memoQ&A: How can I have multiple target languages in a project?

Every translation environment tool has its own approach to project management and languages. Recently, a colleague asked for advice on outsourcing options for a client project which may involve a number of target languages translated from an English source text. I think her usual tool is some flavor of SDL Trados Freelance, but the five-language restriction on freelance software versions from SDL means that Studio is not an option in this case without an expensive upgrade to SDL Trados Studio Professional. This might be a worthwhile option, though it's difficult to judge in this case, because I don't know if this sort of project will be part of the future routine.

As I recall from my days as a Déjà Vu user, projects could have multiple target languages, but without the Workgroup version, collaboration was made difficult by restrictions on the bilingual files ("external views"). I don't know if this is still an issue in DVX3, because the uncertain future of Atril makes me reluctant to invest much study time in that tool.

memoQ does not restrict the languages one uses, but creating a project with multiple target languages requires the Project Manager edition. Kilgray doesn't talk much about this edition of memoQ and usually tries to link it to a server license sale (or a memoQ cloud subscription); if you look on the Kilgray web site, you will find very little information. I think the license typically costs about €1500, with €300 (20%) annually for maintenance upgrades and support. Quite a bargain, actually, and with the PM version one also gets access to another well-kept secret: the memoQ client API, which can be used to automate or simplify a number of project management processes. And of course with the PM edition one can create convenient "handoff packages", which provide convenient resource bundles for collaboration with other memoQ users with compatible versions of the translation environment tool.

But the memoQ PM edition is total overkill for someone who typically needs only individual language pairs for work and is faced only rarely with the need to manage multiple target languages from a source language. If there are just a few languages involved, it's probably not a big deal for someone with the memoQ Translator Pro edition to create several projects (one for each target language needed). There is, however, another option worth considering in some cases: using the Translator Pro edition to manage a multilingual project created with the PM edition.

If a multilingual project is created with the memoQ Project Manager edition, the individual target languages are available in the memoQ Translator Pro edition. A text imported with the target set to "All languages" is automatically put in every target language in the project; suitable bilinguals (XLIFF, RTF bilingual tables or TWB-/Wordfast-compatible unclean DOC) can be generated from each individual target language.

A downloadable example of a memoQ project backup to test for memoQ 2013R2 is here.

Using a project with multiple target languages in the Translator Pro edition requires, of course, that the original project be created by someone with the Project Manager edition. And the sophisticated functions for reporting, package creation, etc. are not available when the project is open in the Translator Pro edition. But translation memories, termbases, LiveDocs and other resources can in fact be managed for multiple target languages in the project. The work can be reviewed or prepared for external proofreading, target files can be created in all the languages, and a number of other simple management tasks can be performed. In many cases this may be enough.

The Next Big CAT Feature To Copy?

Thanks to the persistent disbelief of some users, particularly cranky financial and legal translators who don't understand the challenges of programming, that it really is "impossible" to enable a project or TM update based on an edited monolingual target text, Kilgray has decided to just do it and make this feature available to the masses with the next release, memoQ 2013 R2. It's not a perfect solution, but a great start, and when the rest of the specification is implemented later, it will be really, really good.

Here's an example of the first step reimporting a short text in which every sentence except the first was rewritten and rearranged (click the pic to see it full-sized):

This monolingual alignment and the matches it assigned was totally automated - no adjustments by me. When applied to the translation document in memoQ, it doesn't change the order of the translation, but it does make updating the translation memory much easier. I can also use the tracked changes feature for versioning to look at the edits in more detail, and the view can be filtered to show the changes in a large document more clearly to ensure that nothing was missed.

What good is this? Well, so far Kilgray is rather fixated on the idea that one might receive edited documents from a proofreader or a client at some later date and import the changes to the project to update the TM. Maybe, but in many cases, this won't really happen in my workflow. If I finish I project, now I very often send the documents to a LiveDocs corpus, where they make a marvelous pseudo-TM (if a bit slow or slower sometimes) and an excellent context reference for concordance searches. I then delete the documents from the project, because I use projects as "containers" for repeated business, so unless some day the monolingual updates are made available for a document in LiveDocs, I may often not be able to take advantage of it. One could, of course, apply the same principle of monolingual alignment to a translation memory or even a TMX file, and I am sure somebody will do that before long if it doesn't already exist in some flaky academic freeware for supernerds somewhere.

