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Conversion of Déjà Vu memories into MemoQ memories

Posted on 21 February 2012 by Timothy Barton

If you export a Déjà Vu (DVX) memory or terminology database and import it into MemoQ, you lose some of the data such as the client, subject, project, user name and creation date. This is because the tmx format created by DVX does not match the tmx format created and understood by MemoQ. For example, Déjà Vu has separate creation dates and user IDs for the source and target, whereas MemoQ has a single creation date for a translation pair (which makes more sense). Also, the tmx created by DVX contains the subject and client codes, not the actual names. For example, if you used the subject “33 – Economics” in DVX, you will be importing the number “33” as the subject, not the word “Economics”. Similarly, if you used client codes, like “MST” for “Microsoft”, you’ll be importing the code rather than the full name.

Anglo Premier recently migrated from Déjà Vu to MemoQ. After much labour we succesfully converted our translation memories and terminology databases, preserving all the subject and client data and the dates. We initially described the process on this blog, but the procedure is complicated to follow and the script we created won’t run properly on all versions of Windows. It also requires the user to have Excel and Access 2003. Instead, we are offering to convert your translation memories and terminology databases for you. For a fee of €20 or £16.50 we will convert a translation memory or terminology database, and for €40 or £33 we will convert up to four databases. None of the content of your databases will be read and we will delete the databases from our system as soon as the conversion has been done and the file(s) have been sent to you.

If you wish to use this service, please contact us via the contact form on our main website.

Machine translation and context

Posted on 6 February 2012 by Timothy Barton

A sentence I’ve just translated is an excellent example of the advantages and disadvantages of machine translation. The original sentence said this:

Los rankings se basan en indicadores sociales y económicos.

Google Translate offered this:

The rankings are based on social and economic indicators.

This is a good example of how machine translation can speed up the translation process. The translation is almost perfect. I say almost, because the translation doesn’t quite work in my context. The reader is left asking “Which rankings?”.

The original sentence is actually talking about rankings in general, rather than any specific rankings. Unfortunately Spanish does not make this distinction in the use of articles, so the word “los” is needed whether talking about rankings in general or specific rankings referred to earlier in the text. Google Translate works sentence by sentence, so it has no way of knowing whether the word “the” should appear at the beginning of the English translation.

Another similar problem comes up when I translate biographical texts. Imagine a sentence in Spanish that says the following:

Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive en Roma.

Is Tolosa referring to the city of Toulouse in the Languedoc region (Tolosa is the traditional Spanish spelling of the city) or the small town in the Basque Country? OK, so I’ve deliberately come up with an ambiguous place name, but the other problem in this example does occur more often: is the text talking about a male or female? Google Translate has no way of knowing, since it only looks at the context of the sentence. It normally chooses a sex seemingly randomly. In this particular example it has produced a translation that does not specified the sex of the person:

Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living in Rome.

Although it has avoided assigning a sex to the person the text is talking about, the translation is unacceptable and would need considerable editing. By changing the sentence slightly I can force Google Translate to assign a sex:

Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive con sus padres en Roma.

Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living with his parents in Rome.

The pronoun “his” is used, but the person we’re talking about could just as well be female. As additional evidence that Google Translate doesn’t use context I will now ask it to translate the following two sentences together:

Julia es una ilustradora francesa. Nació en Tolosa en 1960, pero desde 1970 vive con sus padres en Roma.

Google Translate provides the following translation:

Julia is a French illustrator. Born in Toulouse in 1960, but since 1970 living with his parents in Rome.

Google Translate still uses the word his, yet to any human translator it is blatantly obvious, thanks to the context of the first sentence, that the correct pronoun is her.

Running Dragon 11 on 64-bit Windows XP

Posted on 6 June 2011 by Timothy Barton

Nuance say Dragon is not compatible with 64-bit Windows XP. The installer aborts if you try to install it on this system. But there’s a workaround! Simply follow the instructions found here, but omit the part telling you to change the properties of Audio.exe to run in XP compatibility mode, since you’re already running XP (the blog was written to explain how to run Dragon in 64-bit Vista).

Many thanks to Larry Henry for explaining this workaround.

Invertext glossaries

Posted on 20 May 2011 by Timothy Barton

Edit on 29 March 2012

I have looked at this glossary more closely and having seen entries like this I can only conclude that it is not a reliable source.

End of edit

For professional translations, visit www.timtranslates.com.

Today I stumbled across this little beauty of a webpage. It contains a bilingual Spanish<>English glossary with 6,000 definitions in the fields of banking, stock markets, accounting, money and currencies, corporate banking, retail banking and money laundering. I’ve not really tested it yet, but it looks promising.

