Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Technology


Corinne McKay

Product recommendation: Dell 14 portable monitor

I’m doing some digital nomading this summer, and don’t love working on my laptop monitor alone. I have a ThinkPad T590 with a 15 inch screen, but I use a 24 inch external monitor when I’m working at my office (which is 90% of the time), so the laptop alone is pretty painful. I find it particularly hard for remote interpreting, when I need one window for the RSI platform and one for my resource materials, and for translating official documents when I often need two landscape-orientation documents open at once.

An additional factor is that when I’m working in a conference room at my co-working office and I want a second monitor (particularly for remote interpreting), I have to lug my big monitor with me. This problem will soon be solved because I’m moving to a small private office within a co-working office, but it’s a pain. I’d also like to have a fully portable remote interpreting setup, for which a second monitor is essential.

For a while, I’ve been considering purchasing a lightweight portable monitor, but I couldn’t decide what to buy, and I wanted something truly lightweight (a monitor that fits in my laptop case), not something “luggable.” After doing some research recently, I found that, as with most tech gadgets, options for portable monitors have gotten better and prices have gone down. I’ll be working from the East Coast for a week in August, so I decided it was time to make a purchase.

I settled on the Dell 14 (not an affiliate link) which is currently selling for US $300; it arrived a few days ago and I really love it! As the name would suggest, it’s a 14-inch monitor. The pluses are:

  • Really light and thin: weighs 20 ounces and is about half an inch thick
  • Has an integrated fold-out stand that tilts to whatever angle you want
  • Runs power and data through a single cord (USB-C to USB-C) so it doesn’t require a separate power cord
  • Has excellent resolution and a brightness adjustment button
  • Comes with a carrying sleeve

The Dell 14 is thin enough that I can fit both my laptop and the monitor in my regular laptop sleeve. Here’s what it looks like on my kitchen table, in digital nomad mode

And here’s what it looks like on my desk at my co-working office, where I put it on a small monitor riser

I honestly like this monitor so much that I’ve been using it instead of my massive Acer desktop monitor, to free up some desk real estate. The only negatives/caveats I would give it are:

  • Your computer has to have a USB-C port
  • You have to make sure to always carry the USB-C to USB-C cable with the monitor, otherwise the monitor is useless
  • The carrying sleeve that comes with the monitor doesn’t have a pouch for the cable
  • As shown in the demo pictures on Dell’s website, if you want the cable not to be curling all over the place, you need to position the monitor on the opposite side of your laptop to where the USB-C port is, so that the bulk of the cable rests behind your laptop. So if the USB-C port is on the left side of your laptop, you’re going to want the monitor on the right. This works well for me because I like the second monitor on the right anyway, but it’s something to consider.

Readers, any digital nomading tech gadgets that you’d recommend for this summer?


Corinne McKay

Software review: TextAloud text to speech tool

Important disclaimer: I received a free review copy of TextAloud for the purpose of writing this review, but the links to purchase TextAloud are not affiliate links and I do not receive any commission from TextAloud.

How is text-to-speech useful?

After reading the post I wrote about text-to-speech proofreading, the folks at NextUp, the makers of the TextAloud text to speech software, approached me about reviewing their tool.

Brief overview for those who aren’t familiar with text-to-speech. If you enjoy having things read to you because you get sick of reading, or if (like me) you have a major problem with proofreading your own work because you skim over the errors–but you hear those errors when the text is read to you–I highly recommend experimenting with text to speech, where the computer reads a designated piece of text to you.

The simple solution is to use the Read Aloud function in MS Word. It’s under the Review menu. But Read Aloud is pretty basic: at least in my version of MS Office, the only selections you can make are the voice (between two men and a woman–I’m partial to David!) and the reading speed. Read Aloud also has some small but annoying foibles–the one that drives me nuts is that if you click anywhere in any MS Word document while Read Aloud is running, it pauses. So, if you have the source and target Word documents open, and you want to scroll down in the source while the target is being read to you (so that you can follow along), Read Aloud pauses as soon as you click, and then you have to re-start it.

What does TextAloud do?

TextAloud costs US $34.95 and comes with a 30-day guarantee. There’s also a free trial. It’s easy to download, and you can choose what software you want it to integrate with. For example whether you want just the standalone tool (where you can import things for it to read), an MS Word toolbar, a browser plugin, etc. I installed the standalone version, the MS Word toolbar, and the Firefox plugin. With my complimentary version, I got to choose four voices, and I chose two English and two French. I watched a couple of the tutorial videos for an overview of how to use all of the flavors of the tool. In total, it took me less than 30 minutes to download and install the software and watch the videos.