So why am I so excited about this feature? Because I already use it every day. It saves me time and puts a big smile on my face. When I get ready to deliver  translation, the last step for me is to look at it in the source application - Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, etc. There I make last-minute adjustments, change words, combine sentences, split sentences, delete things, etc. A lot of these changes never make it back to the TM, because that maintenance can be a major pain in the backside, especially when there's a lot happening on my desk and in my e-mail inbox. This feature is a big step toward reducing that stress.

Kilgray isn't done with this by any means. Plans for source text merges to allow combined sentences in an edit to be handled easily have not been implemented yet, but I'm told that will follow no later than the next version. I hope so. The current beta version is also a bit dodgy with many formats I've tested so far beside DOCX and TXT, and changes of target text file type have been forbidden in the current version, as have any edits except segmentation adjustment and linking during the monolingual alignment.I plan a lot more testing to understand the limits of the current implementation, and I expect there will be many improvements in this area. But this is an excellent start.

When the specification was developed, Kilgray was unaware that something like this was already available from SDL in one of that company's pricy "regulatory" licenses (I wonder if the idea came from watching the video of the public argument about this option at memoQfest two years ago - I know that remarks about the SDL OpenExchange were followed closely). However, SDL has taken no great advantage of this to offer such a feature to a wider user base yet, so I have no idea how well it looks. But mark my words - in a few years, this innovation will be one of those things that users of any good CAT tool should take for granted!

Selectable metadata for memoQ 2013 projects

One of the things I have missed very much since switching from Déjà Vu to memoQ years ago is the ability to create and maintain selectable lists of metadata for classifying my data. One of the strengths of DVX was that this data could even be used to prioritize TM and terminology relevance during translation. But even for simple things like sorting and filtering data for an export, it can be very helpful.

Let me give an example. I have an old client I'll call National Translators. Well, sometimes that's the name I use when filling in the Client field for the memoQ project. Sometimes I write Nat'l Transl, sometimes it's NatTrans or even NT. And then when my fingers get rebellious I might have the occasional NtaTarns or worse.

Despite the messy appearance of screenshots of the TM and termbase lists in my various tutorials, for the most part I follow the "Big Mama and Papa" approach to data management with a large master TM and termbase with over a decade of archived reference material. But I do occasionally like to filter those data and produce a more focused termbase or TM for a projects, such as all the NatTrans material from projects involving Poultry. That was easy with Déjà Vu. Each client had a unique, selectable code. Subjects were number coded with a sophisticated classification scheme that I adapted for my own use. With memoQ it's been a real pain in the ass.

Well, it seems that times are a'changin. A little bit at least in this respect. One change that sort of slippe under my radar in memoQ 2013 was the addition of selectable data to projects through the use of the free Kilgray Language Terminal. I almost missed it completely, because I was looking at some of the latest "innovations" there from the wrong perspective. Wrong for me at least.

Clients list on my demo profile on the Kilgray Language Terminal. Click to enlarge.

Kilgray recently introduced the ability to do basic project "management" on Language Terminal. Price lists. Clients lists. And more. I was appalled, or at least quite uninterested in that, though I rather like other aspects of Language Terminal. I have a good tool for quoting jobs and maintaining my client records, and I really don't think I'll be replacing that with the rather simple start that has been made by Kilgray in this area. And having lived in Germany for years, I have almost adopted the knee-jerk aversion to storing my client data online which is so common there.

But... there's another way. Better for me. I don't have to enter my clients' details. I can enter just the names. Or better yet - my preferred codes (which can protect their identities but let me sort my data better). Click on the screenshot above to see an example of this in the last two entries. You need not be as cryptic as I was in that example.

On the "Professional" page of my Language Terminal profile (the link to the left of "Clients"), I can enter my subjects. Kilgray intended this for their find-a-translator search function that they are adding to Language Terminal, but I'm probably not going to be interested in being found and approached by the sort of prospect that might use their database. My philosophy is that looking for a translator based on tool use is fundamentally backward, and I really don't want to support bad practices like that. Translators should be engaged based on subject and linguistic expertise; the translation technology involved is like a shirt, tie and a pair of shoes - you just put on what is appropriate for the occasion. But without the subject and linguistic competence, you really ought not to be part of the game at all.

So once again, I would enter my subject data on Language Terminal, not with the idea of being "found" by some Indian or Mongoloid agency to be offered the opportunity of a lifetime at 2 cents per word, but rather with an eye toward sensible data classification for use in filtering later. Here's an example of what these metadata entered on Language Terminal look like when you start a new memoQ project and mark it to be "entered" on Language Terminal.

