it gives access to individual and customized connectors to DNN, Drupal, EpiServer, Sitecore, Umbraco, WordPress, and -- in the next release -- SharePoint. The tool allows you to export content from any website into memoQ server and distribute translations to translators all the while tracking ongoing projects on a dashboard.

Note that you will not only need to purchase a license for the iLangL app per CMS connection but also the memoQ Web API license -- just as you would if you connect tools like Plunet, XTRF, etc. (and then you have to coordinate everything so it plays nicely together).

Santa together with the AIT team bring early holiday joy to hardworking translators.

translation3000.com/aitpn/557-41.html 

Get ExactSpent 3D (new!), AnyCount 3D, TO3000 3D, and Projetex 3D all at 50% off! Valid until January 7, 2018.  

With Best Greetings,
Your Team at Advanced International Translations. 

• TranscreationKA: I blog primarily because I enjoy writing. It offers good practice for creative translation work. As a marketing tool, I find it works best if I do not write directly about translation. The minutiae bore clients. You have to be more artful.
• Claire_Cox16: Interesting question. I think a lot of people started a couple of years ago, but underestimated the commitment and content required to keep going on a regular basis....
• Kevin_Hendzel: As content has migrated to webcasts of dubious content, there is a lot of junk now marring the field. It turns out that writing really does hone an argument, and just babbling incoherently by free association is not a viable content distribution model.
• Kevin_Hendzel: Successful blogs on the translation industry have always required that the writer have something interesting, new or insightful to say. They remain the chosen venue for essays that pass the test of time, and can be cited or linked to. The best writing survives in that domain.
• RoseWroteThis: I stopped blogging for a long while because I got incredibly busy with work (still am; it's an ongoing situation) and felt there wasn't much point when people were more interested in the instagurus. I got turned off the industry for a little while, too. I will be back, though...
• RoseWroteThis: I'm not sure we all see it as a marketing tool. Aside from SEO benefits of being shared, it's not beneficial to people who are considered expensive and don't work with agencies/colleagues. Having a name among translators means nothing to the people paying me.
• andricsek: Blogs should be written for clients, not for colleagues in the industry. Have a name among clients :)
• J_A_Schuster: Well, @nikki_graham has a nice blog post regarding this issue. Blogging is definitely not an easy marketing tool, as many had assumed. A badly written, rarely updated or abandoned blog is not a good thing to have.
• TimG_translator: I blog intermittently - but for me it's not marketing (!!). Primarily a means of self-expression and mental stimulation. Not keen on all the stuff around blogging which seems designed to turn it into a chore/source of guilt.
• AnneMHargreaves: No time! Ours has lapsed.
• integlangsbiz: A few things, I think. Most #xl8 blogs really weren't/aren't that client-friendly, most of the community content is now on Facebook, and perhaps the rise in conferences and biz skills are taking up lots of time. My 2p.
• integlangsbiz: I would love to blog more but just don't have time!
• NTceline: Personally, it is because I caught the golf bug (complete with blog!), which now takes up all my free time and more. Plus I do feel like I've said all I had to say over 10+ years.
• vertaaltnu: Many blogs are starting out of enthusiasm but it's difficult to keep them up when your work load increases. I tend to see blogging as a way of content marketing, blogging every second week. The quality of my posts is differing, but the frequency pays off: vertaalt.nu/blog/tips-blogging-freelancer-2017
• cariobana: I happen to have created blogs for entities and currently manage one. Even with 4 writers on staff and only 2 new pieces a month, it is hard to fulfil the publishing schedule. I prefer to curate. There's a lot of echoes out there.
• t9natno5: As a buyer of language services, in a niche and premium rate area, when doing a background check for potential providers, blogs rarely convince in making a choice of translator. Am more likely to look at a blog that has infrequent but in-depth posts, or addresses CAT issues.
• localization: "Alexa, 2007 called. Write me a blog about not using Google Translate and why English is Just Another Language". Twitter and Instagram easier, faster IMO unless specialist, niche.

As 2017 swiftly draws to a close, like many, I find myself looking back at the last 12 months and asking, "What stood out the most in terms of interpreting and technology?" What follows are four developments that stood out in my mind. The list is far from definitive, but each item illustrates how interpreting and technology interacted at different moments during the year.

Interpreting Equipment Providers Begin Developing Their Own Remote Interpreting Platforms

Over the past five years, multiple technology developers from outside of the interpreting space have launched remote interpreting platforms seeking to disrupt the way interpreting services are delivered for a wide array of use cases -- from dialogic consecutive in healthcare to remote simultaneous interpreting for international meetings. In years past, simultaneous interpreting equipment providers have watched these developments but done little to respond to them, probably because they did not perceive these projects as a threat to their existing market. In 2017, however, that changed in the conference interpreting space. In July, one leading interpreting equipment provider tipped its hand slightly to reveal it was working on a platform of its own (CongressRentalNetwork.com), and in September, another launched its own remote interpreting platform (Kudoway.com).