TextAloud’s basic features within MS Word are pretty similar to Read Aloud’s, but with many more customization options. You can tell the software how long to pause after a sentence, a comma, between words in a sentence, and so on. You can have it read certain types of text (i.e. text in quotes, or text in parentheses) in a different voice. You can have it highlight the current word, sentence, or paragraph, and so on. Tons of ways to customize how the software works.

And…drumroll…TextAloud does not do the annoying thing of pausing when you click elsewhere in a document. It just keeps on reading, which is what I wanted it to do!

Using TextAloud outside of MS Word

Another huge difference between TextAloud and Read Aloud is the ability to read other types of documents, such as PDFs and web pages. You can load a PDF into the standalone TextAloud window and have it read to you, or you can install a browser plugin so that TextAloud will read web pages to you. I found this very cool: sometimes I just want a break from staring at my screen, or I want to take a break but also consume some information. For example, I had it read me a New York Times article while I was eating lunch. I also tested it with a book in PDF format, and it performed well on that as well.

One feature I didn’t try–but that seems really useful for certain purposes–is exporting your spoken files for later use. For example, you could run TextAloud on an article, but save the file to your phone, and listen to it while you’re driving. As luck would have it, I had a part-time job in college, recording audio versions of college textbooks for dyslexic students who struggled to keep up with their classes if they had to read the print versions. Back in the 1990s, this was arduous for those students. TextAloud seems like an incredibly helpful solution for this kind of thing.

Another great use of TextAloud: having it read your own blog posts before you publish them. I rarely do this because it used to involve copying the posts into MS Word, then making any changes in the WordPress interface. But since installing TextAloud, I’ve used it multiple times to proof my own blog posts and e-newsletters right in the browser, which I found really helpful and will continue to do.

Voice selection

TextAloud has tons of voices to choose from; some are included with the basic software and some are premium. I must have a relatively high tolerance for computerized voices, because the MS Word voices really don’t bother me. I find that the slightly robotic tone is actually helpful, because it’s just annoying enough that you aren’t lulled to sleep while you’re listening to it. However I do find the TextAloud voices pleasant to listen to, and they’re a big plus if you’re actually listening for pleasure, rather than just to catch errors.

My preferred TextAloud voice is Ava22 (I used her to proof this blog post). And, to be fair, she’s MUCH more expressive than Microsoft David!

Premium voices, and supported languages

This is an addendum to the original post: I should clarify that the base price of TextAloud includes only the default Microsoft voices, and the TextAloud interface and help files are available only in English. However, you can purchase premium voices for 29 languages, and with different regional accents (i.e. Scottish English). The voices range in price (most of the non-English voices are $45 each), and you can sample them before you buy.

To sum up

If you’re into text-to-speech on any serious level (either for proofreading or for actually reading), TextAloud seems well worth the investment of $35. I found that when I was audio-proofreading (prooflistening?) for long periods of time, the ability to switch voices was really helpful, and I liked the ability to customize the software’s pausing and pronunciation patterns. It’s also great to have web articles or PDFs read to you when you don’t feel like reading the print version. I see this software as being really helpful to translators–and other word people–and really, really helpful if you struggle with dyslexia or any other issue that interferes with your reading speed or accuracy. Bonus: you could also use it to practice simultaneous interpreting at various speeds, since you can speed up or slow down the reader very easily.

I plan to continue using TextAloud to proof my translations, blog posts, and e-newsletters, and thanks to the company for providing a free review copy!


Corinne McKay

Translating in Lilt: one translator’s experience

This is a guest post by Suzanne Rietveld (suzarieve@gmail.com). Suzanne translates between Dutch and English; she has a background in horticulture and has worked in women’s health—these are her primary translation specializations. She is also an expert reviser and editor and is available for work in these areas.

As a beginning translator, it is quite difficult to decide which systems work and which are not helpful at all. During my Bachelor’s degree program in translation at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation in Utrecht (Netherlands), we had not been introduced to many CAT tools or other digital options at all. We all had to do an introductory course in the CAT tool Deja Vu, (DVX3) and learned how to set up a project, how to import a document, how to confirm segments, and if you were lucky, you managed to export the document as well. It took a lot of time to find the answers to my own questions, and I found out that that is not the way to learn a new system. I managed to acquire the how-to documents which were used with Deja Vu, and that is how I started to use CAT tools.