I still like the local DVX approach better for such metadata, but this is actually an improvement, and it will help me clean up my data organization. And using these features for my purposes, rather than the purposes for which they seem to have been created, will also maintain confidentiality as I want to. In fact, the profile seen here is not even viewable by other Language Terminal users.

There are many other very useful features of Language Terminal, which make it worthwhile to get a free account, even if you don't use memoQ. The blockbuster is still the free InDesign processing service, which enables one to handle native INDD files, get PDF previews at any time and convert InDesign files to XLIFF for convenient translation in most modern CAT tools. As a memoQ user, I find the backup feature useful as well; the Resources page is starting to get a few useful things, and rumors of future plans make me think this is really something to watch closely.

But this recent "revelation" of the possibility of selectable metadata for my memoQ projects is a small but very welcome addition to my toolbox in memoQ 2013, and finding this in an area of the site that I had already written off as uninteresting to me was perhaps the most pleasant surprise. It's nice to be wrong like that.

Creating translation projects in memoQ 6

As with most other translation environment tools, memoQ translations are performed in "projects" which bring together all the necessary support resources for reference, quality assurance, etc.

New projects are started on the Dashboard when you open memoQ or in that and any other context by choosing Project > New Project...  

This opens the Project Wizard.

 Name the project, choose the source language and a target language and add any relevant meta data (for inclusion in translation memory and term data). Recording the version history is a good idea if new versions of source documents may come or if you want to track changes in a translation.
The next wizard screen lets you select the documents to translate.

These can also be added later if you do not have them or are creating a template project for later use. Import adds the selected documents to the project using default filters; Import with options... allows other filters to be specified or special filter settings to be chosen.

The translation memories page of the wizard shows all the registered TM resources; memoQ uses a primary TM into which translated segments are written and as many reference TMs as you like. Here the ISO 9001 memory is chosen as a reference for matching and concordance search.

Termbases also have a "primary" termbase and any number of reference termbases, but unlike TMs, new information can be written to more than one termbase simultaneously if the settings are adjusted later.

After the project wizard setup is finished, the project is ready to be used for translating. Double-clicking an item in the translation documents list will open it for work.

OTM: starting and completing projects from e-mail

There are a number of instructional videos put together by LSP.net which show the broad range of features in the Online Project Manager (OTM). These are great if you want an overview of the environment's many features from the perspectives of a project manager, end client and service provider (such as a translator), but with all the possibilities presented, it's easy to get overwhelmed, and the basic simplicity of a typical project can be overlooked. I made the video tutorial below to show the workflow I usually go through for simple projects.

An e-mail arrives from a customer with an attached file to translate and a request for a delivery date. I produce a quotation, send it, wait for the order (or not if it's already given in the initial e-mail), then translate and deliver the job, invoice it and close the project. When I'm not making a video of the steps, they typically take me less than five minutes, but here you can see it all in "slow motion". More details on this process are found in my other posts on this blog about OTM.



  

This tutorial was recorded with the Google Chrome browser and the Open Source recording tool CamStudio. Try it in full-screen mode using the icon at the lower right of the playing window.

memoQuickie: customizing project, file and view lists

Many are not aware of this, but three of the important working lists in memoQ - the project list on the Dashboard and the Documents and Views lists on a project's Translation page - are customizable.

Right-clicking the header bar of the list opens a context menu where columns to be displayed are selected:

Project list context menu on the memoQ Dashboard
 

Documents list context menu in a project

Views list context menu in a project

Customizing the column display is particularly helpful in the Documents list when using memoQ versioning. If Document Version is marked in the columns choices, the major and minor version will be shown for each document. (The major or source version is the number before the decimal, the minor version - the target version for that source version - the number after it.) If versioning is not active for a document, the column displays "n/a".

Twitterview: SDL Trados Studio, memoQ, DVX2 and PDF extraction

When I began using Twitter somewhat hesitantly three years ago, I never expected that it would eventually prove to be one of the most useful social media tools for gathering information of professional value. Much of this is serendipitous; I really never know what will come floating down the twitstream or where some of the conversations in it will go. Like the direct chat I had with with a colleague in New Zealand about features she liked best in the two main CAT tools she uses, SDL Trados Studio and memoQ.

We both really appreciate the TM-driven segmentation in memoQ and the superior leverage this offers. But to my surprise, she expressed a preference for SDL Trados Studio, particularly for the quality of its PDF text extractions from electronically generated files. This is not a feature I make heavy use of in either tool, though I have used it more often lately in memoQ for alignments in the LiveDocs module and found it generally satisfactory. Most of my work involving PDF files is with scanned documents - there one has no choice but to use a good OCR tool like OmniPage or ABBYY FineReader.