Why does this matter? Well, if the market leaders are developing their own remote interpreting solutions, they now recognize that end user expectations are shifting, and that they will have to adapt to remain both competitive and relevant as user demand evolves. We are that much closer to a tipping point where the way we provide interpreting services will fundamentally change, but more importantly, the way people meet and communicate will evolve as well. That said, it is an evolution and not a radical change that will take place from one day to the next.

Interprefy at the SCIC Universities Conference  

Kudos to the interpreting service of the European Commission (or SCIC, as it's known) for jumpstarting a discussion between the public and private sectors about remote simultaneous interpreting (RSI). At the annual SCIC Universities Conference in April, organizers invited Interprefy CEO and founder Kim Ludvigsen to speak about his vision of remote or distance interpreting before an audience of distinguished interpreter trainers convened each year by SCIC. The reception of Ludvigsen's presentation was cool at best and sparks flew during the Q&A session, laying bare the concerns held by conference interpreters about efforts to provide interpreting services in new ways. Ludvigsen's presentation and the ensuing Q&A session are available online in English, French and German here. The presentation begins at 5:56:20 and the Q&A at (6:16:30).

Why does this matter? Communication models are evolving and expanding. Face-to-face meetings are not disappearing, but new ways of meeting and conducting business continue to gain traction as telecommunications technologies continue to improve. More and more meetings are taking place online with participants scattered across continents and around the globe. Interpreters are being trained online. So why wouldn't they work online as well? One can take issue with Ludvigsen's approach to implementing remote interpreting, but not with the trends behind it. This is something SCIC recognizes and interpreters should as well.

Translating Earbuds

The idea of a gizmo in your ear that lets you smash the language barrier by communicating with anyone anywhere while listening to your favorite tunes at the same time is terribly seductive and makes for really good marketing hype. In 2017, Established tech companies (e.g. Google and Bragi) and multiple tech startups (e.g. Waverly Labs, Lingmo, WT2) continued to market their various flavors of in-ear technology as a revolutionary way to communicate across languages. Efforts to make speech-to-speech translation good enough for consumer use will continue, as will the incremental improvements in the underlying technologies like speech recognition, transcription, machine translation, and speech synthesis. (For the tech geeks out there, I recommend a great blog post by Awni Hannun called "Speech Recognition Is Not Solved," which takes a closer look at the multiple aspects of just the first link in the chain of technologies that makes rudimentary speech-to-speech translation possible.)

Why does this matter? Two reasons. First, the consumer market ultimately shapes the way our end users perceive interpreting and how it should be provided. Second, as I mentioned in my September column, at a minimum, interpreters should be aware of these technologies and understand the premise behind them, so we can intelligently explain the difference between what the gizmos do and what professional interpreters do.

As I write this column, a new pair of the Lingmo Translate One2one earpieces are on their way to my office from Australia. I'll be carefully testing them and reporting on my experience in the new year.

Strategic Partnership between Boostlingo and ProZ.com

In March of this year, Boostlingo and ProZ.com announced a strategic partnership to provide interpreters on ProZ.com a streamlined way to work on the Boostlingo platform. (for more info on Boostlingo watch this video from March.) ProZ.com is arguably the largest online freelance translation marketplace on the planet, and many of the translators on ProZ.com are also interpreters. This incipient partnership opens up a unique opportunity for freelance interpreters looking to offer OPI and VRI on their terms, allowing them to freelance for multiple agencies that also use the Boostlingo platform.

Currently, there are roughly 500 freelance interpreters across a broad spectrum of languages that have registered in the Proz.com system via the Boostlingo platform with new interpreters signing up each month. Interpreters do go through a vetting process before they are granted access to the Boostlingo platform to ensure they have meet a set of minimum professional and technical requirements. Languages in greatest demand so far are Arabic, ASL, Mandarin and Spanish. During disaster recovery efforts after the hurricanes in Houston and Florida earlier this year, the platform saw interpreted calls reach an average of almost 33,000 minutes per month.

Why does this matter? While not seeing a huge amount of traffic yet, this partnership between Boostlingo and Proz.com is effectively giving freelance interpreters the chance to control their own careers and not be tied to one VRI or OPI agency. As traffic on the platform increases, Boostlingo has a chance to create a true interpreting marketplace where individual interpreters will decide when they are available to work and what rates they would be willing to accept. Of course, this requires that there be enough OPI and VRI volume to provide work to all interpreters who log on, and there is a natural ebb and flow to the demand for interpreting services. But, in theory, when there is enough aggregate demand and there is a nearly friction-free way to supply interpreting talent, those interpreters ready, willing and able to work on the platform will be able to complement their other sources of work nicely.

Keep an eye on this partnership because its success or failure will give us an idea of how OPI and VRI will be provided in the future.

Bring on 2018!

Based on the evolving relationship of interpreting and technology during 2017, the new year is shaping up to be interesting indeed. I'll be back with more reviews and commentary on the technologies affecting the way we interpreters work.  

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.  

Cadence: at the Cutting Edge of Interpretation

The interpreting market is constantly evolving, with new customers, new technologies, and new modes of delivery. Join Cadence to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and discover exciting new opportunities to work, learn, and grow. 

Go to www.cadencetranslate.com to register and learn more.

