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: