Wordfast launches Wordfast anywhere

A few days ago Wordfast launched their internet-based CAT tool application. This is no doubt a step towards this sky full of clouds (if you know what I mean) but at a first glance a very simplistic one. One thing we can say in favor of Wordfast is that they are consistent with their old look, keeping their old followers safe from the riddle of nowadays features-packed CAT tools. One thing we can say against them is that they just keep the pace in the industry, provide no great breakthroughs and really need some help with the design of their interphase. Of course, at some point we could say that the simple the better, but I would say that I'd rather keep it simple and go a little complicated every now and then, but still have the option, than just having to stay simple. The new tool promises to be free of charge, asks for not many details to create an account, and will run from almost any internet-enabled device. This last promise is perhaps the most interesting one. In this days of mobility frenzy, the promise to take care of that urgent translation in the middle of the traffic while heading downtown seems like gold to me. Maybe you can't progress that much, but sometimes a little progress is gold. Picture yourself in the backseat of that taxi, coming back from that downtown meeting you reluctantly attended. You could just take your iPad out of your portfolios and start taking advantage of the time. This is what in my opinion gives value to their offer. The tool is free, so no matter what you use, SDL Trados, Alchemy Publisher, or any other CAT tool, you could just work there, export your TM and then just import it into your local TM. An ideal scenario would be as follows for me (this is only in theory, I will carry out the tests and publish them soon):
You get out of your meeting, rush into a cab and find yourself trapped in traffic trying to find yourself something to do. Suddenly you remember, you are the "proud" owner of an iPad with a 3g connection, you take off your jacket, roll up your sleeves, and get down to work. First you use your logmein connection to get into your iMac at your office, find this urgent file, connect to Wordfast anywhere, upload it and have it ready. Then you just open the Wordfast anywhere website on your iPad and start working. In the middle of your journey through the traffic you get a call and get a request to meet someone else not far from your actual location. You get off the cab, look at your watch and realize you still have almost 2 hours before the meeting takes place. You rush yourself to a Starbucks order a very nice caramel macchiato (you need the sugar right now the calories won't hurt that much), a turkey breast panini and sit in a nice coach to cool down and keep translating with your IPad and your online application. After the 2 hours are gone you rush to your meeting just around the corner, chat with your client, realize this could just have been a phone call, and hit the road in the yellow car again. Unfortunately for you it is rush hour again, but this time you are ready to face it, getting "comfortable" on the back seat of the cab, you wear your headphones, look for some soothing music in your iPod application in the iPad, open the Anywhere website and keep translating. By the time you get out of the traffic it is so late that getting to the office will just be a waste of time, so you decide to just get home. When you arrive home, all you want to do is unwind from the craziness of the day and comfortably sit in your veranda to drink a glass of wine (ok you could also have a cup of Coffee if you think it is to early in the week to drink alcohol). You just take out your bluetooth keyboard, your iPad stand and comfortably sit to translate and enjoy the view (as long as you don't have kids going crazy because you just arrived!). Next morning you get to the office, log into your Anywhere, download your translation memory and import it into your favorite CAT application. How does this sound? It sounds great to me as long as the web-based application is responsive and reliable, as long as my information is guaranteed to be kept as private, and as long as I don't get caught in using just Wordfast, but instead have full compatibility with my current Desktop CAT tool. Well, we shall put this to the test in the next days and keep you all posted. In any case, keep enjoying that glass of wine or cup of coffee and let us do the hard work to provide you with tips and recommendations. Cheers!

