Resources for learning European Portuguese (A1-B2)

When I first moved to Portugal eleven years ago, I resolved to avoid the difficulties I had experienced as an exchange student in Germany many years before, where my northern German accent and academic style of speaking caused bartenders and salespeople in the Saarland to refuse service shortly after my arrival. So in Évora, I decided to learn the language "of the street" from neighbors, shopkeepers and daily tasks. It was a slow process to be sure, but I soon learned that other options were hardly available in the interior; even the local university offered essentially nothing except an A1-level course for Erasmus students, which was poorly attended (and often canceled) due to the lack of coordination among the faculty. In that city and in the border town I moved to a few years later, there were also neither language schools nor established, reliable tutors available. The few who could be found had issues with low business volumes and soon ceased their registered commercial activities.

In the heavily populated coastal regions with a large number of immigrants or tourists with money, there are a number of good programs at universities or private institutions, but the time commitments for these (typically weeks or months of full-time attendance) were not really compatible with my lifestyle and work schedule, and the most highly recommended programs cost thousands of euros that I needed for other things.

When it came time to take the CIPLE exam to certify A2-level competence for my permanent residence (which is also required for citizenship for those not married to a Portuguese citizen), I enrolled in online courses offered by the Camões Institute in Lisbon. These had three options: an entirely self-guided program, and two programs with some level of interaction with an assigned tutor for 30 minute sessions each or every other week. I opted for the latter, and the excellent tutors (who in my case were usually native Portuguese enrolled in some graduate program in Spain) were probably the main reason I was able to pass the exam and get my título da residência permanente. The actual exercises in the online courses weren't very good (except for the writing assignments), and I found a lot of functional errors in some of them. Plain sloppy programming, which is really shameful in a country that hosts the Web Summit every year.

My early explorations of apps available for language learning a decade ago were not very satisfying. Flashcard programs like Anki or Memrise are really too limited for achieving any kind of functional competence, and at the time I found nothing with any kind of systematic structure for acquiring basic grammar and conversational skills. I could open and read an entirely Portuguese grammar book and understand the content without difficulty because the concepts were largely familiar to me from other language study, but without some systematic practice or more social opportunities in the country, the grammar books were of little real use.

One hears that "immersion is critical", and when I moved to Portugal, I assumed that my learning curve would be even faster than it was years before for German, Russian and Japanese, but there's immersion in the shallow end of a language, with simple, comprehensible input to build a foundation of basics, and then there is immersion in the fast river of daily adult life with bills to pay and neighbors and authorities of all kinds to deal with, where in the comfortable slumber of a language novice, it is more likely that "human voices wake us, and we drown".

For a long time, the only "comprehensible input" (in Krashen's sense) that I could find to help improve my Portuguese was the podcast "Portuguese with Leo", which is intermediate level, about right for me by the time I discovered it, but still lacking the content I needed to patch up gaps in my competence.

Duolingo, allegedly the world's most popular language learning app, while helpful for basic Spanish, simply sucks whale dork when it comes to learning Portuguese for Europe or Africa. People have no idea how bad and useless its teaching of Brazilian Portuguese is for a visit to Portugal until they get here and realize that what they hear sounds nothing like what they learned. There's nothing wrong with Brazilian, and if I were planning to visit Brazil or spend a lot of time with people from there, I would certainly spend time mastering the quirks of pronunciation and the great differences in vocabulary and grammar in informal speech particularly, but for Portugal all that is simply unhelpful in the extreme. The differences are far greater than between ordinary speech in the UK and the US, for example, and on my first visit to London in 1977, I understood almost nothing of the directions people gave me on the street. In what was supposed to be my native language. So don't expect to get far with Brazilian in Portugal. Even if you are a native speaker from Brazil, the pace and manner of speech here may make you feel like a victim of a traffic accident.

But meanwhile, there are a few good apps and sites that focus on European Portuguese and may help you prepare for holidays or life in Portugal. The best of these I've found are described below.

I didn't realize until someone in a Facebook language learner's group mentioned the Practice Portuguese app that I had actually discovered and subscribed to their YouTube channel some time ago. But I didn't pay enough attention to the YouTube content to realize that there was something more on offer and that this something was, to a large extent, something useful for me, even after eleven years of living in Portugal and a competence level that allows me to conduct daily business and socialize in my hunting club without a lot of difficulty.

I'm currently working my way through the A1 level of the Practice Portuguese iOS app and website, though I also skip ahead and enjoy a lot of the B1/B2-level content in lessons, videos, podcasts, etc. After a few days of looking at the free content, I decided to subscribe (the best deal here is via the web site, not the online app stores for phones and tablets), and I am finding a lot of useful material to fill basic knowledge gaps even at the simplest level. I'm also impressed by the well-considered and somewhat original options for review, including the recently introduced "audio review" option.

One of the things that distinguishes the content of Practice Portuguese from Duolingo, for example, is that the voices used in the app are real ones (sometimes with shitty audio and a lot of background noise, but there is always a button to click and hear the same expression in a clear, noise-free native speaker's voice). The use of a large number of different speakers is helpful, I think, to recognize some of the different pronunciation one might encounter, and this is often dealt with explicitly in the lessons. Not differences between Brazil and Portugal but rather how one might here something in Lisbon as opposed to Beja or Braga.

Another resource I found recently is "Conversa Portuguese". It uses the Learnworlds platform (similar to Teachable, which I use sometimes to offer online CAT tool instruction for memoQ) and has what looks like a well-structured program for those needing Portuguese competence for countries other than Brazil. The platform also offers quite a number of useful, free resources for practice. I've looked at these resources, and I like them, but I haven't tried the commercial instruction program (yet) for lack of time. I hope to do so later this year and offer an in-depth report on what I find.

