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1. The Many Uses of AI
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| I have not written about Memsource for a while (you can find earlier reports in editions 265, 262, 257, 240, 208 and 201) even though I really appreciate both the tool and the people behind it. And I'm not the only one, it seems -- the company has grown to 70 employees (including 30 engineers), a growth that has been spread throughout Asia (in particular Japan), Europe, and North America. Today I would like to concentrate on only one new feature and see how that fits into a larger trend. I know many of you are sick of hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) and/or anything neural in relation to translation because the assumption is that this is always connected with neural machine translation (NMT). Interestingly, though, there are many other ways that the extended computing capabilities presented through AI and neural computing can be used in other processes that are relevant to translation. Previously I had talked about Lilt's neural morphology engine and Smartling's quality assessment that is partly based on computer learning. Memsource has actually staffed an AI department to work on AI features for its tool. The first (and, according to CEO David Čaněk, not the last) feature that has been introduced is an AI-enabled, language-combination-specific recognition of non-translatables. According to Memsource's analysis, 14% of segments (and 4% of words) are non-translatable. Some of those are already caught by regular, rules-based recognition, but others are not (think of proper names or numbers that don't follow a predictable pattern of delimiters). It is those that the new feature is after, and once it finds them it marks them as a 99% match (I wish the percentage could be adjustable by the project manager). This has to be a language-combination-specific feature because, for instance, a personal name is a non-translatable in some language combinations but not in others (think "Bill Gates," which is an untranslatable in languages like German or French but becomes 比尔盖茨 in Chinese or Bills Geitss in Latvian). Presently about 500 language combinations are supported (of about 9000 that are used system-wide in Memsource). And the "system-wide" question brings us to another really interesting item. I asked David whether he is using all the data located in Memsource's cloud (Memsource had previously used the data for analysis purposes to find out how much machine translation is being used across the different users, for instance -- see edition 240). Well, no, he said, they're mostly using "public data" and only "some customer data." Why the change in policy? The EU's "General Data Protection Regulation" or GDPR is coming into effect May 25 of this year, and companies are scrambling to find out whether and how they can use their customers' data -- regardless of whether it's anonymized. I don't need to tell you that this is very interesting, and I'm very eager to find out what it means for other services, including public machine translation services such as Google Translate and Microsoft Bing Translator, at least as far as their European operations are concerned. By the way, this new feature is presently available only in the "Ultimate" edition of Memsource, but it will be implemented for all editions in a few weeks. |
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2. The Counter-Cultural View: Too Much Work
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Sometimes I roll my eyes at my dear
Tool Box Journal subscribers ("Could s/he please not be one of the 25 who point out that one typo!"), but much more often I feel genuine affection for them (yes, you!). English-into-Japanese translator and reader
Dan Lucas
sent me a lengthy email shortly before Christmas after the last edition in which I talked about the demise of many translators' blogs. I'll quote just part of his thoughtful musings:
On the subject of your interesting write-up on blogs, I have often wondered how people find time to write as much as they do if they are successful translators. For the past week, I have been gently declining projects from clients in the run-up to Christmas. I currently have only one or two small residual jobs on, with longer deadlines, but the aim is essentially not to work for the week of Christmas itself.
I find it difficult not to work. I say this almost with puzzlement, because as far as I can tell I am not a rabid career person. Even now, at a time when I work only for myself, I occasionally find myself muttering the lines from
Larkin
under my breath as I pound away at the keyboard: "Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?" I work to support my family and, before I had a family, I worked to fund my hobbies and interests.
My best guess is that because I grew up in a family where my father and mother were not very good at careers or work, we were always a bit short of money and that left a psychological mark, perhaps an indelible one. I feel that I don't want my children to hear my wife and I bickering about our finances because we're short of cash. My approach to this as an adult has been to hurl myself into the fray and simply earn more money than I can reasonably spend, hence my two decades in international finance. That was effective up to a point, but I still need to work, which is of course no bad thing. It's a question of balance.
And so we circle back around to your comment about the disappearance of translator blogs and to your twin conclusions, namely that it is a consequence of (a) being too busy to maintain one and (b) of the realization that most blogs probably don't help with clients.
