Complementary Translation Tools

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Translation services and low-cost tools - Part III

In this article:

1. WebBudget
2. Wordfast
3. WordFisher
4. Ergane

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WebBudget
http://www.webbudget.com/
Software PC Windows
Commercial
= interesting, promising

WebBudget is a handy, efficient tool to help translators, project managers, authors and other professionals to budget/invoice Web projects.

WebBudget processes, categorises and counts all translatable text in an Internet file, including ALT, BUTTON, META, JAVA and other translatable labels.

WebBudget handles both individual files as well as entire projects (folders + subfolders), and the output can be printed or exported to different file formats, also *.DBF, to link it with your current database.

WebBudget automatically detects and informs you of all tags with translatable text and word delimiters, and for word delimiters has a built-in "SmartCount" function.

Don't devote long hours to budgeting your web project. WebBudget can save your time and increase your income by giving an instant, accurate and complete picture of your web-work. That's the basic concept behind this product: to make life easier and more productive.

List of WebBudget features at:
http://www.webbudget.com/features/ index.htm

Examples of use of WebBudget
http://www.webbudget.com/examples/ index.htm

System Requirements: To run WebBudget, you need Windows 95/98 or Windows NT/2000, 2 MB free disk space, 16 MB RAM and a Pentium processor.

The WebBudget program is downloadable in a self-extracting (.exe) format. The file, wb251.exe is about 900 KB.

You can download a fully-functional Public Version of WebBudget right now. The Public Version of WebBudget is fully functional on .html documents up to 10k.

Download a copy of WebBudget at:
http://www.webbudget.com/download/wbXTsetup.exe (Build 3.9.0.3) - 3,7 MB
http://www.webbudget.com/download/fb3.exe v3.2 (FREE) - 960 KB

Commercial Professional version price is USD $ 89 for individual use. Multiple license price ranges from USD $ 267 to USD $ 450 depending on the price plan.

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Wordfast
Software PC/MAC
http://geocities.com/wordfast/index.html
FREE
= worth knowing

Wordfast is a Translation Memory engine available for Microsoft Word on PC and MAC.

Beside classical translation memory services, Wordfast includes real-time terminology/typography control.

Although Wordfast is essentially a translator's tool, it easily integrates in the workflow of translation agencies & large accounts.

All this power is packed in a single, compact Word™ template.

Wordfast is network-ready, allows translation of Word™, Excel™, PowerPoint™ & Access™ files, directly translates HTML/XML files, Trados-tagged files, can be linked to most Machine Translation packages (PowerTranslator™, Systran™, Reverso™ etc), supports Semitic languages, Cyrillic languages, as well as Japanese and Chinese 16-bit modes, handles jumps, popups, fields, tables, bookmarks, frames, headers/footers/notes and many other features unfound in other packages.

Among its other key features I must note its compatibility with the popular Trados translation software. Direct compatibility is maintained with Trados 2 & 3 TMW (native), Trados 2 & 3 TXT, TMX and Translation Manager TM's, while offering a totally transparent, open format.

You can download Wordfast in 2 minutes at 56Kbps (file size: 410 Kbytes). An English manual is included in the download.

The unregistered version is fully functional, with a limitation on TM size (256 units) and glossary (20 entries).

Registration is free at this time. It removes these two limitations, and entitles you to a one-year free hotline.

Current version is 3.35e, dated 7 October 2001.

Download Wordfast FREE at:
http://www.champollion.net/wordfast2.zip

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WordFisher
Software PC
http://www.wordfisher.com
= interesting, promising

WordFisher Relatively new, MS-Word based macro kit with some TM, text search and project management features. Its distinguishing feature is that this tool is developed not by the business organisation, but by the translator himself (Tibor Kornyei).