***

Some may wonder how it is that I can still find useful learning opportunities for European Portuguese with programs like Practice Portuguese or Conversa Portuguese, given that I've lived in the country for so long, I have a Portuguese partner with whom I share a farm and a life, and I've had a lifelong reputation of being "gifted" with languages (said reputation being largely unearned and taken seriously mostly by monolinguals). Well, I ask myself that too sometimes, but it is what it is, and "fluency" is really context-dependent, and depending on one's needs and commitments may differ greatly between individuals. It all really comes down to comprehensible input, I think, and that depends a lot on interests and background. Within a few weeks of coming to Portugal, I could grab an organic chemistry textbook in the library and read it, understanding everything in Portuguese (even though I could pronounce none of it). But it was probably a year before I could reliably order a pizza or tell the butcher just what I wanted.

For my friends and colleagues and others who plan to visit Portugal for a holiday or a professional conference or who may consider living here at some point, the options I have described in this article should give you a good foundation for coping with the variety of Portuguese you'll encounter here and perhaps make the culture of the country a bit more accessible. Portugal is not the Paradise some claim it to be, but of all the places I've lived in my life, I find it the least problematic for the things that matter most to me. Your mileage may differ, but equipped with some basic language skills, you'll be more fit for the journey.

Ferramentas de Tradução - CAT Tools Day at Universidade Nova de Lisboa

The Faculty of Sciences and Humanities held its first "CAT Tools Day" on June 16, 2018 with a diverse program intended to provide a lusophone overview of current best practices in the technologies to support professional translation work. The event offered standard presentation and demonstrations in a university auditorium with parallel software introduction workshops for groups of up to 18 persons in an instructional computer lab in another building.

The day began with morning sessions covering SDL Trados Studio and various aspects of speech recognition.

Dr.  Helena Moniz explains aspects of speech analysis.

I found the presentation by Dr. Helena Moniz from the University of Lisbon faculty to be particularly interesting for its discussion of the many different voice models and how these are applied to speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. David Hardisty of FCSH at Universidade Nova also gave a good overview of the state of speech recognition for practical translation work, including his unobtrusive methods for utilizing machine pseudo-translation capabilities in dictated translations.

Parallel introductory workshops for software tools included memoQ 8, SDL Trados Studio 2017 and ABBYY FineReader - two sessions for each.

Attendees learned about ABBYY FineReader, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ in the translation computer lab

The ABBYY FineReader session I attended gave a good overview in Portuguese of basics and good practice, including a discussion of how to avoid common mistakes when converting scanned documents in a number of languages.

The afternoon featured several short, practical presentations by students, discussions by me regarding the upcoming integrated voice input solution for memoQ and the preparation of PDF files for reference, translation, print deadline emergencies and customer relations.

Rúben Mata discusses Discord

The final session of the day was a "tools clinic" - an open Q&A about any aspect of translation technology and workflow challenges. This was a good opportunity to reinforce and elaborate on the many useful concepts and practical approaches shown throughout the day and to share ideas on how to adapt and thrive as a professional in the language services sector today.

Hosts David Hardisty and Marco Neves of FCSH plan to make this an annual event to exchange knowledge on technology and best practices in translation and editing work in discussions between practicing professionals and academics in the lusophone community. So watch for announcements of the next event in 2019!

Some of the topics of this year's conference will be explored in greater depth in three 25-hour courses offered in Portuguese and English this summer at Universidade Nova in Lisbon. On July 9th there will be a thorough course on memoQ Basics and workflows, followed by a Best Practices course on July 19th, covering memoQ and many other aspects of professional work. On September 3rd the university will offer a course on project management skills for language services, including the memoQ Server, project management business tools, file preparation and more. It is apparently also possible to get inexpensive housing at the university to attend these courses, which is quite a good thing given the rapidly rising cost of accommodation in Lisbon. Details on the housing option will be posted on this blog when I can find them.

memoQ Web Search examples for Portuguese

This week I'm in Lisbon teaching a 24-hour Boas Practicas (best practice) evening course for translation technology with David Hardisty and Marco Neves. Tonight we're covering web search with various sites and tools, including memoQ Web Search.

Unfortunately, Kilgray provides examples of configuring the web search only for English and German, and many of the site configurations are defective. And if you have other languages as your working pairs there isn't much you can do with those examples.

In tonight's class we had students working in the following pairs:

• Portuguese to English
• English to Portuguese
• Portuguese to Russian
• French to Portuguese
• Spanish to Portuguese
• German to Portuguese

So we created some example configurations to do web look-ups in all these pairs. And they are available here.

I was a bit surprised to find that I never blogged the chapters of my books that dealt with configuring the web search - I'll have to get around to that one of these days - but the memoQ Help isn't bad for this if you need a little guidance on how to add more site searches or change the configurations of these.

Anyone is welcome to do with the configurations provided here as they please; I hope they will help friends, colleagues and students in the Lusophone world to go a little farther with a great tool.

NOW is not the National Organization of Words...

... but with over 4 billion of them, that interpretation of the News on the Web corpus at Brigham Young University would be plausible. BYU is known for its high quality research corpora available to the public. The news corpus grows by about 10,000 articles each day, and its content can be searched online or downloaded.

The results are displayed in a highlighted keyword in context (KWIC) hit list with the source publications indicated in the "CONTEXT" column:

As a legal translator, I find the BYU corpus of US Supreme Court Opinions more useful. It displays results in a similar manner:

It is difficult or impossible to configure a direct search in these corpora using memoQ Web Search, IntelliWebSearch or similar integrated web search features in translation environments. However, these tools can be used as a shortcut to open the URL, and the search string can be applied once the site has been accessed. Since I perform searches like this to study context infrequently, a standalone shortcut with IWS serves me best; if I were using this to study usage in a language I don't master very well, like Portuguese (yes there is a Portuguese corpus at BYU - actually, two of them, one historical), then I might include the URL in a set of sites which open every time I invoke memoQ Web Search or a larger set of terminology-related sites in an IntelliWebSearch group.