In my case, having taken a realistic view of the situation, it would be very difficult to commit the resources to running a blog without rejecting a decent slug of actual translation business. Here's a thought: are most people who maintain their blogs primarily successful translators, or primarily people who were once successful translators but who now mostly talk and write and give seminars about translation? If the latter, blogs might make business sense.
Because I only started freelancing full-time in early 2015, I am still in the process of accumulating clients, and have signed up several new ones in the past quarter. Even without a significant input from these recent additions, my cumulative revenues are up something like 25% year on year on a fiscal year basis, which I would not have thought feasible at this time in 2016 -- I thought I was already working quite hard. My time is increasingly under pressure, which is not really what I envisaged when I left the financial markets in 2013 to return to my hometown for a less stressful life.
I don't think there is any particular secret about what modest success I have had. I believe myself to be an averagely competent translator, but I have a decent knowledge of my subject matter, I deal politely and professionally with clients and potential clients (rather than writing blogs that sneer at them) and as a result, my problem has increasingly become too much work rather than too little.
Moreover, because 95% of my work is repeat business from clients I work with a great deal, turning down projects really does feel like a betrayal, and I almost never do it unless I have to. Hence my difficulty in trying to set aside time for myself, my family, and a little reflection this Christmas.
So, what I'm trying to say Jost, having meandered around the point for long enough, is that I'm facing 2018 not wondering how I write a blog, but wondering how on earth I fit together the existing components of my life in such a way as to achieve some balance with work. Hopefully it can be done through becoming more efficient and wasting less time watching YouTube and so on. If not, something has to give, and blogs are very far from my mind at the moment.
Against this background, I was amused by your tongue-in-cheek comment about our "dying profession." Yes indeed, as you imply, some of us are doing pretty well, at least for now. What I think would be interesting (and of course, whenever somebody says that, they really mean "What is looming large in my own thinking at the moment") would be a series of vignettes covering the topic of what you do when your business gets to the point that you are struggling to deal with demand.
I can only assume that many of you will appreciate Dan's perspective as much as I did and find it similarly encouraging.
Of course, Dan raises some interesting questions, including what to do with too much work, why (and how) people find time to write blogs, and why there is this common refrain in many fora about declining rates and less interesting work.
Clearly, I don't have all the answers, but here are one or two stabs at them.
Let's first address the widely held perception that rates are in freefall and good jobs are hard to be had: I think we are all (and that includes me) suffering from misconceptions about how wide and broad the world of translation is and, accordingly, how varied our experiences and therefore our perspectives. We tend to make statements or have strong feelings and impressions about what we experience or observe and assume they can be extrapolated to all. If you are dealing only with clients who are exclusively doing post-editing of machine translation, that tends to be the reality you equate with all translation. If you deal only with clients who exert a lot of pressure on price, that will become the one reality. And so on and so forth. That is also true for the flipside of the coin ("if you work only with clients who never work with machine translation" or "clients who pay premium rates"). What's different about that side, though, is that those kinds of jobs are a lot less public, i.e., they don't appear on translation portals, and there are a lot fewer public discussions with complaints about them (duh!).
It's a lot easier to make statements about a whole even if something is true for only a part of it. And if that's the only reality you encounter, it even feels sincere and truthful. (And it might very well be -- for that one subsection.)
Another section of the world of translation is represented by people like Dan: highly qualified in a subject matter, impeccable business skills, and, despite being relatively new to translation, experiencing enormous growth in his business. (And -- I have to say I appreciated this most of all -- without the need to brag about his translation skills!)
As far as the question about what to do about too much work, I asked for some responses
on Twitter
,
and if I hadn't included a typo in the tweet there probably would have been more responses (did I mention the curiously critical mind of translators/editors?). Those that came were quite helpful, though, and can be summarized like this: a) ask for higher rates and b) spend a good deal of careful effort to build up a trusted network of collaborators to whom you can refer clients and who deliver a good work product without poaching said clients. I will add another: Saying "no" to a client sometimes can be quite helpful since it demonstrates your desirability by other clients as well (or that you in principle don't like to work at night or on the weekend). This naturally isn't appropriate when the client is in a true bind, but it may be acceptable for projects you know have a longer deadline.