So I was quite intrigued that the quality of PDF was "better" than from standalone tools. Especially because my experience is quite different. Further discussion (not shown in the graphic) revealed that what she actually meant was that the quality of the text extraction with the CAT tool usually beat the quality of text received from translation agencies who performed conversions. That is easy to explain, really. In my experience, most agencies are clueless about how to use conversion tools and too often use automated settings and save the results "with layout". This is very often utterly unsuited for work with translation environment tools or requires a lot of cleanup and code zapping.

For years I have recommended to agencies and colleagues that they spare themselves a lot of headaches by saving PDF conversions as plain text and adding any desired formatting later. Most people ignore that advice and suffer accordingly. So in a way, a CAT tool that does so encourages "best practice" for PDF translation for those files they are actually able to handle.

Encouraged by the Twitter exchange, I decided to do a few tests with files from recent projects. I took a PDF I had with various IFRS-related texts from EU publications. It appeared to extract quickly and cleanly in memoQ, giving me a translation grid full of nicely segmented text. SDL Trados Studio 2009 choked badly on it and extracted nothing. Her extraction in SDL Trados Studio 2011 caused a timeout with the project I was told, but the text itself was completely extracted and converted to DOCX format. This is useful, because unlike the extraction to plain text in memoQ, this offers the possibility to add or change some text formatting in the translation grid. Other extraction examples from SDL Trados Studio 2011 showed that text formatting was preserved.

A closer examination of the extracted texts revealed some problems with both the memoQ and Trados Studio extractions. The memoQ 5 PDF text extraction engine proved incapable of handling text in multiple columns properly. The paragraph order was all fouled up. The extraction with SDL Trados Studio had a great number of superfluous spaces. Whether it is possible to optimize this in the settings somehow I do not know. The results of all the extraction tests are downloadable here in a 6 MB ZIP file. I've included the SDL Trados Studio extraction saved to plain text as well for a better comparison of the text order and surplus spaces problems.

Overall, I am personally not very pleased with the results of the text extractions from PDF in either tool. The results from SDL Trados Studio are clearly better, and other examples that were shared made it clear that this tool works better than many an untrained PM with better PDF conversion software. This is certainly much better than solutions I see many translators using. But really, nothing beats good OCR software, an understanding of how to use it well and a proper workflow to get a good TM and target file better fit for most purposes.

*****

Update 2012-05-22: I met colleague Victor Dewsbery at a recent gathering in Berlin, and he told me about his tests with the recently introduced PDF import feature of Atril's Déjà Vu X2 translation environment. He kindly offered to share his results (available for download here) and wrote:

Here is the result of the PDF>DVX2>RTF>ZIP process for your monster EU PDF file. Comments on the process and the result:

• The steps involved were: 1. import the file into DVX2 as a PDF file; 2. mark all segments and copy source to target; 3. export the file as if it were a translated file (it comes out as an RTF file). The RTF file is 20 MB in size and zips to 3 MB.
• Steps 1 and 3 took a long time, and DVX2 claimed to be not responding. For step 1 I just left it and it eventually came up with the goods. Step 3 exported the RTF file perfectly, even though DVX2 claimed that the export had not finished. I was able to open the RTF file (it was locked, but I simply renamed it), and this is the version which I enclose. Half an hour later DVX2 had still not ended the export process (and had to be closed via the Task Manager), although the exported file was in fact perfectly OK. The procedure worked more smoothly with a couple of smaller PDF files. Atril is working on streamlining the process and ironing out the glitches in the process, especially the “not responding” messages.
• The result actually looks very good to me. There are hardly any codes in the DVX2 project file (the import routine also integrates CodeZapper). I didn’t spot any mistakes in the sequence of the text. Indented sections with numbering seem to be formatted properly - i.e. with tabs and without any multiple spaces.
• The top and bottom page boundaries in the exported file are too wide, so most pages run over and the document has over 900 pages instead of just under 500. Marking the whole document and dragging the header/footer spaces in Word seems to fix this fairly quickly.
• I note that some headlines are made up of individual letters with spaces between them. This may be related to the German habit of using letter spacing (“Sperrschrift”) for emphasis as an alternative to bold type.
• I found one instance where text was chopped up into a table on page 857 of the file.
• There are occasional arbitrary jumps in type size and right/left page boundaries between sections.

On the strength of this sample, it would usually be OK to simply import the PDF file into DVX2, translate in the normal way, and then fix any formatting problems in the exported file.