One great benefit of using such corpora as a language learner, is that context and collocations (words that occur together with a particular word or phrase) can be studied easily, better than with dictionaries, enabling one to sound a bit less like an idiot in a second, third, fourth or fifth language. Or for many perhaps, even their first language :-)

CAT tools for weapons license study

More than a decade ago I found a very useful book on practical corpus linguistics, which has had perhaps the greatest impact of any single thing on the way I approach terminology. Among other things, it discusses how to create special text collections for particular subjects and then mine these for frequently used expressions in those domains. It has become a standard recommendation in my talks at professional conferences and universities as well as in private consultations for terminology.

Slide from my recent talk at the Buenos Aires University Facultad de Derecho

In the last two weeks I had an opportunity to test my recommendations in a little different way than the one in which I usually apply them. Typically I use subject-specific corpora in English (my native language) to study the "authentic" voice of the expert in a domain that may be related to my own technical specialties but which differs in its use of language in significant ways. This time I used it and other techniques to study subject matter I master reasonably well (the features, use and safety aspects of firearms for hunting) with the aim of acquiring vocabulary and an idea of what to expect for a weapons qualification test in Portugal, where I have lived for several years but have not yet achieved satisfactory competence in the language for my daily routine.

It all started two weeks ago when I attended an all-day course on Portugal's firearm and other weapon laws in Portalegre. Seven and a half solid hours of lecture left me utterly fatigued at the end of the day, but it was an interesting one in which I had a lot of aha! moments as I saw a lot of concepts presented in Portuguese which I knew well in German and English. Most of the time I looked up words I saw in the slides or in the course textbook prepared by the PSP and made pencil notes on vocabulary in my book.

Twelve days afterward I was scheduled to take a written text, and in the unlikely event that I passed it, I was supposed to be subject to a practical examination on the safe use of hunting firearms are related matters.

Years ago when I studied for a hunting license in Germany I had hundreds of hours of theoretical and practical instruction in a nine-month course concurrent with a one-year understudy with an experienced hunter. Participants in a German hunting course typically read dozens of supplemental books and study thousands of sample questions for the exam.

The pickings are a little slimmer in Portugal.

There are no study guides in Portuguese or any other language which help to prepare for the weapons tests that I am aware of except the slim book prepared by the police.

There are, however, a number of online forums where people talk about their experiences in the required courses and on the tests. Sometimes there are sample questions reproduced with varying degrees of accuracy, and there is a lot of talk about things which people found particularly challenging.

So I copied and pasted these discussions into text files and loaded them into a memoQ project for Portuguese to English translation. The corpus was not particularly large (about 4000 words altogether), so the number of candidates found in a statistical survey was limited, but still useful to someone with my limited vocabulary. I then proceeded to translate about half of the corpus into English, manually selecting less frequent but quite important terms and making notes on perplexing bits of grammar or tricks hidden in the question examples.

A glossary in progress as I study for my Portuguese weapons license

The glossary also contained some common vocabulary that one might legitimately argue does not belong in a specialist glossary, but since these were common words likely to occur in the exam and I did not know them, it was entirely appropriate to include them.

Other resources on the subject are scarce; I did find a World War II vintage military dictionary for Portuguese and English which can easily be made into a searchable PDF using ABBYY Finereader or other tools but not much else.

Any CAT tool would have worked equally well for my learning objectives - the free tools AntConc and OmegaT are in no way inferior to what memoQ offered me.

On the day of the test, I was allowed to bring a Portuguese-to-English dictionary and a printout of my personal glossary. However, the translation work that I did in the course of building the glossary had imprinted the relevant vocabulary rather well on my mind, so I hardly consulted either. I was tired (having hardly slept the night before) and nervous (so that I mixed up the renewal intervals for driver's licenses and hunting licenses), and I just didn't have the stamina to pick apart some particularly long, obtuse sentences), but in the end I passed with a score of 90% correct. That wouldn't win me any kudos with a translation customer, but it allowed me to go on to the next phase.

Practical shooting test at the police firing range

In the day of lectures, I dared to ask only one question, and I garbled it so badly that the instructor really didn't understand, so I was not looking forward to the oral part of the exam. But much to my surprise, I understood all the instructions on exam day, and I was even able to joke with the policeman conducting the shooting test. In the oral examination in which I had to identify various weapons and ammunition types and explain their use and legal status, and in the final part where I went on a "hunt" with a police commissioner to demonstrate that I could handle a shotgun correctly under field conditions and respond appropriately to a police check, I had no difficulties at all except remembering the Portuguese word for "trigger lock". All the terms I had drilled for passive identification in the written exam had unexpectedly become active vocabulary, and I was able to hold my own in all the spoken interactions - not a usual experience in my daily routine.

The use of the same professional tools and techniques that I rely on for my daily work proved far better than expected as learning aids for my examination and in a much greater scope than I expected. I am confident that a similar application could be helpful in other areas where I am not very competent in my understanding and active use of Portuguese.

If it works for me, it is reasonable to assume that others who must cope with challenges of a test or interactions of some kind in a foreign language might also benefit from learning with a translator's working tools.

Máquinas virtuais para traduzir e ditar no Apple OS/X para Totós (ou como os Macs são os melhores amigos dos tradutores Portugueses)

 

RESUMO

O OS/X, o sistema operativo da Apple, inclui nas suas últimas versões a aplicação “Ditado”, que permite ditar para o computador numa panóplia de diferentes idiomas, com a dita máquina a transcrever o texto ditado para o ecrã.