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The Tech-Savvy Interpreter: Review of the Lingmo Translate One2One Earpiece (Column by Barry Slaughter Olsen)
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| For this edition of the Tech-Savvy Interpreter, we're going to take a look at one of the first wearable, in-ear, speech-to-speech translation devices available on the consumer electronics market -- the Lingmo Translate One2One. These devices tend to create tremendous media buzz when first rolled out, with many heralding the arrival of the Universal Translator and an end to the need for human interpreters. But do these gizmos live up to the hype? You may wonder why a professional interpreter would take the time to review a wearable translation device designed for use by travelers. The reason is simple. No one, to my knowledge, has given one of these new devices a thorough review to see what they can do. Do they live up to their claims? Will they actually help people communicate? Will they put professional interpreters out of business? I know I get asked that last question over and over each time a new in-ear translator is announced in the media. If anything, the proliferation of these translation devices reflects a huge and growing demand for interpreting services -- a demand that the language industry still hasn't figured out how to meet adequately. I wanted to find out the answers to these questions for myself. So, in June of last year, I plunked down 229.00 USD of my hard-earned cash (thanks to companies that advertise with the Tech-Savvy Interpreter) and ordered a pair of Lingmo Translate One2One headsets. They were supposed to ship within a few weeks, but they didn't arrive until late December. This is the first wearable translator that I have reviewed. I hope to review a couple more in 2018. I want to be able to say authoritatively, based on my own experience, what these devices can and can't do and if they truly perform as promised. As they say, knowledge is power. This review is divided into four sections:
- How Does It Work?
- Product Design, Fit and Finish,
- User Experience, and
- Software Performance
Let's get started! How Does It Work? The Translate One2One concept goes like this: You wear an earpiece over one ear when you want to talk with someone whose language you don't speak. The other person also wears an earpiece as well or you can pair your earpiece with a Bluetooth speaker and have the translations projected that way so more than one person at a time can hear them. When it's your turn to speak, you tap the earpiece with your finger and speak normally. Once you finish speaking you tap the screen again, so the device will "interpret" what you said. To achieve this, the IBM Watson artificial intelligence:
- Uses speech recognition to process the speech.
- Converts it to text.
- Runs it through the machine translation algorithm.
- Produces the translated text in the target language.
- And finally, uses speech synthesis to pronounce the translated text in the earpieces.
The person who speaks the other language wearing a similar earpiece goes through the same steps when s/he wants to reply. Currently the One2One purports to translate between any combination of Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English (US and UK), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Spanish. < How do the earpieces accomplish this? Like every other speech-to-speech translator I have seen, the Lingmo device requires a connection to the Internet either through WiFi or mobile data networks. One of the things that attracted me to the Translate One2One earpiece is that it did not have to be tethered to a cell phone (like the Google Pixel Buds or the Waverly Labs Pilot) to work. To make that possible, Lingmo put the mobile phone in the earpiece. So, in essence, the process is the same, but the presentation is different. One of the earpieces is designed for use with mobile data technology in the Americas (1900 MHz) and the other for Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania (2100 MHz). The catch is that you have to purchase a micro SIM card for use in the earpiece designed to work with the mobile data networks of the part of the world you are in. You also have to pay for the mobile data used by the earpiece once it's connected to the data network. If you live in the Americas and travel to Asia, you will have to purchase another micro SIM card in Asia and insert it into the appropriate earpiece for data network access. So, you still have to pay for access to a mobile data network, even though it does not go through a mobile phone per se. The earpieces also work with Wi-Fi, but Lingmo notes that this will slow down the reaction time of the earpieces. The second earpiece does not connect directly to the Internet. Rather, it uses Bluetooth to connect to the mobile or Wi-Fi-enabled first earpiece. The second earpiece sends all data back to the first, which in turn, sends it to the Lingmo IBM Watson servers for processing. Once processed, the data is sent back to the first earpiece and then relayed to the second through the Bluetooth connection. The second earpiece is tethered to the first. Wait times for translations were usually between four to six seconds -- definitely not real time, but speedy nonetheless considering all the steps the data have to go through. Product Design and Fit and Finish The Translate One2One earpieces are designed to fit over your right ear. They are quite bulky by today's minimalist earbud standards. Each earpiece has a square touchscreen that is 3 cm square and two mechanical buttons at the top (the on/off switch and the back button). Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the folks at Lingmo have repurposed a smartwatch form factor to create the earpieces. The watch band lugs (where the wristband usually attaches to the watch) are secured to a plastic frame that allows the earpiece to rest over the top of your right ear, once it is attached to a soft rubber headband that comes with the earpiece. That's right, you are basically hanging a smartwatch over your ear. All this gives the earpiece a thrown-together feel. The on/off and back buttons are so close to the plastic frame that for someone with big fingers they are not easy to find and press without looking at the earpiece, which is hard to do when it is hanging on your ear. The one-size-fits-all headband is not very comfortable. It didn't fit my head well and didn't keep the earpiece securely over my ear when I turned my head. It felt floppy and felt like I needed to readjust it constantly so it didn't slip down my neck. Also, only being able to wear the earpiece over the right ear is problematic. What happens if you prefer your left year or are deaf in your right ear? These observations aside, the earpiece does generally stay over my ear and wearing the earpiece and headband was comfortable enough to wear for 5 to 10-minute stints. On the positive side, each earpiece comes with magnetic charging points that make it easy to connect the charging cable. Continued below . . . |
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The Tech-Savvy Interpreter: Review of the Lingmo Translate One2One Earpiece (continued)
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. . . continued
User Experience User experience is the single most important factor of any piece of consumer technology, especially in-ear speech-to-speech translators designed for travelers. If the technology hopes to wow the end user, it has to work right out of the box, be extremely simple to use, and require almost no training to make it work. What is more, the device needs to turn on quickly and require as few steps as possible to provide the service. Otherwise, users will seldom have the patience to use the technology. After all, they are designed primarily for strangers to use with each other in brief interactions. Unfortunately, trying to use the One2One earpieces to communicate was an exercise in frustration, but not for the reasons that you might think. As translators and interpreters, we tend to zero in on the accuracy -- or more likely, inaccuracy -- of the machine translations, since translation is the very core of what we do. But translation accuracy, while definitely problematic, was not my only concern. My frustration stemmed from the difficulty in just getting the device up and running. Out of the box, it took me several attempts before I could get the main earpiece connected to the Internet and then connect it to the second earpiece via Bluetooth. One complicating factor is that each earpiece is a fully-fledged miniature smartphone running the Android operating system, complete with 24 pre-loaded apps and the possibility to purchase and download even more from Google Play (To be clear, you can't sync the earpieces with Android phone or and iPhone). Another is that you must use two different apps for the Translate One2One system to work -- one for the main earpiece and another for the secondary earpiece. If you accidentally launch the wrong app on the wrong earpiece, the system won't work. Connecting the main earpiece to Wi-Fi was a challenge. I had to type in a long and complicated network password on a microscopic keyboard on the 3-cm square screen. I think it took me at least five attempts before I finally got my extra-large fingers to tap the right miniscule keys on that tiny screen. The size of the text on the screen appeared to be between 6 and 8-point type -- not easy for my middle-aged eyes to read at all. Connecting to a cellular network proved even more difficult. I never did successfully get the 1900 MHz earpiece designed for use in the Americas working with a micro SIM card, in spite of the fact I tried three different brands and even went to a local AT&T store to get technical support. The technician couldn't get the earpiece to connect to the mobile data network either. So, all my tests were conducted using Wi-Fi. Once you have connected the earpieces to each other and the main earpiece to a Wi-Fi network and pre-selected your preferred language combination, the actual speech to speech translation was less time-consuming. It takes three taps to begin a conversation. When you are ready to begin, you tap the screen of the earpiece hanging on your ear, hear a beep, and begin speaking. In theory, I was told by a Lingmo representative, you should be able to speak as long as necessary to complete your thought and then touch the screen again to begin the translation process. In all my tests, however, the earpiece would not let me talk for more than four seconds at a time before it beeped again and began the translation process. So, at best, the One2One will really only work for simple conversations in short chunks. No complex sentences. Once what you have said has been converted to text, it briefly appears in the source language in that tiny 6pt text I mentioned previously. Shortly thereafter, the translated text appears, and finally the spoken translation is heard in both earpieces. Of course, if you are wearing the earpiece, you will never see the text. Completed translations are stored on the earpieces under "History." A major flaw that makes the earpieces difficult