Notifications in OTM

For more than two years now, I have used the SaaS project management system from LSP.net (the Online Translation Manager or OTM) to handle my project tracking, quotation, delivery, archiving and invoicing workflows. Since early 2010 when the system was first made available to others beyond the group it had served for nearly a decade previously, it has developed rapidly into a unique, full-featured system for translation agency operations. For an individual translator like myself, it is arguably overkill, but its secure delivery features and excellent 24/7 client access to data via private archives as well as the very modest cost and the fact that I have no infrastructure to maintain are the decisive factors for me. I haven't seen anything else I can afford which takes my business as seriously as I do. Or more so, to tell the truth :-) As a matter of full disclosure, I will remind readers of what many already know: I do the English localization for the product, and I have a formal employment relationship with another member of LSP.net's corporate group. But all that is the consequence of liking and using the product and wanting to see it develop further, not the other way around.

The project mail system in OTM is excellent in most respects, but limited. As mentioned previously, it uses text only for reasons of data security to prevent the transmission of viruses via graphics of JavaScript in HTML mail. Some potential users have not adopted the solution for this reason, but I usually prefer straight text in my e-mail anyway unless I am doing a quick tutorial with screenshots, so I don't care. And it's nice to know that I can't accidentally infect my clients with an "innocent" e-mail. Another "limitation" of the system is that it is web-based, and for quite some time I was vaguely annoyed at having to log in to the system or refresh the Task Board view to see if new mail had arrived. It is not possible to query the mail system via POP or IMAP configurations.

As is so often the case, when we are annoyed by such shortcomings, the solution is usually there for those of us who will RTFM or simply ask the support personnel. One day when I was chatting with the system architect about new features for translation certificates being added, I mentioned my annoyance, and he kindly reminded me of the mail forwarding setting in the user profiles of the administration module. In just a few minutes, the usability of the system increased drastically for me as every incoming e-mail was forwarded to an account I monitor on my laptop and on my smartphone, so I no longer missed interesting inquiries or urgent requests because I had no time to log in to the web interface.

The relevant portion of the user profile is shown below. The critical setting is marked with a red arrow:

Both project mail that has been sorted using the project number and "orphaned" e-mail (no identifiable number present for assignment) are forwarded to the external e-mail address.

memoQuickie: locations for data & avoiding name length trouble

Most memoQ users never change the program defaults for where projects, TMs, termbases and corpora are stored. Usually this is not a problem, but some want to put things elsewhere, and if you have crazy clients (like lawyers) who are fond of file names that push the allowed limits for Windows, you may encounter frequent errors because of file path length (in many tools, not just memoQ - OmegaT appears most robust in this sense). To choose custom locations for your data and possibly reduce the chance of trouble with long file names, go to select the menu and dialog option Tools > Options... > Locations

and set the paths you want. At the bottom of the dialog is the possibility to shorten the temporary folder path length and avoid some trouble.

Poll: Barriers to Cooperation

Recently in the sidebar of this blog, the following question was asked:

What are the significant barriers for you in collaborative projects with colleagues?


The responses were distributed as follows:

12%    None. I do it all the time without trouble
25%    Organization: coordinating & scheduling tasks
29%    Technology: suitable means and methods of resource sharing
45%    Networking: I don't always know suitable people to work with
31%    Trust: I'm afraid of having clients stolen or being held responsible for the failures of others
6%    Other reasons

It's interesting that the most frequent response indicated a lack of suitable partners for cooperation. Whether this is a perception issue or a real matter of getting out and getting to know qualified peers is probably very much an individual issue. In my case I simply don't know a lot of linguistically qualified German to English translators with a significant knowledge of chemistry and related sciences and a healthy dose of legal competence. When I see otherwise very good translators going at such texts armed with a dictionary and boundless confidence, I can't help but cringe, especially if I'm involved in the review somehow. I have bad flashbacks to the day that a superb legal translator took on an IT text on entity/relationship modeling and asked me if some key term had the same meaning as it does in contracts. Not even close.

Trust was another major issue. This was not unexpected given the paranoia I observe at times in various fora. I don't worry much about client "theft" and often freely pass on contact data for qualified colleagues, with the understanding that the parties involves in any transaction bear all the responsibility for the results. Concerns about responsibility for bad quality from others is understandable, but here proper project management - enough time allowed for review and rescue and a sufficiently high margin to allow for any contingencies - can offset a lot of potential trouble. This is an important organizational issue that many freelancers are neither prepared to qualified to handle, so caution in this regard is probably praiseworthy.