Neste momento, poderão eventualmente pensar “Ah, pois, e tal, isso é o que o Dragon NaturallySpeaking faz!”. Pois é. Mas a versão actual do DNS já não suporta Português, e a aplicação do OS/X, com base no software da mesma Nuance que produz o DNS, suporta Português (deste e do outro lado do Atlântico), Alemão (Suíço e o da Alemanha ), Checo, Chinês (três variantes), Coreano (da Coreia do Sul - assumo que quem estava a desenvolver a versão do Norte foi raptado pelo regime local), Dinamarquês, Eslovaco, Espanhol (três variantes), Finlandês, Francês (três variantes), Grego, Holandês, Húngaro, Indonésio, Inglês (quatro variantes), Italiano (duas variantes), Japonês, Malaio, Norueguês, Polaco, Romeno, Russo, Sueco, Tailandês, Turco, Ucraniano e Vietnamita.

O sistema operativo faz isto descarregando dicionários acústicos com informação acerca do sotaque e idioma esperado, que são processados localmente com base nessa informação. A melhor parte é esta: podem instalar os que quiserem.

Trabalhando eu essencialmente com Português e Inglês, e sendo detentor de uma licença do Dragon Naturally Speaking, pude comparar a funcionalidade de um e outro. No entanto, a maioria das ferramentas CAT não funciona em ambiente OS/X, pelo que se torna necessário recorrer a máquinas virtuais a correrem o Windows para beneficiar simultaneamente das potencialidades acrescidas oferecidas pela Apple e da base comum oferecida pela plataforma da Microsoft.

Assim, estabeleceu-se Inicialmente, uma base comum para avaliar o software de visualização que permita beneficiar do ditar juntamente com aplicações CAT.  Foram avaliados dois pacotes de software de virtualização com exactamente a mesma máquina virtual, e testado o desempenho e funcionalidade em ambos.

INTRODUÇÃO, OU COMO RAIO ACABEI A FORMATAR O MEU PORTÁTIL E A FAZER EXPERIÊNCIAS COM ELE EM NOME DA CIÊNCIA

Há alguns meses atrás, o Kevin Lossner falou-me de um desenvolvimento levado a cabo por William Hardisty e Joana Bernardo, uma aluna sua, que estavam a utilizar a transcrição automática de texto ditado  incluída no OS/X como uma ferramenta de acessibilidade e aumento da produtividade num contexto de tradução. Aliás, esta mesma abordagem foi descrita e discutida num evento na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, o SDL Day, em 22 de Janeiro de 2015.

A utilização deste recurso não é nada de novo -  a Nuance construiu a reputação da sua empresa com base na família de produtos “Dragon”. Infelizmente, na última versão (que utilizo num PC para a escrita de documentos originais em Inglês, relacionados com os meus objectivos académicos), pude constatar que o Português tinha sido abandonado.

Felizmente, a Apple assegurou que o seu sistema operativo tinha esta funcionalidade. Agora a questão era como implementar essa funcionalidade com as ferramentas disponíveis, a maioria em ambiente Windows.

David Hardisty e Joana Bernardo relataram a sua utilização recorrendo ao Parallels Desktop, uma ferramenta de virtualização para o OS/X, que permitia utilizar este recurso num ambiente instalado na máquina virtual - que pode correr o Windows, entre outros sistemas operativos.

Este artigo debruça-se assim sobre a instalação dos dois  pacotes de software - VMWare Fusion e Parallels Desktop - o seu desempenho e outras observações relevantes.

1 - QUAL O SOFTWARE DE VIRTUALIZAÇÃO A UTILIZAR?

Como referido anteriormente, este artigo debruça-se essencialmente sobre o VMWare Fusion 7 e Parallels Desktop 10, as versões actuais à data da escrita destas palavras. Existem diversas outras aplicações de virtualização, tendo eu utilizado o VirtualBox da Oracle desde o momento em que adquiri a máquina utilizada neste teste comparativo.

Infelizmente, esta última aplicação não permitia a utilização destas funcionalidades pelo que foi imediatamente excluída. É uma pena, porque ao contrário dos outros, é gratuito. Para além disso, serviu-me fielmente até ao momento em que limpei o portátil.

Quer o software da VMWare quer o da Parallels são produtos comerciais, e ambos mencionam a integração da funcionalidade de ditado com o seu sistema de virtualização como argumentos para a sua utilização.

Portanto a questão que se coloca é: funcionam realmente, e qual dos dois é o melhor para este trabalho?

2 - INSTALAÇÃO

Não vos vou maçar com pormenores aborrecidos - digamos que aproveitei a oportunidade para limpar o portátil, tendo-o formatado e feito uma instalação do OS/X Yosemite. A máquina em que foi testado foi o meu fiel Macbook Air de 2013, com 8GB RAM, i5 1.3 GHz e um SSD de 120 GB.

A instalação de ambas as aplicações é bastante simples, e o diálogo para a criação da máquina virtual é praticamente idêntico. Ambos pedem para registarem/comprarem a aplicação, e ambos permitem testá-la - por 14 dias no caso do Parallels Desktop, por 30 no caso do VMware Fusion.

 Como estava a criar uma máquina nova, foi esta a opção que escolhi com o Parallels

 Apontei para um ficheiro ISO (os Macbook Air não têm leitor de CD...)...

 ... e escolhi a opção "Produtividade" para predefinir a configuração da máquina virtual.

Nota importante: Se quiserem configurar a instalação do Windows, desmarquem "Instalação expressa". 

Dei comigo a instalar o Windows em Alemão antes de cancelar a coisa. Eu fiz a activação do Windows no interior da máquina virtual.  

 

Eh... é o Windows 7, pá!

 

E cá está ele a instalar...

... e com o Windows a funcionar, a ditar para o Bloco de Notas!

