ABBYY Lingvo vs Multitran: crowdsourcing in dictionaries

Just another subjective opinion :)

I've always liked Lingvo. I'v been using this dictionary for ages, I like people at ABBYY, and Tatyana Danielyan, their Director of Project Management, was so kind to award me with the full version of their dictionary a year or more ago, and it was extremely helpful in my trips to non-English-speaking countries etc.

And I was occasionally using Multitran. As we still experience some network slowdowns, it was inconvenient to look up words on the Web; it took much longer than searching Lingvo.

However, this weekend I was translating a text from a completely new domain for me. Therefore, I had to check each and every term against a dictionary, and to make sure this is the term that is actually used in Russian. All of a sudden, I discovered that Multitran is much more useful from this point of view.

Multitran became interactive many years ago. Registered users may add their terms to it and expand to different domains, and due to this crowdsourcing it's really much more "live" and "up-to-date" than Lingvo is. Additionally, their style to present information proved to be more convenient for me, and because of that, even in times of network slowdown it took me less time to come up with a correct term in Multitran than in local Lingvo dictionary.

Both dictionaries lack Swedish, though, which I personally would like to have.

Google Translate

Recently I started learning Swedish. And I immediately started interacting in Swedish. And to not waste my time for boring word-for-word translation with regular check of grammar rules, I tried Google Translate. It provided quite sensible translations from Swedish into English. Sometimes when I didn't have time to recheck what it translated for me, I sent out some stupid Swedish text, but in most cases I ran through the whole translation to learn from it and make sure it makes sense, and it was quite good. It really inspired me. Indeed, everyone is saying machine translation is already here doing things for us, but it's just another pair of shoes when you see it in practice and can easily use it.

So, I certainly wanted to test it with Russian. I didn't hope to get too much, but I've always believed that statistical machine translation is better for Russian than rule-based one, and with Google's huge text corpus, I was pretty sure that it should make at least some sense.

No, it didn't.

(to be continued, however, after some more tests with Russian...)

Tricky clean up in Trados

Tring to solve our yesterday's problems, we spent quite a lot of time testing different things, and eventually came up with an interesting finding.

Cleanup settings do not depend on the language combination set for the TTX files to clean up. What it depends on, is the language combination of a TM you clean the files up to (even if you select not to update it).

So, if you just need to clean up some files translated into German and don't care which TM you have open, and it happens to be a Chinese or Japanese TM, you will receive your translation without any spaces between sentences. And just the other way round, if you clean up Chinese files to a dummy Italian TM you won't be able to get rid of the spaces.

So, just be careful when cleaning the files up!

SDL and its support again

Yesterday we ran into a problem. Our main platform for translation at the moment is SDL Trados 2007. And we don't have premium support agreement because when we started using it there were no such agreements at all, and their support was very responsive and helpful (one of the main reasons why we opted for SDL). Then we haven't had any serious problems for many years, and even if we had some, we always had some opportunity to ask a question or to find an answer in their knowledge base (still open to registered customers, wow!).

So, eventually we ran into a problem. We apparently checked everything we could, ended up with that it is not any setting problem, and decided to contact SDL support, to show them where the problem is and to ask if it can be solved.

So, we went to http://www.sdl.com/en/support. It said: go to My Account, and everything is going to be fine. OK. My Account apparently directs me to My Support. Happy to do so. My Support offers me to review my Primary Services Agreement (which I apparently don't have) or go to SDL Trados Knowledge Base. OK again. Knowledge Base is good. But I don't find answers to my question there. I remember there was a link to ask a question. Not any longer. Or it's just so well hidden that I failed to find it.

It's not too often I disturb their support, but if I do it I really need it. Now there's no way. OK, we'll develop a solution; at least they use XML for the bilingual files, so we can easily parse them without Trados.

But I really like the trick. SDL lost their main advantage (for us, of course), but they translated it into another one, into becoming so deeply integrated into our and our clients' processes during the Good Support Era that it's really impossible just to switch to another tool. And on the other hand, we already developed a lot of proprietary utilities to do this and that in Trados files... maybe we can easily translate it into our own TM system? :)

Vison of a QA tool

It's for about five years I have a vision of an ideal formal translation QA tool - at least for our needs. A tool that would spot errors correctly, determine different languages (which is so easy!) in a multilingual project and not report inconsistent translations when the same phrase is translated into different languages.

It would intelligently detect where a capital letter is required and where it is a false positive to report it etc. It would easily and correctly handle flexing languages when checking terminology. It would automatically not report untranslated segments like "Windows Vista". It would easily open any of numerous bilingual file formats, allow to make changes on the fly and once changed, automatically recheck if the error is in fact corrected. It would provide you with clean and intuitive reports where a click of a button allows to correct all the errors of the same type, make a note for the future that this error is highly possible again and advice on adding it to a checklist. It would accumulate statistics and provide recommendations to translators and QA specialists based on different criteria. It would automatically "pre-correct" errors in new projects based on its experience with previous ones.

To be continued or never published :)

SDL Trados Studio 2009, too much for 1 GB RAM?

At Localization World Berlin a week ago, I non-intentionally stopped by SDL's booth. I don't really like to make an opinion on a product based on any demonstration, but only on my own experience in trying and testing it.

So, they've been showing there that new appearance and how it works in general (which is to my mind not interesting again because if you've been using translation environments tools for ages, you can easily imagine the basics of any new tool in this category).

When I was briefly beta-testing Trados Studio (and the tool is in fact really nice and convenient), I didn't see any preview. I didn't have time to really try to find access to it, but it was interesting to take a look at how this feature works. So, eventually I asked at the booth if the Studio supports preview and how. The guy certainly started demonstrating. He pressed a few buttons, and the preview started being generated. It took some noticeable time to generate it, and I asked if the computer running this demonstration was slow.

'Yes, it's quite an outdated one', the guy responded, 'It only has 1 GB of RAM'. Working currently with 1 GB of RAM and feeling not bad about it most of the time, I didn't say anything. However, I thought that not many potential users of this tool are likely to have faster computers.

Besides that, the preview works great, it updates every time you confirm a segment (which is in fact what MemoQ's preview has been doing at least for 1 year I've been testing it), and is in general a very good reference for a translator. What may be a bit inconvenient is that it is in a separate window, so you have to switch. But for those who use small screens, it's even a benefit, and I assume there is a way to include it to the single Trados Studio window if you have a larger screen (this is something I have to check though).

But what I'm eager to do now is to check the real speed of the tool running on a real average workstation which most of the translators use.