memoQ 8.5 is released

Integration with the DeepL Machine Translation plugin, a preview plugin for subtitling videos, two 'compare and control' options, and server-to-server workflows are just a few of the many new features and concepts that memoQ 8.5 brings.

Learn even more about it and get memoQ 8.5 today by visiting the memoQ website.

Download. Try. Enjoy.

SDL Trados Studio 2019 will be released in less than two weeks' time (on July 25), and I was thankful that David Brockmann, Massi Ghislandi, and Paul Filkins took some time (on a late Friday afternoon for them!) to sit down with me to have a look at the new version and talk about their visions for it.

Many of the changes of this sixth major release since the initial release of Trados Studio 2009 go back to what was learned in SDL's Translation Technology Insights survey of 2016 as well as feedback from the ongoing ideas communities hosted by SDL.

It's been a "thing" for a while to have certain "themes" for new versions of programs, especially when it comes to translation environment tools. This release of SDL Trados Studio has one that is as clear as could be: user experience (Studio 2015 was "quality," 2017 "innovation").

How does this manifest itself in this version? Mostly in two things: a massive overhaul of aids (including a new video library and a relatively non-intrusive display of contextual tips) and an MS Word-like "Tell me what you want to do" feature that sits atop the screen and guides the user to resources and the actual feature they're looking for. It's handy. Type in "Visio" and with one click in the displayed "Tell me..." options you can open the properties page of the new Visio filter vs. doing this in six or seven steps like before.

The "Tell me..." feature is available in all UI languages (EN, FR, DE, ES, IT, JP, ZH, KO, and RU) and is bilingual (always in combination with English) so you can type in either language. The development team has tried to allow you to look for the exact terms used in the interface as well as similar terms and phrases so you don't necessarily have to remember the correct terminology. Of course, they're aware that the system is not foolproof, so they expect to add to the terms via the "Customer Experience" telemetry program. This has been around since 2014 and is an optional feature for SDL to capture some usage data (you can deactivate or activate it under Help> Customer Feedback).

I asked the SDL team about their experience with the program so far and was surprised to hear it described as only a "medium success." About 40% of users sign in -- that's good -- but they haven't had it set up to look at some important data (including crashes, which is now happening, though).

After looking at the new program, I'm convinced that this 2019 edition is a much better and easier-to-use variation than Studio 2017 for newish or inexperienced users. What about experienced users, though? Well, the team said, they were surprised at how much even experienced users appreciated the shortcuts the new systems offered. Those users also liked the overhauled and simplified wizards and a radically abbreviated project creation process. It'll be interesting to see whether this is enough to motivate experienced users to upgrade. On the other hand, we know it's eventually going to happen in some way or the other, at least for those who are really using Trados Studio as their main tool. Until SDL switches to an annual fee system like companies such as Adobe and Microsoft, you can certainly "sit out" one or two upgrades, but you'll then have to pay more when you finally have to upgrade because of compatibility problems.

And speaking of compatibility: apps you downloaded from the SDL AppStore for the current (or previous) versions will have to be updated by both the developer and you, though Paul Filkin promised that there's an easier possibility for developers who need to upgrade.

What I would like to see in the next edition -- maybe even in the certainly planned SP1 for this version -- is steps similar to the user experience in the more complex regions of SDL Trados Studio. Rather than just adding some regex functionality (like they did this time by allowing the merger of regex lists and language-specific QA via regex), I'd like to see additional wizards or other visual aids for things like regex and XPath. Although it's true that many of us never encounter these monsters when working in Studio, those who do when working with complex file formats either love it because they have the time to figure out how to write commands with the correct syntax, or they just know it. The other ones who have neither the time nor the expertise (which is likely the vast majority, I'm afraid) are being left out. Let's bring 'em in.

Terminotix announces SynchroTerm 2018 which offers the following new features:

• Cleaner and more modern interface
• Duplicates detection feature at record creation
• SDLXLIFF and XLIFF files support
• 64-bit compatible
• Faster extraction engine

SynchroTerm is a terminology extraction software used by a number of international organizations, LSPs and freelancers alike to accelerate the process of creating term records by employing statistical algorithms to automatically identify equivalent terms.

If you have any questions about Terminotix products, please write to info@terminotix.com.

I've been pondering a lot about one of the most dramatic changes we have seen in the world of translation. And now you say: Yes, I know, machine translation! You're right that this is a big change, but it's not really what I've been thinking about (at least not exclusively).

I've been thinking about data. We have access to so much data! While there are clearly some advantages to this, there are plenty of disadvantages as well. Or maybe primarily one: we need to learn to become (better) data curators. (I can't remember ever having heard of that as a topic of study in a translation program.)

What's this data I'm talking about?

OK, let's start with the most obvious: (y)our termbase and translation memory data.

For years, I -- along with many others -- was a proponent of the big mama TM and big papa termbase, which essentially consisted of just one repository each for all of your translation memory and termbase data. We had good reasons. I've had cases where a whole file in a new project was virtually identical to a file in a much earlier project even though the projects didn't seem to have anything in common with each other. If I hadn't used my big mama TM at that point, I would have spent a few hours of unnecessary translation work. But things have changed since then. First, if you've been a translator since the early days of translation memory use, those big mamas have become monstrous mamas, slow and unwieldy. More importantly, the technology has changed. With most tools using some kind of automatic subsegment retrieval, the data that otherwise would likely never have been touched again is being processed all the time, resulting in suggestions that are often unhelpful. The concept of subsegmentation or fragment reuse is fantastic -- if you have a translation memory that reflects what you're currently translating. Otherwise it will slow you down at best or decrease the quality of your output at worst.