Despite of its seemingly amateurish origin, this program has several functions which are absent even in the new Trados release. Furthermore, its price ($30) is quite incomparable to the prices of "large" TM programs. These include:

a) Translation Project management - WordFisher presents a simplified TM-like environment for the translator. Automatically creates a simple folder and file structure for managing the project. Indexes documents, and utilizes the indexes to synchronize source and target files, as well as to navigate in the project.

b) It can create a bilingual table containing the matching sentence pairs from the source and target files. The translator can collect these tables for future reference and use them as his translation memory. These tables can later be read into any full-featured TM program.

c) Glossary management - You can add new entries to glossaries without leaving the document you are working on. With the help of WordFisher's Quick Alignment and Glossary Builder modules, you can easily build glossaries by aligning a document and its translation and selecting the corresponding terms.

d) Enhanced Replace function - You can replace strings in one or more files. Replacement operations and options may be logged and they can be re-used again to pre-translate other files.

e) Alignment - You can align a document and its translation on screen. You can synchronize the files at any time while working on them. The module offers Synchronized scrolling as well. In addition, WordFisher has its own Aligner module to create a translation memory corpus from old translations.

f) Consistency Check - This unique feature enables translators and agencies to check in a group of aligned files whether the required translations were used in a project consistently or not.

g) Trados support - WordFisher can convert its translation corpus into Trados readable format.

Its sole drawback, in my view is slightly low operation speed.
This becomes appreciable only while working with relatively large documents.

To be noted that the user manual for this software has been trasnlated in over 11 languages including Chinese, Ukranian, Russian, Czech and Hungarian.

Full price for Wordfisher is USD $30.

Download a full evaluation copy of WordFisher at:
http://www.wordfisher.com/download.htm

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Ergane
Freeware multilingual program
http://download.travlang.com/Ergane/
Software PC Windows
FREE
= interesting, promising

What is it and what can one do with it?

Ergane is a free multi-lingual dictionary programme for Windows (version 3.1 and higher). It can not only be used as a translation dictionary, but also as a tool for helping students to memorize the words of foreign languages. Furthermore it is possible with this programme to generate wordlists.

Not only does Ergane cost nothing, but the wordlists generated with it are also free of copyright and can be copied, distributed and changed without legal restrictions. You can use them in any way you like, even for commercial purposes!

You also have the right to modify the programme and use it as a basis for developing your own software. Again, no legal restrictions are applicable here.

How does it work?
In order to avoid to necessity of a bilingual wordlist for every combination of the many languages that are supported by Ergane, the artificial language Esperanto is used as an intermediate language for translating from one natural language to another.
Esperanto has the advantage over natural languages like English that Esperanto words having more than one meaning are very rare.
Another advantage is its flexible and regular system of word-building, which makes it possible to find almost always a good equivalent for any word in any other language.

The obvious disadvantage of this system is that the extra step of translating a word first into Esperanto may occasionally cause some accuracy to be lost. But I believe that the advantage greatly outweighs the disadvantage.

Installation & deinstallation
Download the file Erg50.zip and copy it to a newly created directory for the Ergane files, or download Erg50.zip directly to this directory. Then use a programme like WinZip to extract the executable file and the accompanying data files. Finally you can erase Erg50.zip.

Run Ergane by double-clicking on the filename Ergane.exe.

Dictionary files
If you download and install Ergane you will notice that initially it only supports one language: Esperanto. The reason for this is that few people need more than two or three languages. So in order to save download time the vocabulary files for the various languages are not in the same compressed file as the programme itself.
They must be downloaded and installed separately!

Another good reason for keeping the dictionary files separate from the programme is that you do not need to download all software again (of which 99% or more may not have been changed) in order to get an update of only one or a few dictionary files.

Download Ergane at:
http://download.travlang.com/files/ setup.exe
(4.5 MB)

If you want to get an impression of Ergane before you decide to download the very large Erg50.zip, you might consider to try out a smaller version of Ergane called Loxias first. And if you do not need the extra functionality that Ergane offers, Loxias may even be enough for you.

Download Loxias at:
http://download.travlang.com/files/ Loxias.zip
(117 KB)

The source files of the dictionary programmes are also available. These can be useful if you want to create your own dictionary programme:
http://download.travlang.com/files/ErgSrc.zip
http://download.travlang.com/files/LoxSrc.zip

Find the Ergane vocabulary files at:
http://download.travlang.com/Ergane/

The FREE dictionaries cover over 60 languages among which some very unique ones are supported (albeit by some very small dictionaries).

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