Technology as a barrier is more a matter of knowledge than the actual technology available. Not everyone has the resources or inclination to maintain a translation server with SDL solutions, memoQ, Déja Vu or other options, but new entries to the market like Wordfast Anywhere (a free collaboration tool with privacy features) could be game-changing here, and little birds tell me that SaaS solutions may soon be available at affordable cost for small freelance teams. About a year ago I had the pleasure of being involved in a nice project where a memoQ server license was leased for a month; the only down side to that was the hardware problems the project coordinator had figuring out the IP addresses with his router. Technical options for collaboration outside of agency structures are increasing, and it is worth investigating developments in this area. In one case we brought a collaborative project to an agency that had the necessary infrastructure (a memoQ server), and the results were quite satisfactory, so this is one option that may be worth exploring with small, flexible LSP partners.

The challenges of coordinating and scheduling can be considerable. Many freelancers lack experience as project managers and may not have had occasion to develop the necessary interpersonal skills and "toughness" to deal with difficulties that may arise. The *technical* aspects of assigning, scheduling, coordinating and delivering jobs can be handled adequately with affordable software solutions. The best option I currently know for this is the Online Translation Manager (OTM) from LSP.net, which for a basic monthly fee of 29 euros per month gives anyone full access to all the IT infrastructure needed to run an agency of any size. It's "software as a service" with automated backups and top-notch security; the cheapest option for setting up my own server and other software adds up to several years of OTM fees at the very least. OTM also gives me completely secure file transfer for clients and cooperation partners. This is important for paranoid patent lawyers and others. I've been looking for and testing solutions in this area for seven years now, and although there is still significant optimization needed by the provider for the average freelancer or small team, OTM is the best option for small teams looking to grow on a budget or medium-sized LSPs who need competence, security and cost control. The provider currently offers free trials to interested parties.

Of course, collaboration isn't for everyone. I'm often of two - or even three - minds on the subject. But for those who are interested in working together with others as a way to grow their business, there are many options and many exciting developments ahead.

A customer's view of the Online Translation Manager from lsp.net

Last September I posted a small note about an online management system and translation provider network that colleague Ralf Lemster told me about at a ProZ powwow. As development plans often go, the plans for this system's release and beta testing were implemented on a schedule that was a little different from the one described. Although the system had been productive for something like 6 years with a small group of companies, the upgrades implemented to accommodate a wider circle required and received a great deal of careful consideration. The beta test phase of the commercial release actually began in January and was completed at the end of April. In that time the system's interface for project managers experienced some important changes that are relevant to the way that many organizations work. You can read about the current state of the system and terms of use on the web pages of lsp.net.

However, those pages in their current state don't really tell me what I would want to know about the system. There's a lot of talk about features, a little about benefits and a bunch of high quality screenshots. What's missing for me are good process descriptions. Workflows.

I tested this system occasionally over a period of four months and was involved with two others (my former partner and her assistant) who tried to wrap their heads around it. It is a very good system for businesses ranging from busy freelancers who do a lot of billing to SME LSPs. But unless the processes are clearly understood it's hard for most people to deal with anything more complex than the back of an envelope or a chalkboard backed up by an Excel spreadsheet.

As part of my recent shift in activities, I now have access to this system in two incarnations: a fully configured company setup for one of the companies that has been using the system for years and the demonstration system for the SaaS provider lsp.net. This enables me to test a wide range of functions and observe carefully how the system is put to daily use. It's very interesting to talk to the individuals making use of it and hear how their practical needs have shaped the system over the years.

I am familiar with several other systems with a similar purpose, and as a translator I am the victim of a number of web-based project management systems from various clients and former clients. Generally I don't think much of these, and their cost can range from substantial to astronomical. I think it's fair to say that this system offers the best balance and value for cost that I've seen yet. It's not perfect, and there are things I hope to see added, many of which are in fact on the development roadmap already. The company, like Kilgray, pursues a steady, well-thought out course for its innovation and tends not to shoot from the hip just because some geek thinks a feature would be "cool". I don't agree with every approach, but I appreciate the thought behind the structure, and after a bit of familiarization, the reasons for particular design decisions often become much more apparent and more desirable than alternatives.

Enough introduction. I intend to show how this system works by presenting a few basic perspectives and workflows. In this post I will show a typical customer experience for submitting a text and receiving a finished translation job. Future posts will deal with the system from the perspective of translators, project managers and others using it.