to use is the lack of volume control. When I first tested them with a conversation partner, the initial beep to begin talking for the Spanish speaker was uncomfortably loud, so much so that she immediately pulled the earpiece off after wincing in pain. Everyone's hearing is different and not providing a simple way to adjust the volume is a serious design flaw. Software Performance Let me start with the positives. The speech recognition for the languages I was able to check (English, German, Portuguese and Spanish) was very good. It isn't perfect, but I didn't expect it to be. That said, it is more than adequate for the application. The speech synthesis was also quite impressive in the languages I tested. The synthetic voice was clear and easy to understand. The US English was a standard midwestern accent, the UK English, like a BBC broadcaster, the Spanish, a strong Peninsular accent, the Portuguese was notably Brazilian (even though the earpiece displays the Portuguese flag). Any Portuguese speaker will surely note the discrepancy between the accent and the flag immediately. Some may even take offense. Localization fail, for sure. When it came to translating what was said in one language into another, the Lingmo didn't perform as well. The IBM Watson machine translation engine was spotty at best. While it did produce an accurate sentence from time to time, most of the translations were off, many terribly so. For example, From Spanish to English the machine translation engine struggled with distinguishing the subject of sentences that were not explicitly mentioned by the speaker and frequently confused verb conjugations for the formal "Usted" form for "you" as the third-person "he" or "she." In another instance from English into Spanish in a test conversation with a police officer, the question: "Do you know why I pulled you over?" was rendered in Spanish as: "Sabes por qué me sacó demás," which is gibberish. Be sure to check out the Tech-Savvy Interpreter YouTube channel for some recorded examples of the One2One at work. Additionally, the software appears to have no ability to recognize and process intonation for meaning. As a result, most questions are translated as declarative sentences. This is problematic because the most likely use case will be to ask questions to solicit information. Words that have multiple possible meanings are frequently mistranslated. Add that to the four-second time limitation, which allows for almost zero context for the artificial intelligence to work from, and the whole setup isn't very practical. Lingmo claims that Translate One2One is 85% accurate. But what does that even mean? Is 85% of each sentence accurate and 15% totally wrong? Or are the translations completely accurate 85% of the time? I went through the Lingmo website and the instruction manual but found no basis for that statistic. It is unclear whether it is based on BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores or some other company-specific metric. Summing It All Up This is not the review I wanted to write. I spent several weeks testing and working with the One2One earpieces to learn to use them and creating appropriate dialogs to test them to see if they would deliver as promised. Dialogs included conversations with taxi drivers and doctors, hotel check-ins, and even with local police officers. The One2One earpieces struggled with every scenario. Machine translation was not even the main problem. The earpieces most often failed due to technical problems like the Bluetooth connection failing between the headsets or the app crashing midway through a conversation. Trying to fit in what you wanted to say in four second chunks wasn't all that easy either. The target market for the One2One is the world traveler who needs to communicate as s/he goes from one country to the next. That is the right market for this kind of consumer electronics -- people who need reliable translations of basic everyday phrases. Unfortunately, Lingmo severely under delivers for its own target market on all counts. It has serious product design flaws, a frustrating user experience, and only produces acceptable to terrible translations. What's the bottom line? For the world traveler looking for an in-ear translation device, I recommend waiting until Translate One2One improves substantially in every area I've mentioned. For professional interpreters working in legal, medical, conference and other settings, don't expect this technology to take away your job anytime soon. But the demand for quick, easy speech to speech translation will only continue to grow. Our profession would be wise to keep tabs on this technology as it evolves and inevitably, improves. 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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4. On Being Pushed
