The Translorial Tool Kit

By Jost Zetzsche © 2005 International Writers’ Group, compiled by Yves Avérous

The Tool Kit is an online newsletter that comes to its subscribers’ mailboxes bimonthly. In Translorial, we offer a quarterly digest of Jost’s most helpful tips from the past season. If you would like to subscribe to The Tool Kit, visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit/ and mention Translorial during the subscription process; Jost will put your name in a drawing for one free Tool Box book per edition.

Attachment Etiquette

With literally hundreds of compression utilities out there, many of which are free (like www.zipgenius.it/index_eng.htm) and even a bare-bones compression utility integrated into your operating system (Windows XP, Mac OS X), there is simply no excuse not to zip your files. There are three main reasons to compress files. The first is to make them more easily digestible on the receiver’s side. The second is that it adds a layer of protection to the sent files. And lastly, it helps in managing the reception of a large number of files.

Online Dictionaries

Since access to the IATE (Inter-Agency Terminology Exchange, see https://iate.cdt.eu.int/iatenew/login.jsp), the ultra terminology database that contains the EU online terminology databases (Eurodicautom, TIS, Euterpe, etc.), has now been blocked for anyone not working on EU projects, here is another resource that offers surprisingly good results: https://www.lexicool.com/. Among other things, Lexicool is a directory of online dictionaries in many different language combinations.

And here are two other resources that are fun to look through: TranslatorsCafe.com has an interesting How-To library with a number of valuable articles on all sorts of translation-specific topics (see www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/HowTo.asp) and so does TranslationDirectory.com at www.translationdirectory.com/article_index.htm.

TRADOS Bug?

It’s been slightly annoying that after shutting down various TRADOS applications (in my case MultiTerm iX and MultiTerm Extract) the error message MEM_BAD_POINTER popped up. While it was easy to click it away, I was glad to find a link to a “fix” on the TradosYahoo! user group. The problem is caused by a third-party tool and they say it is caused by Windows XP SP2… You can find more information at www.microquill.com/kb/xpsp2.htm and I can happily report that after writing to them, I received a new DLL file within a few minutes. I found two instances of shw32.dll on my computer that I replaced and I can now happily close all Tradosapplications without unnecessary error messages.

In Brief

• Wikipedias have certainly been discussed a lot in the media recently, but for those who have not yet had a chance to look at what it is, take a look at how Wikipedia defines itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia. From a translator’s perspective, the Wiktionary project under the Wikipedia umbrella may be particularly interesting (see https://en.wiktionary.org/). You may also read more on the translation of Wikipedias in the LISA newsletter: https://www.lisa.org/globalizationinsider/2005/06/wikipedia_local.html.
• One of the best individual Most Valuable Professional (MVP) sites for Word is that of Shauna Kelly at www.shaunakelly.com/word where among many other things, you can find her nifty little Word count tool (see www.shaunakelly.com/word/CompleteWordCount). You may also want to browse the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) site for Microsoft Word, https://word.mvps.org/, not only because it is well-designed, but also because it stands in real contrast to other, much poorer, MVP websites (see a listing of all the sites at https://www.mvps.org/).
• Two free little tools from Maxprograms: The first one converts any comma-separated value (.CSV) file (and that includes the Microsoft glossaries that are available at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/msdn/newup/Glossary) into a TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) file. The second one is just what the name says it is: a TMX Validator, and it’s quite useful if the import of any particular TMX file into your translation memory applications fails and you need to verify its integrity.
• My company, International Writers’ Group, is one of the founding partners of TM Marketplace, a new company and a new business model introduced in June at the Localization World conference in Bonn (see https://www.localizationworld.com/). TM Marketplace connects owners of translation memories and other parties by serving as a broker for the licensing of the translation memory content between these parties (see https://www.tmmarketplace.com/).
• And here is some very good news for new or less-experienced Trados users: The Spanish localization company ITTranslations has written and published a concise and well-written “Trados Manual for Dummies.” More information, including a freely downloadable excerpt, at https://www.ittranslations.com/trados.htm.
• Apple aficionado (and employee) Michael Metzger recently pointed to an interesting link that gives a kind of rough overview of the localization process of the Macintosh environment: https://developer.apple.com/intl/localization/tools.html.html. This page also includes a link to AppleTrans, which is a “text editor specially designed for translators, featuring online corpora which represents ‘translation memory’ accessible through documents.” JZ