GALAxy recently published an article about test translations and their potential (or lack thereof) of providing a true test of the quality of a company’s work. What do you think about test translations?

Read the full article at this link: http://www.gala-global.org/GALAxy-article-why_sample_translations_break_all_the_rules-8668.html.

GALA Technology webinars have provided a platform for tool providers to give an in-depth introduction to their tools. Many of you will have attended a GALA webinar and have contributed to their success over the last few years. These have been non sales events where you got a good overview of the tool from the people who built it. This year we have decided to extend this program. We now have expert presentations as well as the presentations from tool providers.

GALA will shortly be announcing the 2008 series of webinars. Among the tool providers who have already committed to presentations are across, Alchemy, Plunet, Beetext, AIT and Kilgray. The expert presentations will start in March with a presentations from Richard Sikes called ‘Global Customer Satisfaction – Quality at the Source’. We will also have Yves Savourel from Enlasso on ‘The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS)’. XLIFF has recently become an official OASIS standard and I will be giving a presentation on it called an ‘Introduction to XLIFF’. Balázs Kis from Kilgray will be talking about ‘Term Extraction Algorithms’. Adam Aasnes from Lingoport has confirmed that he will be giving a presentation and towards the end of the year we will have David Pooley from SDL will give us an ‘Introduction to TMX’.

These are just some of the presentations which have been lined up so far. We are very interested in seeing your ideas for improving this series. If you want to suggest an expert presentation or are a tool provider who would like to take part in this please contact Amy who will work with you on this.

I hope you enjoy this series of presentations.

If you are new to software localization and visit the web sites of software tool vendors, they will tell you that What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) is an extremely important feature. We all know it is important for desktop publishing. WYSIWYG editing eliminates the need to print a flyer again and again to see how changes look. But why is WYSIWYG important to software localization? [Read More on The Localization Tool…]

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) version 1.0 has just been published as a W3C Recommendation. You can read the W3C press release.

ITS is a set of attributes and elements designed to help in the internationalization and localization of XML material. It can be used externally to the documents (a bit like the “DTD Settings” file in Trados), and it can be integrated within the XML documents themselves.

The ITS 1.0 Specification can be found here: www.w3.org/TR/its

You can find extensive examples, descriptions and links to implementations of ITS on the ITS Working Group page: www.w3.org/International/its.

The next step for the Working Group is the publishing of the “Best Practices for XML Internationalization” which is currently a Working Draft.

Microsoft posted earlier this week an update to their software glossaries, and that update includes the long awaited Vista glossaries. Many thanks to Nick Rosenthal for letting me know, it was a great news this week. If you are an MSDN Subscriber, you will find the steps to download them in Nick’s blog.

This is very good news for the localization industry, and I hope that eventually Microsoft decides to make them available again to the general public. There are many freelance translator’s out there for whom a subscription to MSDN is not really an option that makes sense financially speaking, and freelance translators definitively can play a role in getting IT content translated consistently with the platform if they have the right tools.

Many years ago, Microsoft decided to make available the software glossaries for all their products in MSDN and as a free download. This was shocking at first, as it was lot of IP and potentially, trade secrets.

But the reasoning behind was clear, if Microsoft wanted to be “the platform” globally they had to open up to the entire ecosystem also globally. Steve Ballmer made it very clear that it was not about users, but developers. And Developers, and by extension, localizers, need to have useful and full access to the platform information to build a true ecosystem.

We developed ApSIC Xbench, a free download, with a view to provide a convenient access to bilingual information, and that included support for the Microsoft Software Glossaries in its .csv form.

Late last year, Microsoft decided to pull out the software glossaries and replace it by a Master Glossary. The announcement mentioned that former software glossaries would continue to be available to MSDN subscribers. But it did not mean that they are available. We at ApSIC are subscribers of MSDN Universal Edition and the latest software glossaries are as of July 2006. This means: no Vista glossaries, no Office 2007 glossaries, no Exchange 2007 glossaries.

I think that with decision is moving away from the role of being the platform. It is simply more difficult and expensive for Microsoft hardware and software partners to integrate globally and seamlessly with the platform.

Hey, what about the master glossary? IMHO, a master glossary helps you to translate something that ’smells’ like the platform, but professional translation requires access to the exact strings in any relevant product to provide international users with a true high quality experience.

And there is a fundamental problem with a master glossary: there is no single market force to push to make it right. No end user wants a master glossary. End users want software that they can understand well. The software strings should become the master glossary, because localized software “wants” to be clear and accurate if it has to sell well. Actually, I would symptom it as a big problem if software glossaries cannot become the real master glossary after the product has shipped.

At least now we have Mac OS X glossaries (which we now support in ApSIC Xbench 2.7), which seems to follow as a publicly extensive available reference.

I don’t discard that Microsoft sees publishing software glossaries as a security threat (hence the title of this post). I hope they reconsider the value they bring to the entire ecosystem by continuing to be a platform and that we see the glossaries available publicly again in the future.

We are a Singapore software internationalization and localization provider with one of the branches in China. Currently we need the Trados training to our staff. However, we searched the webs but couldn’t find such training courses locally..

-Stefan
ESS Software (www.essware.com)

I just learnt about a relatively new feature of Google: the ability to define your own search engine. After some tries in our own website, I found it was interesting for limiting searches to some content we planned to add (namely our tools documentation) but the requirement to add advertisements was a turn-off. I definitively do not want random ads in our website.

I looked into the Custom Search Engine settings and then I saw that non-profits are allowed to have no advertisements. Then suddenly an idea came thru. How about if there was a search engine whose search results included only content in the websites of GALA members?

It turned out that implementing it was simpler than I though, and here is the result:

The custom search engine could be added somewhere in the GALA website (and maintained as new members join GALA). Please note that the search engine in this blog post only lists websites for members as of the time of this writing.

I hope you like the idea of a GALA syndicated search.

The Last Call Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set has been published.

Along with it a new document the Best Practices for XML Internationalization has also been published as a First Working Draft.

I would encourage anyone who develop translation tools that provide support for XML to review the ITS Specification document. Part of the specification addresses some of the XML localizability issues, offering a common way to specify localization information:

• what should or should not be translated,
• some terminology identification mechanism,
• identification of inline codes and sub-flows,
• localization notes,
• and more…

You can use Bugzilla to point out issues and provide comments. The review period lasts until June-30 (6 weeks).

Google has released an Arabic to English and English to Arabic machine translation engine. AFAIK, it uses a statistical approach to build the bilingual corpuses. I tried to cut and paste Arabic texts from Al-Jazeera and translate them into English and they seemed to make a lot of sense.

Obviously, there is a cap on what machine translation can achieve (if linguistics was an exact science, jokes wouldn’t exist), but if the translations are accurate this seems to be a significant leap.