As the Chair of ATA’s Translation and Computers committee, I meet over lunch at the ATA conference with the translation software vendors who are exhibiting at the conference. It’s a good chance to talk about issues in the industry; last year I asked for readers’ input on what you’d like to tell the translation tool vendors, and then I wrote a follow-up post on the software companies’ responses.
This year’s lunch discussion topic is translation software interoperability, and I’m looking for your thoughts once again. Specifically, I’d love to know:
- If you exchange files between translation memory programs (i.e. you have Trados and the client has memoQ, or you have DVX and your co-translator has Wordfast, etc.), how well does the process work? What could be improved?
- What interoperability features would you like to see in future releases of the tools that you use? What would help streamline your workflow?
Here’s what happens to your comments: I compile them into a PDF and hand that out at the vendors’ lunch. Then we talk about your comments and the vendors respond. I take notes on what they say and then write a followup post. Thanks in advance for contributing to this dialogue!
I confess that I’m a bit of a technophobe. I use memoQ (still using version 6.2), and I’m quite pleased at how easy it is to work with Trados SDLXLIFF files and packages, as well as WordFast. However, I sometimes don’t get a translation preview with Trados files, which can be a problem.
>> If you exchange files between [TEnTs]… What could be improved?
I would agree with Amy that where preview information is available with a file, it would be very good if other platforms could make use of those previews.
The biggest nuisance for me is the inability to share terminology with synonym structures and metadata (definitions, context info, linguistic properties, etc.) losslessly between application environments.
And one of my greatest concerns for the future is that the rise of server-based projects is seriously undermining gains in interoperability over the years, because they lock one in to a particular client environment. This is true with web-based interfaces as well, because the translating environment differs for each server type. This is terrible ergonomically and leads to a loss of linguistic quality, as translators are distracted from the text due to working environment differences. For translators with disabilities that require the use of tools like voice recognition for relief, the inability to determine one’s client working environment can be particularly burdensome. Server environments should offer open interfaces for integration with any external client.
>> What interoperability features would you like to see in future
>> releases of the tools that you use? What would help streamline
>> your workflow?
1. Access to “foreign” servers and their resources
2. Better terminology exchange capabilities
3. Access to preview information where it is present.
… in that order
Hi Corinne! My biggest pet peeve with interoperability right now is that some clients still use the OLD Trados 2007 and send TagEditor files. I can open and work in these files in Studio, and save them back as ttx-files, but in some cases the tags get shifted a bit and the client cannot use them with their old system. SDL claims that it should work, but it is not bullet proof.