A instalação do VMWare Fusion é muito semelhante. Eu clonei a máquina Virtual do Parallels para garantir uma igualdade entre ambos. Em todo o caso não registem a aplicação! Eu esperei uns dias e comecei a ver publicidade a oferecer descontos no Parallels, na loja online da empresa :)

3 - CONFIGURAÇÃO DA MÁQUINA VIRTUAL

Ambos os sistemas utilizaram exactamente a mesma configuração: 30 GB de disco, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2010 (é a versão que tenho licenciada para PC), Mozilla Firefox e memoQ 2014R2. Foi ainda instalada a aplicação Novabench para medir o desempenho de ambas as máquinas virtuais, a correrem sob definições de desempenho máximo, com o portátil ligado à corrente.

4 - DESEMPENHO E RESULTADOS

Logo após a instalação de qualquer uma das máquinas, o ditado fica imediatamente disponível. Basta utilizar a combinação de teclas predefinida (ou outra) e este começa imediatamente a funcionar, com pouco mais atraso que quando utilizado nativamente no OS/X. Todos os comandos estão disponíveis, e pode-se mudar de idioma através do menu flutuante que acompanha o cursor da escrita. Uma vez que o reconhecimento e voz é nativo do OS/X e transposto para a máquina virtual, não há diferenças imediatamente evidentes entre ambas, embora as medições de desempenho contem outra história.

A avaliação de desempenho do Windows 7 dá uma pontuação mais alta ao Parallels Desktop, em virtude essencialmente do desempenho gráfico.

Parallels Desktop...

...e o VMWare.

Já o Novabench dá o resultado exactamente oposto, com o VMware Fusion a ter um desempenho gráfico marcadamente melhor, embora pior em tudo o resto, especialmente no desempenho do processador.

Parallels Desktop... 

...e VMWare Fusion.

Na prática, durante o período em que o testei, não notei diferenças - admito no entanto que isso possa ser diferente à medida que se utilizam mais e mais recursos do sistema através da máquina virtual.

Quanto ao desempenho da aplicação “Ditado” - é boa. Muito boa, na verdade. Consigo velocidades superiores às do DNS em Inglês, embora tenha de editar mais frequentemente o texto. O “Ditado” requer uma dicção calma, monocórdica e pausada. No seu melhor, resulta em frases de 40, 50 palavras com pouquíssimos erros (um ou outro do dicionário, e costuma ter problemas com artigos que soem ao fim ou início das palavras antecedentes ou seguintes. Também é aborrecido colocar a primeira letra sempre em maiúsculas.

Em termos de velocidade pura, para quem está habituado a utilizar o Dragon juntamente com o teclado e rato (a que o Kevin chama “mixed mode”) a diferença em velocidade e ergonomia é gritante. Este passou a ser o meu equipamento de eleição para tradução.

Descobri que numa casa em que duas crianças pequenas, dois cães e uma gata correm, em números constantemente variáveis entre si, atrás uns dos outros, o velho auricular do meu iPhone 4 me permitia uma melhor qualidade de som ao colocar o microfone mais perto da minha boca e mais longe da algazarra doméstica.

Descobri ainda que existe uma variedade interessante de comandos, não na aplicação “Ditado”, mas na opção Acessibilidade das Preferências do Sistema, sob a opção “Ditado”. Podem activar a opção de Comandos Avançados (que é pelo menos tão detalhada quanto a do DNS), ou criar os vossos próprios comandos.

Localização das opções para a ferramenta Ditado e configuração de comandos da mesma.

Localização da opção "Ditado" no menu de Acessibilidade... 

 ... e a lista de comandos disponíveis (são muitos, mesmo muitos). Ao clicarem no "+" podem criar os vossos próprios comandos!

CONCLUSÃO

Bem, tem que ter um fim, não? Pessoalmente, não notei diferenças entre o VMWare e o Parallels quanto ao ditar o texto e em velocidade, apesar dos resultados dos testes de desempenho.
No entanto, o Paralells oferece algumas coisas interessantes, tais como integração directa com o ambiente do Yosemite (podem copiar ficheiros de e para a Máquina Virtual de dentro dela ou fora).
Isto é-me particularmente útil porque assim só preciso de ter uma cópia do conteúdo local da minha Google Drive, ao invés de uma em cada máquina, virtual ou verdadeira.

Gostei ainda da possibilidade de lançar directamente as aplicações da máquina virtual a partir do Launchpad.

Dito isto, e considerando o desconto, decidi-me pelo Parallels Desktop. Considerando a minha utilização da Google Drive para questões administrativas, dá-me um jeitaço ter apenas de sincronizar uma cópia da mesma no OS/X, a qual é acedida pela máquina virtual.

Contudo, o VMWare é uma boa opção, e a diferença de desempenho não me foi notória, pelo que suponho seja uma questão de escolherem conforme a vossa preferência. O VMware é mais barato (o preço fica parecido com os códigos de desconto), mas permite a instalação em três máquinas, para além de outras diferenças. O Parallels apenas permite instalar numa.

Divirtam-se, e bom trabalho!

(Este bocado de prosa foi escrito no mais absoluto desrespeito pelo Acordo Ortográfico. Assim se escreve em bom Português.)

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This guest post was submitted by Tiago Neto, a German/English to European Portuguese translator and veterinarian, who has written what I believe to be the first article comparing the efficiency of different virtual machines for Windows-based translation environments running on Apple Macintosh hardware. Thank you, Tiago!