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| Have you heard about Lingotek? Well, apparently at least 100,000 of you will have heard about it at some point throughout its 12 years of existence (that's how many have registered in their system) and 30,000 of you use it regularly today (at least those are the numbers Larry Furr, VP of Product at Lingotek, shared with me). (And, yes, it's also fun to use these large numbers and say "you" because I can make it sound as if there are actually that many people reading this journal -- alas, there are not . . . only about 11,000. )-:) The very first company to build a commercial translation interface in internet browsers was a company called Uniscape. They were swallowed by Trados in 2002 without any further noticeable impact. The next company to try a commercial browser-based interface and cloud storage was Lingotek in 2006. But to say that just because they were the first they had an easy go of it would be wishful thinking. In fact, I'm not aware of any company who has had to reinvent itself quite as often as Lingotek. At first, they were very translator-centric and committed to shared data; then they discovered crowd-sourcing and tried to become the tool de jour for that; then they had a very strong focus on the intelligence communities here in the US; then they added translation services to their portfolio; and then they discovered content management systems. I probably left a couple of incarnations out of this list, and you might wonder why this happened and how it's possible that the company survived all of this. Well, they have tenacious investors who didn't want to see their money go bad, and those folks continued to push for ways to be successful. How successful? According to Larry, they are aiming at SDL. When I questioned this, pointing out that the range of products SDL offers is quite different than Lingotek's, he clarified that their challenge would be in the comparable areas: translation management systems and connectors to content management systems (more on that later). So far, Lingotek has not become profitable, which seems remarkable after 12 years of existence, but I was assured that this is by design and due to pressure from their investors who are more interested in growth than profitability. I've been thinking a lot recently about the differences between the actions of externally funded companies that offer translation technology and those that don't. Of course, every new company is funded in some way, whether by personal savings or personal loans or -- in the case of companies like Lingotek, Smartling, and Lilt -- by external investors (not to mention Trados, which also received funding, including by Microsoft, before it was purchased by SDL in 2005). One of the differences between the two groups is the persistent (and typically translation-centric) vision of the original company in the first group, which either succeeds and survives or not (there are plenty of cases where companies in our space have faltered). In the second group, companies are driven by business goals that can force radical overnight changes to the vision and focus of the company if deemed necessary. And with all three of the companies mentioned above, we have seen that a number of times. I (and I suspect many of you) want to cheer for those companies that stick by their translation-centric vision, but I think we would be mistaken to do so blindly. Because it might just be that in the case of Lingotek, one of those external pushes by their investors has actually brought them into a place they possibly would not have found on their own. In 2011, Lingotek started to develop connectors to Oracle products, and in 2012 they committed wholeheartedly to the Drupal community. Drupal is a relatively widely used open-source content management system (check out how it got its name here), and Lingotek not only developed connectors that pulled content out of those CMSs, making it possible to process it within their own translation workbench and then push it back into the CMS, but they also sponsored Drupal conferences and really tried to be very visible to the Drupal community. And it seems that they found a sweet spot there. Today, while they have continued their high visibility in the Drupal community, they have more than 30 other public connectors to content management systems, customer relationship management systems, knowledge bases, and a variety of other database products, while of course also still maintaining the desktop file support from their early days. And due to the availability of an API (application programming interface), there are also about 100 privately developed connectors. Since Lingotek also offers translation services (they have about 60 people in the development team and 12 in their translation services section), they -- with some exceptions -- typically don't develop partnerships with other LSPs but are open to expand this if the LSPs in question have not developed their own technology. LSPs are also not the customers they sell their products to since Lingotek exclusively sells to translation buyers that use one or several of the supported systems mentioned above. This doesn't mean that you as a language provider can't use the Lingotek system, though. In fact, not only is the use of the translation workbench available for free for any translator, but even the Drupal and WordPress connectors are freely available. I'm not sure that I would recommend Lingotek as your primary translation interface. To me the workbench still seems crowded and not particularly intuitive, but there are some nice new features, including an in-context view for HTML content (though only through the installation of a plugin and only within Google Chrome), a much improved quality assurance module and a handsome dashboard for project managers. Some strange Lingotek lingo has not changed throughout its existence ("TM Vault" anyone?), but that should not be a reason not to use it. If you as a translator are spending much of your time in Lingotek anyway (because you work for clients who use this as their tool of choice), you would be silly not to continue to use it for your own needs, particularly because any of the data that you import into the Lingotek system can all be exported again in their respected exchange formats (TMX, TBX, and XLIFF). |
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