Most Internet users probably only use one browser: Internet Explorer or Firefox on Windows or Safari and the Mac.
There are other browsers, however: Opera has been around for years and has a faithful following, and although Netscape bit the dust earlier this year, Safari is now available for Windows, too.
A less-known browser that might interest translators is Maxthon. It is offered in two
I’ve just deleted a bunch of spam comments from some anonymous user who wanted to use this site to scatter links to whatever services they provided. This is something which happens from time to time.
A hint to other would-be spammers: if you have something interesting, and would like me to link to it, the way to do it is NOT to put the same comment to a number of my posts. I leave the comments
Yesterday I received this message:
Dear miss, dear mister,
We need urgently a translator who translates technical documents from english to italian for our firm [name deleted].
Therefor we need a test for his person in order to know his translation qualities . The english texte to translate as a free test is enclosed to the email.
So, you need a translator urgently.
Happens.
But in order to
I know I’ve not written anything in quite a while, but since late April I’ve been working some very long days: a quick look at the e-mail, one hour drive to Boulder, eight straight hours of software testing every day, then the drive back to Denver. (At least I get to listen to some good book on tape - right now an interesting biography of Julius Cesar).
In the evening, again the e-mail (trying
I open my mailbox this morning and I’m greeted by a message from SDL TRADOS: "Upgrade Amnesty for SDL Passolo 3 and 4".
The message then goes on to say that users of Passolo version 3 and version 4 may still purchase licenses to the current version of the software for the reduced upgrade price.
I would normally call this an upgrade offer extension, and if that had been its title, there would be
In my February post about agency rating lists, I said that to access the TranslatorCafé "Hall of Fame and Shame" it was to necessary to pay TranslatorsCafé’s $120 membership.
I have now been informed that any payment to TranslatorsCafé is sufficient to access the Hall of Fame and Shame. From the message I received:
[…] any payment (starting from $10 for credentials verification) [is] enough
Corinne McKay, in her excellent blog Thoughts on Translation, recently had an informative post on whether translators should be paid by the word or by the hour.
After a paragraph detailing the advantages of pricing by the word, she starts to mention the disadvantages:
Pricing by the word has an obvious disadvantage from the translator’s side, which is that you are agreeing to work for a flat and
Microsoft Language Excellence’s team (formerly MILS) launched today the Language Portal, a new terminology Web site.
The new site makes available more of Microsoft’s linguistic resources than ever before.
Using the Language Portal interface, one can search Microsoft terminology and UI strings from most released products: Language Excellence has thus made available the MS Glossaries, once hidden
grepWin is a simple, yet powerful, freeware tool for difficult search and replace operations on text files (for example, xml or html files).
For complex search and replace operations, nothing really beats RegEx (regular expressions) searches, but regular expressions may be very difficult to create.
grepWin includes a "Test regex" utility: by using the utility on a sample of the text, you can
My previous post received a detailed comment from SDL, "so you can retain a balanced view".
Here are my further comments, in rebuttal of SDL’s comment:
It is not practical for SDL to maintain products doing back more than 3 years.Possibly so, but this has nothing to do with the subject of this post, which did not ask for ongoing support for users of 6.5, but for retaining the ability to upgrade
With a remarkably misleading title ("Our upgrading guidelines are changing"), SDL announces that, from April 1st, 2008, Trados v6.5 (or older) and SDLX 2004 (or older) will no longer be eligible for upgrade price, and that people wishing to upgrade their old software after that date will have to buy a new (i.e., full price) license.
The first page of the announcement only indicates that
our
You know the kind: a "fee" becomes a "processing fee" - clear enough, that’s a fee for processing something, and very different from "fee processing", which is something you do to fees.
But then words start to accrue, like barnacles on a fouled hull. "Fee", "processing fee", "double processing fee", and so on. And on.
For the translator, the problem compounds: is a "double processing fee" a "
This week, in the online course on translation I’m teaching for the University College of Denver University, I had this questions for my students:
What tools do we have available (software or not, narrowly aimed at producing translations, or with a broader usefulness)?
There are many way this can be answered. If I change my question to "What is the best tool for translators"?, I would answer
Dr.Dobbs has a fairly interesting article on the use of page resources for the localization of web sites.
Page resources are literals stored in an application-specific assembly and bound to a culture identifier.
Fairly technical, but of interest for those of us who translate, localize or build multilingual web sites.
Something that annoys me is wordiness: I don’t mind long texts, if there is little redundancy, but words that are there just to take up space, are another matter.
There is a dear friend that always translates "including [something]" as "ad inclusione di [qualcosa]". When I edit her, I can usually pare that down to "incluso" - one word instead of three, 7 characters instead of 16 (I know, I’m