SDL conquers translation at Universidade Nova in Lisbon

The day started inauspiciously for me, with a TomTom navigation system determined to keep me from the day planned at Lisbon's New University to discuss SDL Trados Studio and its place in the translation technology ecosphere. When the fourth GPS location almost proved a charm, and I hiked the last kilometer on an arthritic foot, swearing furiously that this was my last visit to the Big City, I found the lecture hall at last, an hour and a half late, and managed to arrive just after Paul Filkin's presentation of the SDL OpenExchange, an underused, but rather interesting and helpful resource center for plug-ins and other resources for SDL Trados Studio victims to bridge the gap between its out-of-the-box configurations and what particular users or workflows might require. There are a lot of good things to be found there - the memoQ XLIFF definition and Glossary Converter are my particular favorites. Paul talked about many interesting things, I was told, and there is even a plug-in created for SDL Trados Studio by a major governmental organization which has functionality much like memoQ's LiveDocs (discussed afterward but not shown in the talk I missed, however). In the course of the day, Paul also disclosed an exciting new feature for SDL Trados Studio which many memoQ users have been missing in the latest version, memoQ 2014 R2 (see the video at the end).

I arrived just in time for the highlight of the day, the demonstration of Portuguese speech recognition by David Hardisty and two of his masters students, Isabel Rocha and Joana Bernardo. Speech recognition is perhaps one of the most interesting, useful and exciting technologies applied to translation today, but its application is limited to the languages available, which are not so many with the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking application from Nuance. Portuguese is curiously absent from the current offerings despite its far more important role in the world than minor languages like German or French.

Professor Hardisty led off with an overview of the equipment and software used and recommended (slides available here); the solution for Portuguese uses the integrated voice recognition features of the Macintosh operating system. With Parallels Desktop 10 for Mac it can be used for Windows applications such as SDL Trados Studio and memoQ as well. Nuance provides the voice recognition technology to Apple, and Brazilian and European Portuguese are among the languages provided to Apple which are not part of Nuance's commercial products for consumers (Dragon Naturally Speaking and Dragon Dictate).

Information from the Apple web site states that

Dictation lets you talk where you would type — and it now works in over 40 languages. So you can reply to an email, search the web or write a report using just your voice. Navigate to any text field, activate Dictation, then say what you want to write. Dictation converts your words into text. OS X Yosemite also adds more than 50 editing and formatting commands to Dictation. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to bold a paragraph, delete a sentence or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows to create your own Dictation commands.

Portuguese was among the languages added with OS X Yosemite.

Ms. Bernardo began her demonstration by showing her typing speed - somewhat less than optimal due to the effects of disability from cerebral palsy. I was told that this had led to some difficulties during a professional internship, where her typing speed was not sufficient to keep up with the expectations for translation output in the company. However, I saw for myself how the integrated speech recognition features enable her to lay down text in a word processor or translation environment tool as quickly as or faster than most of us can type. In Portuguese, a language I had thought not available for work by my colleagues translating into that language.

A week before I had visited Professor Hardisty's evening class, where after my lecture on interoperability for CAT tools, Ms. Rocha had shown me how she works with Portuguese speech recognition as I do, in "mixed mode" using a fluid work style of dictation, typing, and pointing technology. She said that her own work is not much faster than when she types, but that the physical and mental strain of the work is far less than when she types and the quality of her translation tends to be better, because she is more focused on the text. This greater concentration on words, meaning and good communication matches my own experience, but I don't necessarily believe her about the speed. I don't think she has actually measured her throughput. My observation after the evening class and again at the event with SDL was that she works as fast as I do with dictation, and when I have a need for speed that can go to triple my typing rate or more per hour.

In any case, I am very excited that speech recognition is now available to a wider circle of professionals, and with integrated dictation features in the upcoming Windows 10 (a free upgrade for Windows 8 users), I expect this situation will only improve. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of this technology for improving the ergonomics of our work. It's more than just leveling the field for gifted colleagues like Joana Bernardo, who can now bring to bear her linguistic skills and subject knowledge at a working speed on par with other professionals - or faster - but for someone like me who often works with pain and numbness in the hands from strain injuries, or all the rest of you banging away happily on keyboards, with an addiction to pain meds in your future perhaps, speech recognition offers a better future. Some are perhaps put off by the unhelpful, boastful emphasis of others on high output, which anyone familiar with speech recognition and human-assisted machine pseudo-translation (HAMPsTr) editing knows is faster and better than what any processes involving human revision of computer-generated linguistic sausage can produce, but it's really about working better and doing better work with better personal health. It's not about silly "Hendzel Units".

It has been pointed out a few times that Mac dictation or other speech recognition implementations lack the full range of command features found in an application like Dragon Naturally Speaking. That's really irrelevant. The most efficient speech recognition users I know do not use a lot of voice-controlled command for menu options, etc. I don't bother with that stuff at all but work instead very comfortably with a mix of voice, keyboard and mouse as I learned from a colleague who can knock off over 8,000 words of top-quality translation per short, restful day before taking the afternoon off to play with her cats or go shopping and spend some of that 6-figure translation income that she had even before learning to charge better rates.

Professor Hardisty also gave me a useful surprise in his talk - a well-articulated suggestion for a much more productive way to integrate machine translation in translation workflows:

David Hardisty's "pre-editing" approach for MpT output

The approach he suggested is actually one of the techniques I use with multiple TM matches in the working translation grid where I dictate - look at a match or TM suggestion displayed in a second pane and cherry-pick any useful phrases or sentence fragments and simply speak them along with selected term suggestions from glossaries, etc. and do it right the first time, faster than post-editing. This does work, much better than the sort of nonsense pushed too often into university curricula now by the greedy technotwits and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors, who in their desire for better margins and general disrespect of human service providers and employees fail to understand that good people, well-treated and empowered with the right tools, will beat the software and hardware software of "MT" and its hamsterized process extensions every time. Hardisty's approach is the most credible suggestion I have seen yet for possibly useful application of machine pseudo-translation in good work. Don't dump the MpT sewage directly into the target text stream like so many do as they inevitably and ignorantly diminish the level of achievable output quality.