Each licensee of the Online Translation Management (OTM) system has a dedicated subdomain, such as myls.qtn.net, the demonstration site for the system. This trilingual (DE, EN, ES) demo site doesn't have all the typical text for terms & conditions that one would find on a production site such as Ralf Lemster's rlft.qtn.net or ESmedo in Spain. (But that's the site I'll use, because I can test it from all sides for purposes of explaining how things work. Nonetheless, have a look at these three other sites to see the variations in how the environment is implemented.)

The initial screen layout is simple but functional, with standard navigation elements. Customization is limited to color and content. If you want a fancy front-end, do as you please with your regular web site or blog and link to your workflow subdomain.

Let's get straight down to business and request a quotation by clicking the third element in the navigation bar above.

The following form appears:

I filled out the form and submitted my request with one file upload. The automated response I got after submitting the request was as follows (yes, I made typos):

My online submission was followed by an e-mail:

After the project manager (yours truly) received the request, reviewed it and put together an offer, an e-mail with the following quotation was received:

 After the terms were accepted and the order was placed, the following e-mail was received in acknowledgment:

Of course, this text and others can be customized to suit the preferences of the licensee. The little quirks in the localization here are not from me. The project manager also activated customer service pages, which provide a secure area for HTTPS download of finished jobs or secure uploading of additional files. Deliveries can also take place via e-mail links. This eliminates many problems of attachment size or file security, an issue for many legal projects, for example.

The notification mail I received regarding the customer service pages was as follows:

That link works at the moment, by the way. Go ahead and try it out. I or someone else may delete it eventually.

When the job was completed, I received another e-mail notice:

Clicking the link took me to the login web page:

Since I had never been in the system before with this customer account, I was asked to choose a preferred language for the interface. This can be changed later.

Just for laughs I chose German. Bear with me if you don't read that language. Here is the main customer page telling me that there is a job waiting to be delivered:

The page from which the finished job can be downloaded looks like this in German:

And like this in English:

Afterward I received an e-mail with a PDF attachment for the invoice. This is an option; invoices can also be printed out and mailed, of course.

The invoice looks like this:

All pretty straightforward I think. Any part of this communication can be switched off to suit your preferences and those of your clients. I'm not particularly bothered by the little quirks in the interface localization here (such as "MwSt" instead of "VAT" in the invoice shown), because I can fix that when I customize (or gripe at the system developers to make the change).

For a bit under 30 euros per month I can offer my clients semi-automated professional communication, secure submission of files for work or quotation and secure deliveries. The last point is very, very important to me, because often I have delivered a job, hopped in the car and driven off to an urgent appointment only to learn to my dismay that the e-mail got lost or delayed. With a system like this the client can just log into his secure area and see if the file is ready.

For clients who don't want to deal with logging into a secure file area with a password to view their project archives, etc. (the majority according to one OTM user), simple deliveries via a secure HTTPS e-mail link are possible. This happens, for example, if the customer does not have service pages activated. A mail is received which looks like this:

The link leads to a secure web page with a link for downloading the file directly. This also avoids the problem of dealing with large file attachments for e-mail, which can cause problems for some e-mail software or accounts.

The vulnerability here is, of course, the e-mail. If the customer doesn't get it, then s/he'll not know that the project is finished. I prefer the customer service pages, because they offer better fail-safe security, which hard experience has taught me is very necessary.


Related posts:

Re-sending e-mail to OTM

Receiving an e-mail inquiry in OTM from an listed customer

Receiving an order in OTM after a quotation

Delivering a job (performed by the PM) in OTM

Generating an invoice and concluding the project in OTM

Style agreement

For some time I've been thinking about creating a "default style guide" and presenting it to clients for review before undertaking major projects. This is because little niggling, repetitive questions about stuff like subheader capitalization keep coming up, and some days I feel like a parrot giving explanations.

Well, in the latest issue of Jost Zetzsche's Toolkit Newsletter there is an even better idea. Better because it is more compact and the customer might actually take the time to look at it. Better because it presents options and indicates default choices. He wrote a small "style agreement" for translations into German, covering common issues like German or Swiss conventions, new or old spelling, the use of hyphens in words, quotation marks and more. I love the practical way his mind works, and this is just the latest of many examples of how I have benefited from a premium subscription to his newsletter and the purchase of his books. I can always count on him for accurate, objective recommendations.

In any case, Jost suggested the possibility of a Google docs project with different documents for various languages. A good idea in principle; I hope something comes of it. I will in any case adapt his idea to issues we deal with frequently in English, because doing so will save me time.

