ABBYY Lingvo.Pro

The portal beta has already been available (through invitations) for quite a long time, but I didn't have time to write about it. Actually there is not too much to write. At the moment it is a convenient place to search on-line dictionaries and parallel texts — at least for English-Russian language pair.

Basically what guys from ABBYY did was collect all popular concepts and needs and create a portal that would embrace and address them all. The idea is likely to turn successful, but the implementation also matters.

XBench adds spell-checking plug-in

A couple of weeks ago ApSIC released a new plug-in for their XBench. Based on HunSpell dictionaries, it checks spelling for a number of languages, including Russian. I briefly tested it and certainly found both advantages and drawbacks which I describe below.

Translating Idioms

It was just not long ago when I needed to translate quite an idiomatic text from Russian into English. My old friend Multitran is normally helpful in such cases, but it was nice to discover WikIdioms project. I learned about it from the recent issue of Multilingual magazine (fortunately or not, it was the most interesting post in this issue for me).

Can I Ever Note?

I was reading a blog post on a localization topic and was going to share some thoughts about it, but Evernote, the utility mentioned in the post, was so attractive that I first decided to check it out. By the way, I must admit that Russian localization of the site is pretty good. The only problem for me was that it is sort of haunting: I wanted the site to appear in English and I switched language wherever I could, but as soon as there was no choice it appeared in Russian again.

PROMTMan

He SUDDENLY appears next to you and quietly translates everything! ;) Try to recognize PROMT translation of popular songs!

This is about me.

ABBYY FotoTranslate

The application was recently mentioned somewhere in the news, and I really liked the idea to mix FineReader OCR system with Lingvo dictionaries and make it mobile, so that you can take pictures on our way and check what the words on the pictures mean. If you’re travelling and not speaking languages well enough, it may help you get your bearings in some situations. I recalled that a year ago I had to park a car in the streets of Vienna and as my German was quite poor I really could not understand what all different parking signs say. What I did was sending SMS with the sign text to a friend of mine who spoke German and she translated. What I did when I came back home was taking a course of German :)

Escape from salespeople

I’m not sure if I’m unique… I‘m even quite sure I belong to the majority. I don’t like salespeople. Sometimes I even hate them. My attitude towards them is (not surprisingly) directly proportional to their technical knowledge (or at least the visibility of that knowledge) and inversely proportional to their persistence.

Professionally, I often deal with people selling software, and I would place almost all of them into the following three categories:

Segments in – segments out, or can translations sound natural?

What are essential attributes of a successful translation project?

Anyone would mention client instructions, TM and glossary. The quality and success of a project is often measured as the degree to which those three were adhered. And indeed translators like when the TM is clean and the glossary is unambiguous, and they totally love when client instructions say: your translation should read as if it was originally written in your language. We are all artists, and we do appreciate when customers want us to show how good we are in our native language.

TweetDeck's Unicode Support

Nothing special from me today, just very quick notes.

I noticed yesterday that TweedDeck (isn't it the most often downloadable piece of software at the moment, at least in our industry?) was not showing Cyrillic, and therefore some posts from my friends made in Russian through the sites looked like " - - @ !"

Alchemy Catalyst 8.0 - Activation

Today I fought against Alchemy Catalyst. As a TILP CLP, I've got a lifetime license from Alchemy, one of the most interesting takeaways from Level 1, I think.

I installed it on my home computer because I upgrade my office one quite often and always forget to release licenses. So, I wanted to activate Catalyst today and used remote desktop connection to my home computer as usual. Though Catalyst wouldn't activate via terminal service.

Plug-ins for XBench

A couple of weeks ago our engineers found that DataBridge, a Russian translation agency, developed a plug-in for XBench to check Russian translations. I certainly wanted to try it (and by the way, it is also free).

[Simplified?] Russian Language Day

UNO has recently assigned June 6 (the birthday of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin) to be the Day of Russian Language. And I really liked yesterday's Russian BBC post (in Russian) about it and about current language trends.

PROMT 9.0 and MT into Russian - a really short notice

I was too late yesterday at GALA's PROMT 9.0 Demo webinar. I only could listen to Alex Yanyshevsky telling about last couple of features he was going to show.

I totally forgot about PROMT since their version 8. I do believe MT into Russian is unreal at the moment - at least if you don't have large high-quality and garbage-free TMs, and who has them? So, I use MT to get the basic idea of texts in other languages that I cannot understand. And I never translate into Russian, but into English.

XBench again...

This tool may seem to be my favoite, but that's not true. Unfortunately my favorite tool is not developed yet. But XBench is free and really very helpful in some aspects, so if I find something interesting in it I just cannot help sharing this.

I didn't use it for quite a long time, so ApSIC released build 396 back in February, and I only found this out last week. This build is claimed to load big files much faster and to have more enhancements.

Russian Rules

If you ever hesitated about Russian spelling, grammar, punctuation etc. and spent dozens of so important minutes looking through hard copies of grammar references and other books, you will really appreciate what Ilya Birman from Chelyabinsk did. He prepared a web release of Russian grammar rules with quite powerful and flexible search capabilities.

If you speak Russian (and I believe you do if you’re interested in Russian spelling), I’d rather let Ilya himself to introduce his project:

The dogs bark, the caravan goes on

Note. As far as I know, the closest English equivalent of the title is "the moon does not heed the barking of dogs", but I really didn't like it. I think something like "the moon shines while the dogs bark" would be more correct because the idea is that all parts continue doing what they were doing: the dogs continue barking, the caravan continues moving, and they actually have no relation to each other.

The idea to make service providers pay for the services they provide is indeed great. This is something that fascinated everyone in the translation community, and this is probably one of the most lively discussed topics at the moment.

What happened? L10NBridge announced they are going to work with their vendors only through their Translation Workspace. It's provided on software-as-a-service basis, and you have to pay a monthly fee for using it.

What is it for the vendors? Basically this is that you have to pay for the possibility to provide your services to LionBridge - something that Tom Sawyer invented loooooong ago, and I don't know if he was the first to do that.

What is it for LionBridge? Honestly, I don't think they just want to make extra money, though "you never can tell about bees", especially if you're not a bee. I think their main idea is... to streamline, to increase efficiency, to differentiate - and all sorts of those concinnous words which mean doing things better than you normally did.

What is it for onlookers? All the vendors use lots of other software in order to provide their services - and they don't mind paying for all those pieces of software. All the vendors agree to pay for portals like ProZ etc. LionBridge offered a sort of combination, and the problem is that LionBridge is not a third party in this game. Will we one day see vendors force customers to pay for purchasing services exclusively from them? Why not?

What is going to happen? I'm certainly not the smartest person in the world, but neither the most stupid one. And I do believe LionBridge management is at least more or less the same. Doing what they did, they expected the vendors' reaction to be like this. They expected to make vendors unhappy, they expected many vendors to say good-bye to them, they expected "much ado about nothing". And they think they can handle it. They think they will be going on - and what is more important, they will be going on in the direction they chose. On the other hand, their vendors will go on as well, and their directions will be not bad, too. So, no matter how loud the dogs bark, both LionBridge's and vendors' caravans will be going on.