After the lunch break, Paul Filkin gave an excellent Q&A clinic on Trados Studio features, showing solutions for challenges faced by users at all levels. It's always a pleasure to see him bring his encyclopedic knowledge of that difficult environment to bear in poised, useful ways to make it almost seem easy to work with the tools. I've sent many people to Paul and his team for help over the years, and none have been disappointed according to the feedback I have heard. The Trados Studio "clinic" at Universidade Nova reminded me why.

Finally, in the last hour of the day, I presented my perspective on how the SDL Trados Studio suite can integrate usefully in teamwork involving colleagues and customers with other technology and how over the years as a user of Déja Vu and later memoQ as my primary tool, the Trados suite has often made my work easier and significantly improved my earnings, for example with the excellent output management options for terminology in SDL Trados MultiTerm.

I spoke about the different levels of information exchange in interoperable translation workflows. I have done so often in the past from a memoQ perspective, but on this day I took the SDL Trados angle and showed very specifically, using screenshots from the latest build of SDL Trados Studio 2014, how this software can integrate beautifully and reliably as the hub or a spoke in the wheel of work collaboration.

The examples I presented using involved specifics of interoperability with memoQ or OmegaT, but they work with any good, professional tool. (Please note that Across is neither good nor a professional translation tool.) Those present also left with interoperability knowledge that no others in the field of translation have as far as I know - a simple way to access all the data in a memoQ Handoff package for translation in other environments like SDL Trados Studio, including how to move bilingual LiveDocs content easily into the other tool's translation memory.

Working in a single translation environment for actual translation is ergonomically critical to productivity and full focus on producing good content of the best linguistic character and subject presentation without the time- and quality-killing distractions of "CAT hopping", switching between environments such as SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, Wordfast, memSource, etc. Busy translators who learn the principles of interoperability and how to move the work in and out of their sole translation tool (using competitive tools for other tasks at which they may excel, such as preparing certain project types, extracting or outputting terminology, etc.) will very likely see a bigger increase in earnings than they can by price increases in the next decade. On those rare occasions where it might be desirable to use a different tool or to cope with the stress of change from one tool to another, harmonization of customizable features such as keyboard shortcuts can be very helpful.

I ended my talk with a demonstration of how translation files (SDLXLIFF) and project packages (SDLPPX) from SDL Trados Studio can be brought easily into memoQ for translation in that ergonomic environment, with all the TMs and terminology resources, returning exactly the content required in an SDLRPX file. Throughout the presentation there was some discussion of where SDL and its competitors can and should strive to go beyond the current and occasionally dubious levels of "compatibility" for even better collaboration between professionals and customers in the future.

One of the attendees, Steve Dyson, also published an interesting summary of the day on his blog.

Two years in Alentejo

A little over a week ago I celebrated the second anniversary of my arrival in Portugal with friends, who suggested a trip to town for food and fado. So we went to Casa de Fados Maria Severa in Évora and enjoyed a long night of wonderful music that went on well past the official midnight closing time. This was my first live experience with that musical genre, but it won't be the last. I'm not much of a tourist, so I have yet to experience many of the things that a typical foreign visitor might see in a week's whirlwind tour of Portugal. I came here to enjoy a normal life with good, normal people who respect each other and live as they can with the means available. The famous Alentejan cuisine reflects and amplifies this way of making do and doing it better with its minimalist approach of few ingredients, usually simple and inexpensive, but fresh and sound, with a resulting taste matched or exceeded by few. Life in Alentejo is best savored slowly, like aguardente caseira.

When I first arrived, my intent was only to enjoy a week of vacation, the first real one in nearly a decade. At the time I was living in Germany, where I had been since 1999 and where I expected to remain until my spare parts were harvested by the organ banks. Although I have nearly a 40 year history of close contact with the German language, come from a family of predominantly German heritage and always preferred to speak German at home in the US, and many of my friends in Germany are among the best people I am privileged to know, I never felt at home in the culture there, particularly away from the university environments. Many are concerned today about PEGIDA and other anti-social movements, but as one who usually flew under the cultural radar and passed for German, I find none of this new or surprising. So many things there which are accepted as normal, like the constant police guard on every synagogue, simply do not feel normal to me, and I could never stop taking it personally when imperfect strangers would try to engage me in conversations about how foreigners were ruining the country. Of course, such ugliness is not a majority characteristic there or in my country of origin, the US, but the minority is large and assertive enough in both countries that I prefer to live with a bit more tolerant quiet and hope for pleasant visits from like-minded German and American friends.

I used to think of Portugal as The End of the Earth, a place so far removed from the centers of activity that it was unlikely I would ever visit. Certainly, when I did decide to spend a little quiet time here looking at megaliths and old churches, and a friend spent some 9 hours and 5 bottles of wine trying to convince me not to visit this place where he believed the people were in a deep state of depression over the bad economy and the loss of their colonies (!!!), I did not expect Portugal to be The Journey's End. The sort of place where, after wandering too long on stony paths, you can put your feet up by a fire, like the one behind my office desk, and know you are at home.

Some like it hot!

Of course,  it rains even in paraíso, and the adjustment process, even in a good place, is often not easy. I think the greatest challenge for me, once I figured out where to find bread yeast and pectin, was dealing with linguistic isolation. It still is. For most of the first year I lived here, I kept my head down as I dealt with the administrative details of establishing residence and a business presence and moved house three times until I found a place whose dimensions and character truly met my needs. I spent little time learning more than the rudiments of the Portuguese language in that time, because the more I experienced that beautiful language, the more I knew it would break my heart to have to leave it. After it was clear that I could stay on, for another year at least, I sought out a part of town where the socioeconomic profile made it unlikely that I would encounter a lot of English speakers in my daily routine, and I made rapid progress with the local language for a few months as I fought a plague of mice and cockroaches before moving to a quiet little quinta several kilometers outside of town, a deep, narrow property perfect for training dogs and doing a bit of gardening.

