THE TRANSLORIAL TOOL KIT

Lingua et Machina (http://www.lingua-et-machina.com/), the maker of the TEnT Similis, is offering its tool for free in a limited yet functional version. I have praised Similis in the past, in particular for its term extraction capability in the languages it supports (English, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French) where it achieves a much higher accuracy than any other tool that I am aware of. It is also a full-fledged translation tool with a translation memory and dictionary component. However, it is by no means a small download and installation. The limitations of this free edition include a block on most features concerning data exchange (TMX, Trados, CSV) and you can process only the first 10,000 words in each document. 

Microsoft Reaches Out
Most of you will have read about the Language Portals that Microsoft has opened in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Korean, and of course English at http://www.microsoft.com/language/en/us/default.mspx. After being a little irritated that they are construed so they don’t work correctly in Firefox or Opera, I spent some time actually looking at the content and liked some of it a lot. For instance, you can search terms from English to 100 languages or language variants within the Microsoft glossaries (the search URL is http://www.microsoft.com/language/en/us/search.mspx?sString=TERM&langID=XX-XX for tools like IntelliWebSearch), or you can download the style guides for 35 languages (which many of us had anyway, but it’s nice to get the latest version). What I liked as well was the fact that there are links to non-Microsoft events and websites (I missed one to the Tool Kit, though ;-). It’s also positive that the language portals in the different languages are not translations of each other but original portals (including blogs, target country-specific events and website links) in the respective languages.
And there are some attempts at “crowd-sourcing.” There is a terminology feedback link for all the languages and the Windows Live Terminology Feedback Project for 38 languages allows users to comment on terms that are to be included in future projects. Let’s see how that shapes up. So far (at least in German) there has been fairly little participation but I can certainly see that overall this is a positive move.

AutoStart Juggling
For most experienced computer users, how to control the programs that are started automatically when you boot your computer is old news. But there is a relatively new and completely free program offered by Microsoft for any version of Windows that gives you a fairly good overview of what these culprits are that make your computer so sluggish: Autoruns for Windows (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx). What I like about this program is that it is really very easy to install and use, and it gives some information about what the processes and programs do that are started automatically. And if the explanations sound too cryptic, you can always check http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php.

Anyone Certified Out There?
The Institute of Localisation Professionals (TILP) is offering the first certification level (of three) for localization professionals (CLP)—see http://www.tilponline.org/clp.shtml. The prices for participation vary radically according to the country where you live (in Africa and South America it’s 200 Euro, in Western Europe and North America 800 Euro, and in Eastern Europe 500 Euro). Considering that the admission fee includes free freelance/translator editions of SDL Trados and Alchemy Catalyst (worth about 1300 Euro on their own!) along with the 10 online localization modules, a four-day onsite class, and SDL Trados certification, it’s something that you might want to consider. It’s especially tailored to those who are “beginners and those who are interested in learning about the work, the processes and the tools and technologies used in this fast paced and innovative industry” (quote from their website) and who live in or close to one of the countries where the onsite classes take place, i.e., Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, or the United States.

OmegaT
You think they named OmegaT (http://sourceforge.net/projects/omegat/) as they did to appease both the little- and big-endians? Be that as it may, there is a nice and interesting article on OmegaT on Corinne McKay’s blog (http://thoughtsontranslation.com/2008/04/11/omegat-a-free-and-very-useful-tent/). Corinne is an avid Linux user and she stumbled on OmegaT (again) after she had issues with Wordfast and Heartsome. Now she raves about the simplicity and speed of OmegaT. OmegaT is probably the best-known open-source TEnT that runs on Java, i.e., is supported by Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.A real boost to the OmegaT community was the recent adoption of the tool by at least one language team at Sun (read at http://tinyurl.com/5ojn2r), partly in preference over Sun’s own open-source TEnT Open Language Tools (https://open-language-tools.dev.java.net/).