Templates for quicker DVX project setup

One of the things that does get on the nerves of some Déjà Vu users is going through the Project Wizard to set up a project each time some little file needs to get translated. Some people get around this by having a "master project" with all the settings for a particular client; small new jobs get added to this as they come along. Somewhere I read a suggestion to create a template with all the settings for a particular client and copy this template into each new project folder and use it.

Today I was reading the "SDL Trados Studio 2009" review on the Tracom blog which described a number of questionable "advantages" of Trados (when I saw the comment about the over/under arrangement of segments being superior to an SDLX/DVX/Across/MemoQ columnar arrangement, I wondered what they were smoking). One point, however seemed plausible: the ability to "plunge right in" (more or less) and translate a file without a lot of preparation, then clean it, deliver it and write the bill. "Gee," I thought, "Maybe that's right."

I thought about it for a while and decided to try a little test. I made a DVX "template project", with no client or subject area specified. I saved it in my main folder for current projects. Then, with an eye on the second hand of my watch, I opened a folder with a little press release I have to translate, pasted in a copy of the template, double-clicked the icon to launch DVX, then I opened up the Project Explorer and used the drag & drop technique to add the file straight from the desktop folder (rather than use the program's internal navigation - I'd never tried this before, but I thought "why not?"). Then I right-clicked the file listed and imported it. The whole process took well under one minute. Now if I feel like assigning it to a client or categorizing the job, I can do so quickly via Project > Properties...

What was that about "plunging right in"? If I try to assign client or category attributes in Trados the whole process will probably take longer. Or not - I don't really care any more. This is just another typical example of unsubstantiated assumptions used to justify continued kowtowing to an abusive "market leader". That said, I do agree that other tool vendors could do a lot to simplify their project setup processes, and they could certainly do more to explain shortcuts. I hope one day they do.

Hiding file content in MS Word and RTF files for translation

We frequently receive jobs in which some part of a file is to be excluded or where tables are included where the customer wishes to have the target text written adjacent to a column with the source text. Some of these jobs are straightforward to deal with, others less so. After a particularly nasty assignment with a mix of tables, colors and untranslatable notes embedded in the middle of sentences, I decided to write a short set of suggestions to share with some of my clients so that they can prepare certain jobs more effectively, saving me time and saving them money. If it can be of assistance to anyone, feel free to download the guidelines here. Suggestions for improvement or addition are very welcome.

Advice for DVX users working with Trados projects

There is a lot of information available in the discussion lists and online forums on how to use Déjà Vu X (or other tools) to do projects involving Trados uncleaned files. Yet the questions still come up frequently. (I wonder about some people's research skills, though language barriers do complicate matters in our international profession.) In the past I have put together a few summaries of Trados-related procedures to assist my colleagues or educate clients. These are currently being revised, expanded and collected in a larger opus on small-scale project management which I hope to complete sometime next year. In the meantime, here are links to the existing information for those who may need it and haven't found it elsewhere yet.

Handling Trados projects for MS Word and RTF files in Atril's Déjà Vu X

This instruction set shows one approach to translating DOC and RTF files when the client wants the work done in Trados but for technical or personal reasons one prefers to do it in DVX. Some common problems and possible solutions are also discussed.

Translating SDL Trados TTX Files in Déjà Vu X

This guideline describes how to translate the standard TagEditor format (TTX) using Déjà Vu.

Proofreading and editing Trados projects with Atril's Déjà Vu X

This five page overview shows how to use DVX to simplify the often onerous task of proofreading uncleaned Trados files.

How To Reduce Your Localization Cost by Up To 40%: 30-minute Speed Primer For Translation Buyers

This is another little masterpiece from Robert Kloiber at Academy Translations in Australia.

The guide is 16 pages long, and like the other one (the guide to technical writing for translation), it is well-written and easy to understand for persons of any level of technical sophistication. It is a superb overview and learning tool for end customers, agencies and translators on how to approach the process of localization and what one's expectations should be. There are a few gaps in the current version - for me most notably the no mention of test scripts for reviewers to follow when checking an interface (as opposed to automated test scripts) and nothing about virtual machines as a testing environment - but all the information presented is spot on for establishing effective, efficient localization procedures and saving time and money. Translators who are considering getting into localization or localization consulting should have a careful look at this. (I won't get into the marketing issues involved in this - that's another can of worms.)

Robert tells me that he has other useful guides, which will be released "on a drip feed" on his blog (which is a work in progress at the moment). If they are of this quality, they are worth watching for!