CAT and Statistical Methods are again proving worth

Many years have passed now since we started hearing from this technological marvel called Computer Aided Translation -CAT- (although in some countries it is still to be acknowledged), and the best is yet to come. We have seen many companies come and go, others come, grow and stay, and translation memories (TM) have completely stopped being a luxury or just an aid to completely become an asset. On an even more foggy side of the mirror we every now and then see automatic translation (AT), which had a boom some years ago promising to deliver Star Trek like translations, and then fell into oblivion for some for some parts of our ever-growing producing and consuming society. These two sides of the mirror are frequently mixed or misunderstood in many countries, generating a total rejection in most of the cases towards CAT. I have been and IT consultant in the language industry (although some years ago that seemed more like a hobby than a job in Latin America), and most of the times I have heard things like: CAT? sorry, computers can't translate; translation memory? a database? that is making translation work even more complicated; or my favorite, oh yes yes, I know about CAT, I use word and Babylon, going beyond that is useless and expensive. Nothing further from the truth. CAT has generated a brand new way to see translation and an amazing tool to recycle and reproduce translation work, still, as with all technological tools, this is a double edged knife. If you reproduce trash, you will only get trash. If you have a bad TM management, usage, and maintenance then you are just making the monster of chaos bigger. In the same way, AT is not the ultimate tool, it is not capable of substituting a human being, and will not be in most of the cases still for a long time; however, it is a great tool to deal with some parts of texts, especially when there are short simple sentences, lists, tables, amongst other types of text. This two technologies have finally met in the crossroad and will take the next step together. We have recently seen many companies include the possibility to apply a TM and then an AT engine when there are no relevant results with the first one. Thus leveraging translation tasks and reducing work. Even with all this, there is still a lot of resistance in many countries to put this two forces together to make a huge difference.

So, the verdict would easily be that some selected gurus have grasped the whole potential of these technologies and are using and taking advantage of them, while the rest of translators are still fighting with their Windows Me, or Vista (they were identically bad to me), trying to understand the new distribution of the elements in the awkward office ribbon that substituted the traditional menus, hoping to migrate to MAC for a better land of stability, learning to blog, tweet, use the Proz website, subscribe to forums, synchronize calendars, and a long long list of etceteras.

When amidst this craziness, another breakthrough in technology catches us uncovered, machine translation using statistical analysis seems to have finally evolved to start growing and being a useful tool. But what is the difference between old fashioned AT and ST? well, mainly that instead of only following certain rules to translate it compares thousands of translations between two languages and makes a "best guess". And this is where CAT and AT meet, because there is no better source of material to compare than a well segmented and populated translation memory.

The ongoing project on this regards (called SMART) will no doubt impact CAT and the language industry, but for obvious reasons (and some fear) it will impact the social stratum before the commercial one. Still, convergence between these two strata is not difficult to find. For example, a well organized translation department in a company which has been producing high quality TMs could use them to feed their internal ST engine, which could deliver in turn, with an end-user interface, quick "high quality translations" to end users that just need to know the essence of a text to move on with their work, instead of having to wait until the translation is sent, approved, done, and returned.

On the other hand, these systems are also used to retrieve information in very effective ways, so another interface could be implemented within CAT software in use to make a very fast research on each sentence and deliver pertinent results without the translator leaving his translation interface (if the software developers do I hope they give me the credit and maybe another job he he he). This interface could work in a simple way by retrieving statistically relevant information in the same language or by cross-referencing the original sentence with a TM, obtaining relevant results, then analyzing in turn the equivalent sentence in the target language to finally retrieve relevant information on this. Thus, the translators would have by the best-guess method relevant sentences to help them contextualize terms in a matter of seconds (omg I don't know if I should be writing or patenting this hehehe).

This all takes us to draw one conclusion, on the end-user side, technological tools are very important, useful, and needed by the translation community. Still, unless we want to go crazy and spend more time in configuring solutions than translating, we always need to choose those that are more relevant to us, that do not provoke a hazel in our desktop, and that are more cost-effective. While on the developer side, we need more resources embedded in one solution, TM, ST, AT, Glossaries, and autotexts (and all the others you can think about). Also, we have to be aware that this could make this solutions more expensive, but still, let us be fair, how much have you saved or gained by leveraging your work with CAT or AT? The answer, I'm sure, would be a lot, and even when I'm a supporter of open or even free software I have to say that I will put my marbles in the best bag. So be it, and may the best fighter win in this CAT solutions battle. In the end the only winner would be the final user. For more info go to GOV MONITOR or SDL Trados website

CAT and Statistical Methods are again proving worth by Rodrigo Vasquez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Translation Palette : DigInfo

This is a video showing a review of a new CAT-like translation support system. Althought it is only japanese - english oriented I think some of the ideas are worth considering. The main idea of this software is to provide the translator with suggested translations for words and even names this is oriented towards reducing research time. This video is owned by http://www.diginfo.tv/