The glossary is produced by Ediciones Verba, who have produced what looks like a very interesting set of technical dictionaries. I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who has bought the dictionaries.

I’m a little hesitant about buying them because I wonder whether at some point they’ll put everything online. Also, the dictionaries are not cheap (though given the number of entries, that’s not surprising). I do hope that at some point they will produce digital versions, because that’s what most translators prefer searching in. I’d rather select the terminology I’m looking for and activate a search on my computer or online than get a bulky paper dictionary and look for it manually. In fact, I’d be willing to pay more for an electronic dictionary than for a paper version.

La guia de CCOO i la manipulació de l’IEC

Posted on 18 March 2011 by Timothy Barton

Ja tenim una altra de les moltes guies del llenguatge no sexista. Aquestes guies les escriuen persones que a la pregunta “com estan els teus pares?” deuen respondre “només tinc un pare”. La gent normal sabem que, segons el context, els noms masculins plurals de vegades es refereixen només a homes i de vegades es refereixen a homes i dones.

El pitjor de la guia de CCOO és la manipulació que fa de la Gramàtica de la llenguage catalana que està preparant l’Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC). Argumentant que no s’hauria d’emprar noms masculins plurals com “els treballadors” per a referir-se tant a homes com a dones, la guia de CCOO ens cita un fragment d’aquesta gramàtica:

La quasi totalitat de les categories nominals tenen gènere i nombre, i únicament mostren especificitats morfològiques els noms, els possessius i els pronoms. Els noms, perquè, a diferència de la resta de categories nominals, tenen gènere inherent: els noms són lèxicament masculins o femenins, enfront de les altres categories nominals que poden ésser masculines o femenines segons el context en què apareixen. Els possessius, perquè també presenten la categoria gramatical de persona, i els pronoms, perquè tenen persona i cas.

A partir d’aquest fragment, la guia de CCOO conclou: “Així doncs, cal tenir clar que s’està utilitzant el gènere masculí i no pas el neutre.”

Quina manipulació! Aquest capítol està parlant dels gèneres de les paraules. Diu que tots els noms tenen una gènere: masculí o femení. Però aquí no diu res de la relació entre el gènere i el sexe. Per això, els autors d’aquesta guia haurien d’haver llegit la secció 10.1.2 (“La relació entre gènere i sexe en els noms que designen éssers sexuats”) del mateix document:

En els noms en què el gènere estableix oposicions de sexe, el masculí és la forma no marcada semànticament. El caràcter no marcat del masculí es pot constatar fàcilment en el valor extensiu d’aquest gènere en contextos plurals. Efectivament, un nom masculí plural (com els avis o els llops) pot designar un grup sexualment heterogeni de mascles i femelles, però un nom femení ha de fer referència necessàriament a un grup de femelles (com les àvies o les llobes). El caràcter no marcat del masculí es pot constatar igualment en el fet que la concordança amb mots de gènere diferent es fa en masculí (El meu pare i la meva àvia eren rossellonesos; tots els avantpassats meus són italians menys ells dos).

Els autors d’aquesta guia (per cert, oi que quan he dit “els autors” tots heu entès que podria incloure dones?) no poden utilitzar la gramàtica de l’IEC per a justificar l’ús de les formes dobles com “els autors i les autores”, perquè aquesta gramàtica ho deixa molt clar que aquestes formes són innecessàries.

Finding acronyms in Microsoft Word

Posted on 21 December 2010 by Timothy Barton

To find acronyms written in all caps in Microsoft Word, use the following search line (including the angle brackets) with wildcards activated:

<[A-Z]{2,}>

To find only plural acronyms, change it to this:

<[A-Z]{2,}s>

And to find only acronyms with an apostrophe followed by an s, change it to this:

<[A-Z]{2,}[’'´]s>

Don’t judge a book by its inside cover

Posted on 12 October 2010 by Timothy Barton

Don’t judge a book by its cover, goes the saying. If that includes the inside cover, never could this be more true than with the 2009 edition of the Diccionario politécnico de las lenguas española e inglesa. This very good dictionary has been spoilt by a spelling mistake on the inside cover.