During my course, I managed to find time to start marketing for paid work as a translator. I really like the challenges that we are faced with. I registered with my first Dutch translation agency and passed their test to translate from Dutch into English, which is my preferred language combination. In the meantime, we still had to work on all school assignments; multiple translations into the two languages. I soon found out that my memory is not always up to scratch and I do not mean the translation memory in my CAT tool. It really takes me some time to think about the right word in the right place. I have always been aware of this—and there’s no chance I will ever become an interpreter—but I needed to address it in my translation business.

So, I was really focused on getting some help from machine translation and tried SmartCat for a while. I was very happy with the results because it helped me with vocabulary. In SmartCat, the source text will be translated for you with machine translation and the target text is filled in for you from the start. I found out that this had some downsides for me. With a full segment translated, the job for me as a translator had been reduced to the job of a post-editor. I am quite fond of editing – I had quite some experience as a Dutch editor-in-chief – and I did get the hang of it, but I did find out that when using SmartCat, I did not get the results that I expected, or the quality of translation that I would have translated from scratch.

That was the moment that I came across the translation tool Lilt. It is quite similar to SmartCat as a translation tool, with the biggest difference being that you will get a translation of your source text, but this appears as a suggestion and not as your target text, which you still have to type from scratch. If you choose the same word as in the Lilt suggestion, you can accept the choice by clicking Enter. If you make changes to the structure of the sentence or choose different words, the Lilt suggestion changes on the go. The system is learning while you go and that is quite apparent.

Because I was eager to use a lot of my own terminology, I started to use the translation memory options right from the start. I managed to align most of my previous translations (including a book on prostitutes in Amsterdam, a website on leadership skills and team building, and my school assignments) and uploaded them to my TM. To use your own TMs in Lilt, you have to become a PRO member, which starts at US $15 per month. With all the school work and paid jobs, this has been well worth it. I managed to translate my assignments quicker and was more confident that I used the right terminology.

It is quite easy to import different documents in Lilt, and this works great. The only thing is that documents should not be open on your screen and saved as docx in Word, but I also managed to import Excel sheets, PowerPoint slides and PDFs. Once the translation is completed, it is again very easy to export the document and save it in the place that you want. At the end of my third year in my program, I had found myself a place to gain some work experience and started to work as a translator for a publisher in floriculture. I translated 30,000 words in three months and used Lilt throughout the entire project without any regrets. In hindsight, I should have let the reviser make changes in Lilt as well. Now, I exported all my texts a little too early on in the process and still made many changes during my own revision round and afterward I accepted the reviser’s changes, also in Word. To achieve the best results, I guess the trick is to stay in your CAT tool as long as possible, but many of you probably learned this the hard way as well.

The support team at Lilt is great. There is a chat option in the right corner, and I have made use of it every now and then. The team is very helpful, and it is evident that they want to become bigger and better all the time.

There is one thing that they still have to get right: the use of capital letters and punctuation marks. In the current version of Lilt, all commas, semi-colons and periods are anchored to the target text. If you choose to use the last word (with the period attached to it) earlier in the sentence, you have to delete the period manually. This is okay-ish, but it seems to happen quite often, and with all the different types of punctuation marks, so it gets quite annoying at some point.

So, I have used Lilt during my work experience, for school assignments, and for some private customers. I trained as a horticulturist and garden designer in the past and would like to specialize as a translator in these subjects. So, I convinced myself to get some experience and translate a lot more documents on this subject into the two languages. Lilt remains a great tool to use and it is good to see how quickly it is learning and improving.

I am now in the position of having to make choices. I guess I should try my CAT tool Deja Vu again and use it with a plug-in from DeepL or something similar. At the moment, I do the odd translation job for different translation agencies. I found out that the ones outside of the Netherlands only let me translate into my mother language, which is Dutch. I do work in their web editors and do miss the help of machine translation, but during my program, it has been better for me to keep practicing without machine translation. I have stopped using Lilt for now, also because of the monthly fee and the fact that I haven’t had much use for it over the past few months.

As I said before, I am looking for the next project which will offer me the opportunity to try a CAT tool with a plugin, and I will give you all an update if this appears to be a better choice. It would be great if you can leave some feedback for me with information about other options.


