December 3, 2005

Look it later

From time to time I google for new tools, ideas, and news on the localization business. When I work remotely, I normally VPN and use Remote Desktop from several diferent desktops to the office. I tend to avoid carrying a laptop if I can. However, I always surf from the remote machine because the surfing experience locally is much better than with Remote Desktop.

One issue that I have with this research surfing, is that I tend to lose some of the interesting links I find because I don’t have a stable Favorites place anywhere, which means that I have to rely on my own memory to google it afterwards (most common method, but getting less and less reliable as we speak) or I send myself a reminder mail, but it has to be something really important to make go through all the hassle of sending a mail to myself.

Well, one Web-based tool has just come to rescue: LookLater. It is very new, just a few days old indeed, and it has a quite neat and simple interface a la Google. It’s very easy and lightweight to install (for example, in Firefox, you only have to drop a link to the link bar and you are all set in one second). I wouldn’t be surprised if the big guys eventually launched versions of this cool idea linked with their ad services.

I find Looklater also especially useful for translators. Translation in general and technical translation in particular are extremely knowledge-intensive, much more that most people seem to believe. After all, nobody can translate what he o she does not know what it is (that applies also to machine translation), and that means that the professional translator must often do an intensive background research work to get it right.

I think that translators can use this type of tool to quickly bookmark links, pages, and snippets, when they are looking for information or bilingual corpuses on the subject matter of their current job, and after the research, just do a quick recap on the saved links to qualify and organize them.