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

Cleaning up superfluous tags in DOCX files with memoQ

"Rogue codes", "junk tags" - whatever you choose to call them, they can be a real nuisance for those attempting to work with Microsoft Word and RTF formats in translation environment tools. Previously, I described the use of Dave Turner's Code Zapper macros to clean up junk in DOC and RTF files. Now, for those who work with Microsoft Word 2007 DOCX format, there's another option with memoQ. In the current version of memoQ (4.2.8), there's an option in the "Add document as..." dialog that enables minor format change tags to be ignored. In a practical sense, this works much like Code Zapper.

The relevant option is marked here with a red box:

If that option is not selected, here's what a DOCX file made from the OCR of a PDF file might look like:

If the option is selected as shown in the screenshot of the dialog above, here's what the result looks like:

That's much easier to deal with. There are so many interesting and useful little things in the latest release of memoQ that I probably won't find them all before the next major upgrade. It's not easy keeping up with the progress of an active, dynamic development group like the one at Kilgray.

If you have a "dirty" DOC file with a lot of unwanted, superfluous tags, an obvious strategy is to save it as DOCX (also possible using the 2007 compatibility pack for MS Office 2003), follow the procedure described above, then after export re-save the DOCX file as DOC again if necessary.

Dealing with embedded XML and HTML in an Excel file

One of the occasionally gratifying aspects of translation for an IT geek like me is that IT challenges continue to follow me. Actually, that's one of the things about the current state of the profession that I hate too. (I'm a not-so-closeted Luddite.)

This week's challenge was more of a fun puzzle, because it wasn't my problem, but rather someone else's. An agency owner friend sent me an Excel file that was driving him nuts; his localization engineer, a former star at a Top Ten agency, had pronounced the task of filtering the data in a useful way to be impossible. I love it when engineers say something is impossible; it usually means there is a simple solution at hand if one gives the matter a little real thought.

The file structure looked something like this:

Only the yellow columns were to be translated; some had plain text content (with line beaks in some cases), other yellow columns had XML or HTML content.

Just for fun, I fired off a quick support request to Kilgray along with a copy of my test file, because I thought maybe there was a cascading filter feature I might have overlooked. (There isn't, but the idea was noted as a good one, so maybe we'll see it in the future.) In any case, Denis Hay offered a creative suggestion as he almost inevitably does:

Hi Kevin,

While waiting for "cascading filters" (which I also find a great idea), what you could do is simply copy these Excel columns to a Word table, than use either Tortoise Tagger, or preferably the +Tools from the Wordfast website to tag the HTML/XML content. Import that tagged word file into memoQ, and you should get what you wanted.

Once translated, just paste back to Excel.

Kind regards,
Denis HayTechnical consulting and training
Kilgray Translation Technologies

There's another way I discovered by the time Denis' suggestion arrived. It works well manually, but it can also be automated with macros if you're dealing with content management system exports where the structure recurs and you'll be doing a lot of this.

Do the following:

1. Copy each individual Excel column of interest (or at least the ones with XML/HTML) into a plain text file.
2. In the case of the text files with tagged content (i.e. XML or HTML), change the file extension to fit the content (i.e "text2.txt" becomes "test2.xml", etc.).
3. Translate the text files with your favorite translation environment tool, using the filters appropriate for each type of content.
4. After exporting the files from your working environment, copy and paste the text file content back into the corresponding columns of the original Excel file. Note taht if there are line breaks somewhere, your row positions may get screwed up. This can be solved by performing this operation in OpenOffice Calc. (Maybe there's an appropriate setting for Excel to avoid this problem, but I don't know it.)

The key to sorting this puzzle out was to consider the discrete parts (i.e. the individual yellow columns) of the entire data set as separate collections of data. Dividing a problem up into its constituent parts is often a good way to find an easy solution.