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.
Make Word Jump
Here’s a very cool trick on how to jump to a passage in a Word document when you resume your task after closing a document: You can highlight a section (several words, a paragraph, or a graphic) within Word, drag that section while pressing Ctrl+Shift and create a shortcut (i.e., a cross-reference) within your document, a separate one, or even to your desktop. Clicking on that shortcut will make you jump to the original text. This is a great trick after a long day of translating or editing if you want to jump right back the next morning with fresher eyes to the place where you left off. And to remove the resulting bookmarks in the Word file you just have to select Insert> Bookmarks, search for the bookmark, and click Delete.
TRADOS Files sans TRADOS
Maxprograms (see www.maxprograms.com) has just added yet another little jewel to its set of tools with RTFStyler. Though it may not sound too impressive, what RTFStyler does — it’s a free utility that converts normal RTF documents to TRADOS segmented RTF files — can be extremely helpful. This tool allows you to work in any of the TRADOS-compatible tools such as Déjà Vu, Wordfast, and Heartsome and at the same time work for clients who send you original Word documents but ask for the TRADOS-processed “uncleaned” version as a deliverable.
Printing with Outlook
Although I find much to like about Outlook (2003!) I have always disliked its print behavior. Often I get responses from readers of the newsletter that include a copy of the complete newsletter. If I just want to print the first page of comments, my printer delivers the remaining 5 or 6 pages of the newsletter as well and Outlook offers no way of stopping this. Outlook uses various Print dialogs, including its own rather limited Print dialog if you try to print a message without actually opening it or when you open it in Text or Rich Text format. If, however, you open the message in HTML format, Outlook uses the Print dialog from Internet Explorer, which gives you a great deal more flexibility as to what can be printed out.
So here’s the take-home trick: To force Outlook to use the IE print capabilities with a text email message, press the Forward button (or select Ctrl+F) and select Format> HTML. Now you can print whatever you like.
New Microsoft Glossaries
Microsoft just released its latest glossaries at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/msdn/newup/Glossary. For the newer reader, those are bilingual translation memories for the user interface translation of many of the Microsoft products. From Albanian to Welsh, this release includes an impressive list of no less than 58 languages! Depending on the language, there can be a substantial difference in the size of the zip file. The German glossaries alone are more than 100 MB while the Nynorsk and Albanian ones are less than 2 MB).
This release is particularly useful, though, because glossaries of older product releases never published before are also included along with the newest ones. The FTP server that the glossaries are located on is not particularly strong and you may have to try several times before you can connect.
For Those Pesky Attachments
Lots of readers had something to say about zipping and sending large attachments: Lauren Katzive recommended the open-source FTP client (=program) Filezilla (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla), and Eric Schneider pointed to a helpful review of Macintosh FTP clients at www.macworld.com/2003/09/reviews/ftpclients and to the freeware Mac client Cyberduck (see http://cyberduck.ch). You should be aware, though, that FTP servers, even if they are password-protected, are not impossible to hack. Ken Clark from 1-800-translate mentioned that he has finally given up on FTP technology after being hi-jacked by the “Turkish Brotherhood of Hackers” (no joke).
Eric also mentioned a little program from some folks in beautiful Bellingham, Washington. BeeMail (see www.thebeehive.com) is a little application that monitors your email and automatically places every attachment that is larger than a certain size (to be configured by you — the default size is 750 KB) on a server that can be downloaded by the mail recipient.
Oh, how I wish that many of my clients who regularly send me hideously sized attachments would use this application!
Outside the “Dark Side”
I’ve mentioned the AppleTrans translation suite for the Macintosh before (see http://developer.apple.com/intl/localization/tools.html#appletrans), and Tam McTurk has published a knowledgeable first review on this for various Mac discussion groups. Here is an excerpt: “AppleTrans is fast—light years ahead of WordFast, for example, and easily as fast as Deja Vu on the dark side (for the uninitiated: ‘dark side’= Microsoft/Windows). Access to multiple TMs (corpora) and Terminology/Glossaries really is instant.”
You may subscribe to the NCTA-grown list/Mac User Group TransMUG (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transmug/) or to the MacLingua list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/maclingua/) where the review was first posted, to read this in full.
