[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.

XBench is alive and kicking!

After some time of silence, XBench development has become visibly active. On October 14, 2009 they released new version 2.8, and it took ApSIC less than a month to release its new build with hot fixes.

The tool, which was powerful enough for a tool available for free, is now even more helpful and useful. The most important things, to my mind, are regular expressions support and faster search engine, but this is not the whole list. XBench has always been the tool that supported the widest variety of file formats, but it expanded here as well having added a few more formats with the new release. Additionally, its checklists were enhanced and allow for better organization.

Last but not least, as of October 7, 2009, XBench allows you to develop plug-ins to it. Now you can implement your own types of checks as a DLL and make XBench run those checks together with ones that are built into it. All you need to do that, is to be familiar with software development and read this document carefully.

Well done, I believe. The market of QA tools has been quite live recently, and the fact that we have a powerful and evolving free tool is really pleasing.

And if ApSIC takes the next step and provide support for a community of plug-in developers, I really believe we may expect XBench to be the most comprehensive QA tool on the market in a very short time.

Nanotechnologies in action!

This post in fact is going to deal neither with nanotechnologies nor even with translation directly. However, I'm sooo surprised that I just feel I have to tell the entire world about it immediately.

I need to apply for a new foreign passport as my current one "ran out of space". I traveled so much that there are no free pages for visas any longer though it is valid for two more years. I felt very reluctant about collecting all the necessary papers, calling the officials to make sure what and when and how... and I naturally pushed myself to at least search for the necessary phone number in online yellow pages. And there was a web link under all the phone numbers, and I decided to check it.

What a surprise! They have all necessary information there! It's quite nicely categorized, to my mind, and includes everything you need to deal with passports, migration etc. Open hours, lists of necessary documents, rates, document templates - everything is there. And what really killed me - you can make an appointment with the head of Federal Migration Service in Tomsk via the site, and the appointment will be using Skype!

I can bet almost 100% of Russian citizens (at least outside Moscow) could not even think a provincial government agency may be so "electronically advanced". What they still miss is accepting the documents via e-mail or FTP, sending the passports back via DHL and... site translation into at least English :)