Quinta Branca do Quartel ao Louredo

I'm fortunate to be near the ecopista, a beautiful path for pedestrians, equestrians and bicyclists on what used to be the train route for grain deliveries from the nearby farms. When the weather is nice (that is, most of the time), it's a great way to go to town or much farther out, where your way may be crossed by rabbits and javelis and not so many people.

It's been 16 years since I've lived on a farm, and it's slow going to figure out how to do what I want to with the land when the conditions are so different from what I knew before and I struggle to find the right words for conversations with neighbors about chickens and manure. Most of my attempts at a vegetable garden so far have been greeted with enthusiasm by legions of snails, who may someday adorn my dinner plate as penance for their voracious crimes. I've taken only a few random, neglected fruits from the land so far; a lot of careful thought and rehabilitation will be required, but this is a welcome break from the daily challenges of German translation, technology consulting and teaching for clients and colleagues at the other ends of the Earth. However, I was fortunate to find guidance for what to do with the crop of the dozen olive trees scattered about my six acres:

Home-cured olives and Alentejan white bread to fuel the next memoQ tutorial

I never would have imagined that my own cured olives, spiced as I like them, would be so much better than the ones I've eaten from store-bought jars, in restaurants and bought at farmers' markets and other places for years. Perhaps by next autumn I'll have figured out how and where to convert the bulk of the crop to oil, which was a staple in my kitchen long before I came to Portugal.

Life here is good, but unpredictable, even less predictable than the changing tides of translation in the past half decade. But where the general environment is a healthy one and the culture is tolerant, friendly and mostly flexible, unpredictability often means nice, or at least amusing surprises. When I wake each morning, I am not certain what to expect from the day aside from my usual work routine. Most days are uneventful - a visit by the husky bitch from a neighboring farm, who plays with my dog and hopes for a handout, a few pleasantries exchanged with neighbors about potatoes or rain, um galão at the taberna, conversations with my dog to convince him that the neighbor's sheep are not to be hunted - the usual. But anything could happen, and I always look forward to that here.

Holiday cookies for the Portuguese, Part 1

Whoever told me once that "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades obviously didn't know squat about baking. Given a little respect, food tends to be more forgiving than most priests in Confession.

My involvement with translation began some nearly four decades ago when an aunt gave me a battered copy of the 1897 edition of Katharina Prato's Süddeutsche Küche. My mother and I then began to translate and adapt recipes for tasty baked goods for a modern American kitchen, making educated guesses about times and temperatures and making up measurable quantities for ingredients specified in only the vaguest terms. At the time I was barely into my teens and wondered how my mother could magically interpret all that vaguery and come up with something so appealing for expanding waistlines, but those first translations taught me the importance of reinterpreting content as necessary for a new culture and different times.

With the holidays approaching and most of my interesting recipes still rumored to be in boxes in a van somewhere in Poland, I called my mother a few days ago and begged for my favorite Christmas cookie recipe - a foundational gingerbread cookie with which she often constructs frosted houses with the grandchildren at this time of year. A short time later, the miracle of e-mail brought me the following instructions:

1 cup shortening (Crisco, lard, etc.)
1¼ cups sugar
1 cup molasses
¾ tablespoon ground ginger
1½ teaspoons baking soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons hot water
½ teaspoon salt
2 rounded teaspoons cinnamon
2 eggs, beaten
6 to 6½ cups flour for a soft dough
Roll out, cut and bake at 350°F for about 10 minutes. Refrigerating the dough may make it easier to handle.

The trouble started with the shortening, but I've usually just substituted butter over the protests that "it's not the same", countering with "who cares, as long as it's good?" Moreover, butter has the advantage of keeping vegan fanatics out of one's cookie jar if they are true to the Faith. This time I discovered a big, forgotten block of Banquete creme vegetal in the fridge, and since I no longer remember why I bought the stuff, it had to go in the cookies.

Then came the molasses crisis. the English word is derived from the Portuguese melaço, but try telling that to the people of Portugal. Perhaps it's the grief over the loss of their colony in Brazil which caused them to cut their ties to this critical ingredient, but searches of several supermarkets near me have failed to turn up any trace. Oh well, brown sugar it is then.

One thing led to another, and with a why not this?and a why not that?, and a doubling of the egg content to cut the stress on the mixer motor and get rid of excess eggs, and a surprising shortage of ginger powder, which required half measures, the final mix came out as

115 g vegetable shortening (creme vegetal)  
230 g brown sugar (açucar moreno)
2 eggs (ovos)
2 teaspooons ground ginger (2 colheres de chá de gengibre em po)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (1 colher de chá de canela moída)
¼ teaspoon ground cloves (¼ colher de chá de cravinho moída)
¼ teaspoon fine dry salt (¼ colher de chá de sal fino seco)
450 g self-rising wheat flour (farinha de trigo com fermento)

As with most of my cookies, I creamed the fat and sugar together, then added the egg (I let the mixer do the work of beating) and spices (with the idea that the flavors will mix better in more intimate contact with the fat), followed by the flour, with the speed turned down to low and the time limited to avoid knitting the gluten in the dough.

My cookie cutters disappeared in the last move, so Plan B was to form the dough into a roll, chill it good and use a sharp knife to slice off ¼" (6 mm) thick  rounds, which were then baked for 8 minutes at about 350°F (175°C) on a parchment sheet. These cookies are lighter than the original recipe (more leavening), so they bake faster, and ten minutes in my oven puts a carbon crust on the bottom which might not be to every taste. But of course, times will need to be re-translated for the conditions of your oven.

The final result was nothing like the original, though it was rather tasty. A failed score for translation with many reviewers, I'm sure, as they stuff their faces with the culinary success.

Now it's back to the kitchen to see what happens if caramel syrup takes the place of the missing melaço,