The termbase is different because it is not being used for more granular data access like the TM. But the older big papa gets, the more confusing will be his suggestions. Common termbases that can be profitably used for all kinds of customers are useful for only the very few among us who have such a narrow field of expertise that there really is only one set of terminology, or who have only the one client who always lets us work on the same kind of material. For a freelance translator, however, that is the very rare exception.

Years ago I found a glossary of maybe 20,000 EN> DE generic terms. I was so excited to import it into my master termbase, expecting it to greatly increase my productivity. Instead, it made me waste several hours identifying and deleting those terms after a few days of fighting with extreme data overload. Naturally, the data that forms the glossaries and termbases mentioned above is not generic, but it tends not to be helpful right in your translation environment unless you're able to narrow it down to a much greater detail than is offered.

And then there are the many corpora out there that just seem to be waiting to be turned into translation memories. Whether it's the massive DGT TM of the European parliament (for which there is even a provider of prepackaged TMs), or the famous EN<>FR Hansards corpus of the Canadian parliament ("Hansard," by the way, "is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries" -- and I just learned something new!) -- or how about its English<>Inuktitut counterpart -- or the UN corpus in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, or the many, many other corpora that could be used as TMs and are listed on the OPUS page?

Yes, they can all be used. But are they of benefit? They do benefit machine translation developers as fodder for their engines (provided they are building generic engines), but for translators they are in all likelihood overkill.

Does this mean we should completely ignore these data sources? Probably not, but only if we can find better ways of using them than in the brute force manner of bringing them in as regular translation memories. As reference material that we can consult for some tricky phrases they might be great. But that's what the Linguee makers figured out long ago, and you can get much of the information via that route as well.

And that brings us to machine translation. In addition to all the (potential) data mentioned above, there are also various machine translation engines that you can consult as you translate. In many cases you can connect not only one but several of those engines within your translation environment at the same time and use their suggestions or parts thereof.

The questions then become obvious: Where is the limit to our capacity to process all that data with which we're bombarded? At what point do our brains go into overdrive and wear us out much earlier in the day than they used to? When do we just choose something to "get it done with" rather than produce high-quality translation?

These are very important questions, and I don't know that anyone has the answer. For one thing, I suspect that the answer varies from translator to translator. Also, I think it's a matter of training. Though I'm not aware of any program or course that offers this (though I imagine it might be a very successful endeavor if done right), we will have to train ourselves not to become distracted by information presented all around the target field where we have to enter the translation. We need to be curators to select the right data from which we will choose and "on-the-fly-curators" to make the right choices in a timely and effective manner as we work.

Martin Kappus explored part of this question in a posting on the Language Technology Wiki recently (quoted once before in an edition of the Tool Box Journal):

Nowadays machine translation suggestions are dynamically generated and presented to translators and post-editors. They are even adapted depending on the input by the translator/post-editor. It seems that these new methods yield better output from MT and they also seem to get the translator more "involved" in the post-editing process. Do these additional resources pose additional cognitive load on the translator/post-editor? Particularly when working in longer segments where the suggestions change frequently and rapidly?

Should we use the space provided by the Language Technology Wiki to discuss all of this? I think it would be a very profitable debate.

Process management and control, high cost transparency, networked teamwork, higher quality -- a business solution.

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With GT4T, the ultimate online reference tool, you can use Google Translate, DeepL and many others without ever having to leave your work environment.

GT4T works in all programs. Get ready to be amazed.

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Coming up with something new is an act of creation, the process of bringing new life into an otherwise empty space. So when you're creating, you don't want to "speak" words into an already occupied arena; you really want to start with nothing. A computer screen is never nothing. It's never empty. (Yes, I know it can be, but it typically is not -- you have to work hard to make those menus and taskbars disappear.) It is never free of distraction, from the sounds the computer makes to the email or the Skype call that inevitably pops in to the brightness of the screen. (True, it can all be remedied, but just stay with me. Goodness!)

Seriously, though, the clean whiteness of an empty sheet of paper has a near-sacredness about it that -- to me -- just begs for union with my thoughts. It doesn't even hurt for the first sheet to be filled and then crumpled up and have that magical meeting repeated, maybe even for a second or third or fourth time.

I never write out entire stories in longhand, but if it's an entirely new kind of story or project, there is rarely a time when I don't first face the empty sheet and jot down outlines, structure, and random thoughts. I circle what seems important, connect items through arrows with each other across the page or even several pages and then, as soon as it feels like I'm done, I can sit down at a computer and start to write. The pages that I scribbled on might never be looked at it again, or maybe only at the very end to make sure I didn't forget anything, but the point was to get the process of creation started.

When people say they need "to get their creative juices flowing," I hear them saying the ink needs to start running out of the tip of a fountain pen. Juices on the computer screen and keyboard tend to be messy.

 

Exclusive First Look: New Features in SDL Trados Studio 2019

Join this webinar for a demo of the new features, which are coming soon in SDL Trados Studio 2019.

See how you can get instant access to every feature and setting in Studio 2019, a first look at the on-demand tutorials throughout Studio, one step project creation, mid-project updates and much more.

Sign up here >>  

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