Do you remember Worx? Chances are you won't. It was released at about the same time as Plunet BusinessManager, and like its competitor it was a translation management system for larger language service providers. But then it sort of ... fizzled. It had (and still has) a few customers, but it was quickly outpaced by Plunet and later also by XTRF. Now there seems to be some new life. Worx's owner LTC was purchased in 2015 by Alpha CRC, who are now updating and retooling it in their Estonian office in Tallinn (where they purchased SQA Partners in 2011). Alpha CRC has just recently been in the news with some financial losses, but Sabine Rinsche, Worx's product manager, assured me that these won't have any bearing on the ongoing work on Worx, which will include a full API and connectors to the leading translation environment tools. The release date for the new version 3.5 is next year, and I will let you know more once that has become reality.

The xl8.link URL shortener came under phishing attacks last week, so we had to take it down for a while to add some protection. That has happened and it's up and running again. Be sure to use that instead of the silly bit.ly and others to show you're a translator and proud of it.

AIT, the makers of Projetex, Translation Office 3000, and a host of other tools, have long had plans to combine many of their tools into a larger tool suite. You can see one such effort now with the latest version of ExactSpent and TO3000. The latter is the most widely used accounting tool for freelance translators, and the former -- ExactSpent -- is a little but helpful time tracker. Many jobs are time-based (and hopefully will be ever more so in the future), and it's nice to have a tool that tracks your time at the click of a button and is able to track several jobs simultaneously. ExactSpent has been doing this for a long time, but now it's possible to open it from within TO3000 and have the amount of time spent on any job automatically entered so it can be appropriately billed. Very helpful and (after some early bugs) it now works seamlessly.

And then there is DeepL. There probably aren't too many translation professionals who haven't heard about this neural machine translation on steroids, even though it still supports only seven languages (though that's likely to change soon). When it first came it out at the end of August, there was no way to connect other tools through an API (application programming interface). There was an unofficial API used by tools like GT4T, and a clever way of accessing data within the translation environment used by CafeTran, but now there is also an official API. A number of tools are using that, including MateCat and Intento, and now also Trados Studio through its app store. If you want to use the Studio DeepL app, you will have to purchase an API key from DeepL, and the bad news (for many of us) is it's only available for high-volume customers at this point. Smaller volumes can be purchased next year (I'll let you know when). But here's the good news: Jaroslaw Kutylowski, DeepL's CTO, has assured me (again) that data transmitted through the API will neither be stored nor used for training purposes. This means that, if you should choose to use DeepL's MT engine, you can assure your clients that your provider assures the complete privacy of their data. And that's really good news.

memoQ 8.3 brings about improvements in five main themes: terminology, integrations with content-management systems and other party technology, translation work, filters in memoQ, and memoQWeb -- the browser-based version of memoQ.

Find out more right here.

I mentioned the start of the "Language Technology Wiki" in my last Tool Box Journal and I will continue to mention it until it really resonates with you.

Its tag line is "Devoted to helping evolve the next generation of language technology with your help." I love that! Yes, there is going to be a next generation of language technology (and one after that, and one after that, and...), and who do you want to shape and create it? Of course it's you, and you, and me. (And, believe it or not, the Tool Box Journal is not read only by translators but also by academics, translation company executives, and developers, so they're all included in those "yous.")

Here is what I would suggest: Whatever kind of position or role you have within the world of translation, you will at some point during any given workday come to a point where you get frustrated that whatever set of tools you might be using does not work the way you think it should, or does not work at all in a certain way. (I'm not talking about bugs; I'm talking about badly implemented or non-existing features.) Or maybe there is just no tool for what you want to achieve.

The next time this happens, open www.langtech.wiki, register as a user (takes about one minute), look through existing topics and sub-topics to see whether this has already been addressed (if so, be sure to add your insights to whatever has already been said), and if it hasn't been addressed, add a new sub-topic (or topic if it doesn't fit anywhere else).

Here's a quick tutorial on how to add a sub-topic (not because I think you couldn't figure this out on your own, but because -- ahem -- I couldn't figure it out when I first did it):

• Select Topics in the header bar
• Locate and open the topic that matches your concern most closely
• Note the tags that are associated with that topic (you can find those listed right underneath the sub-topics)
• Type in a title for a new sub-topic in the text field in the lower right-hand corner and click New Sub-Topic
• Describe your sub-topic in the window that will open
• Click Save
• At the bottom of the page, you will see this list of commands:

• Select Tags and enter the tag or tags that you want to have your sub-topic be associated with (note that you have to type it exactly like you saw it when you looked up the tags above). This is important; otherwise your contribution won't show up anywhere.
• If you did all of that, your sub-topic will be displayed under the topic and other people can comment, etc. If it does not appear, use the contact command in the header bar to alert Tom, the administrator, so he can help.

Easy-peasy.

You might also be interested in scrolling through some of the existing content during the holidays (and maybe you could even register then so you don't have to do it when you enter something for the first time). While there is not as much data in there as there could be, there is already some interesting stuff to be found. Do you know, for instance, what TAPICC stands for and why this might be important to you? Check out the entry under "Collaboration" and you'll be the wiser for it.  

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