Inside cover

I suspect spelling mistakes on the front and inside covers are more often than not the fault of the publisher, rather than the author. It’s not the first time I’ve come across one. In the Humanities library at the Autonomous University of Barcelona there is an English dictionary with “Lenguage Dictionary” on the front cover (I seem to have lost the photo I used to have). And then there was the infamous case of the Catalan translation of the Asterix book Le Ciel nous Tombe sur la Tête, which erroneously appeared as “El cel s’ens cau al damunt”. Like the French tomber, caure is not a reflexive verb. In Spanish, however, they use the reflexive verb caerse, hence the mistake. But the mistake is twofold, since even if Catalan did use the reflexive form caure’s, the correct combination of the pronouns se and ens is se’ns, not s’ens.

The English title of this technical dictionary is also spelt incorrectly inside the book.

Front cover

Despite these mistakes, this is a very good dictionary and I would highly recommend it to anybody translating technical texts between Spanish and English. I just wonder how many people have read the online fragment provided on the publisher’s website and judged it by its inside cover.

Linguee

Posted on 7 October 2010 by Timothy Barton

Linguee is an online tool that searches for online translations of terms. It was originally only available for English<>German, but French, Spanish and Portuguese have now been added. You have to look carefully at the sources use and check the results for reliability, but provided you do that it’s a very useful tool.

Linguee website

Spanish<>English toolbar button (drag to the toolbar if using Firefox)
French<>English toolbar button (drag to the toolbar if using Firefox)

A les dones no els va malament perdre diners?

Posted on 21 September 2010 by Timothy Barton

“A tots ens va malament perdre diners”

Això diu un correu electrònic que la secció sindical de la UGT a la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ens ha enviat. Tenen tota la raó. Però mireu aquests altres fragments del missatge.

“Benvolguts i benvolgudes”
“Des de la secció sindical de la UGT et demanem que el dia 29 participis d’aquesta vaga que ens afecta a tots i totes.”
“No esperis que els altres arreglin el teu cotxe amb el seu sou, ajudem a arreglar-ho entre tots i totes.”
“ALS DELEGATS O REPRESENTANTS SINDICALS DE LA UAB, QUE EXERCIREM EL NOSTRE DRET DE VAGA, ENS DESCOMPTARAN EL DIA COM A QUALSEVOL TREBALLADOR O TREBALLADORA“

Suposo que la UGT creu que dir simplement “benvolguts”, “tots” o “treballadors” no inclou les dones. Per tant, quan ens diuen “A tots ens va malament perdre diners”, ens està dient que a les dones no. Quina discriminació! A més, sembla que als delegats sindicals els descompta un dia si fan vaga, però a les delegades no. O és que quan diem “benvolguts”, “tots” o “treballadors” estem emprant un gènere no marcat? Si és així, no cal dir formes redundants com “treballadors i treballadores”!

Did the Queen have a sex change? Automatic translation of speech

Posted on 26 April 2010 by Timothy Barton

There have been many articles recently, like this one, about advances in the automated translation of speech, and I’ve even read stories about armies using them. I find the latter news very worrying.

Automated translation of speech basically combines two previously existing technologies: speech recognition and machine translation. The problems with the latter are well publicised, and despite the advances made, the problems remain. Google’s corpus-based translations mean that sentences tend to be more coherent nowadays, but a coherent sentence can also be an incorrect translation.

Voice recognition has come on leaps and bounds recently. I use it myself when translating. But as every user of such technology knows, you have to train it to your voice, and even then it makes mistakes that you have to correct. The article from The Times I’ve provided a link to discusses the problem of understanding “high-speed Glaswegian slang”. Current technology would no doubt be absolutely useless at understanding this. But what about more standard forms of English?

I decided to test how Google’s new speech-recognition tool would cope with the Queen’s English — literally the Queen’s English — a speech made by Queen Elizabeth II to parliament in 2009. As I expected, because the tool is not trained to the individual’s voice, the results are pretty awful. To see the video, click on this link. Pause the video, move your mouse over the “CC” button at the bottom of the video, then click on “Transcribe Audio” (don’t click on “English”, as that just gives you captions provided by a human, rather than the automated transcription), click on OK, and the video begins. The Queen tells us how she “was a man that’s in the house of common” [sic].

We can, if we wish, have these captions translated into another language. Just go to the “CC” box and click on “Translate Captions”, then choose your language. But the machine translation will only translate what it’s asked to translate, so we are still likely to get told that the Queen is a man. The translations into the three other languages I work with begin like this:

Catalan: “Jo era un home que està a la Cambra dels Comuns”
Spanish: “Yo era un hombre que está en la Cámara de los Comunes”
French: “J’étais un homme qui est dans la Chambre des communes”

As you can see, there is a very high risk of misunderstanding when using this technology. If the army wants to communicate with people in other languages, I’m afraid they’re just going to have to hire trained interpreters.