Corinne McKay

Link: Barry Olsen reviews an automated interpreting earpiece

Do you subscribe to Jost Zetzsche’s Tool Box Journal newsletter? If not, you should. It’s a monthly roundup of all things language technology-related. I always feel that Jost tracks translation technology so that I don’t have to: instead of combing through hundreds of articles, I just read the Tool Box. This is not an affiliate deal; but if you do subscribe to the Tool Box, do the right thing and pay the voluntary $17 per year subscription fee. It takes a lot of time to put a publication like this together, and you can afford $17 for that if you’re going to read it.

In the most recent Tool Box Journal, I particularly enjoyed Barry’s Olsen’s Tech-Savvy Interpreter column, in which he demos and reviews an automated interpreting earpiece, the Lingmo Translate One2One. I found this fascinating, for a few reasons:
-As I said on Twitter, lots of people like to eye-roll and yell about automated interpreting devices (“Worthless and a joke!” “Will put all interpreters out of a job!” and everything in between), but very few people actually test these things to see how they work.
-In my experience, most translators and interpreters focus on the accuracy/inaccuracy of automated translation and interpreting tools, to the detriment of every other feature. And it’s not all about accuracy: usability is a huge factor as well. Barry delves into this–the Lingmo earpiece is essentially a smartwatch that hangs off your ear, and it must be worn on the right ear. Thus, what happens if you prefer your left ear? Or if you are deaf or hard of hearing in your right ear? Or if you don’t feel like roaming around Paris with a smartwatch on your ear? Seemingly small issues like this can make a huge difference.
-Personally, I’m really curious about what automated translation and interpreting tools can actually do. I actually find it fun to pit DeepL against my own work and see how I measure up. I think these kinds of benchmarking tests are really interesting, so I quite enjoyed this article.


Corinne McKay

OT: using an iPhone with Tracfone service

Here’s a tech hack that might be useful: how to use an iPhone with Tracfone service. It’s a small thing, but it made me inordinately happy when it worked. Disclaimer: your mileage may vary, so purchase a returnable phone if you try this. As I’ve written about before, I’m a big fan of Tracfone. Even using my Android Tracfone as my primary work phone, I spend under $200 a year for service (voice, data, and texts). That’s less than half the cost of major carriers’ prepaid plans, which run about $40 a month plus the phone. Tracfone’s service is also quite reliable with good coverage and call quality.

This all started because Android phones have trouble receiving group texts from iPhones. My teenage daughter primarily communicates with her friends by texting. Essentially all of her friends have iPhones, and she chronically had issues with group texts coming through as multimedia messages. Those either take forever to download, or fail completely. I experience this problem with my Android phone too, but I also don’t receive that many group texts.

I don’t have an issue with my daughter having an iPhone. She’s very responsible and kind of a technology hater (often telling *me* to put my phone away). But I do have an issue with paying “real” iPhone prices for a phone that could easily be lost or stolen at school, and that she almost never talks on. I thought…there has to be a way…and there is, or at least it worked this time!

Here’s what I did:

  • Purchased a refurbished iPhone 4S on eBay from Upward Mobile (not an affiliate link) for $70. Made sure it was returnable, just in case. The iPhone I bought was identified as “AT&T” on the listing, but did not have a carrier identified when I turned it on. Cosmetically, it looks new, and came with a nice case.
  • Received the phone. Note that when I entered its IMEI code into Tracfone’s bring your own phone verification page, the result was “not compatible.” But I figured, we have the phone, why not at least try it.
  • Purchased a Tracfone Smartphone Activation Kit for $30. Our local grocery store carries them, but you can also order them online. The kit contains three SIM cards of various sizes, and an initial prepaid plan for the phone.
  • Followed the instructions in the kit, which mostly involved inserting the correct SIM card, then registering it on Tracfone’s website. I already have a Tracfone account for my own phone, so you would have to create an account if you don’t have one already.
  • Followed Tracfone’s activation process for porting my daughter’s existing number to the new phone. This is pretty simple: just input the existing number and the SIM card code on their website.
  • Waited. The process is not instant. By the next day, the phone was getting service but couldn’t make or receive calls. For whatever reason, I then had to call Tracfone customer service and have them manually activate something. They didn’t really specify the issue, just said: “we have to manually activate this.” But within 24 hours, the iPhone was working like a regular iPhone. In our case, my daughter had about 4,000 existing minutes from her old phone, which all carried over. So our total cost was $100 and we won’t need to add minutes for at least a year.
  • All systems go. The phone has been active for about a week, and so far everything works as it should. Score one for a tech hack that actually works, if you don’t need the newest iPhone or hours of talk time.