Our Russian distributor is going to have our documentation / software translated from English to Russian. He says he'll employ his own translator, but he also says he'd appreciate any referrals I might be able to make. So I figured I'd give him the contact info of any interested Langmates. Our products are bio-medical equipment. They are used for biofeedback purposes. The software analyzes signals captured by sensors, so an understanding of signal processing will make the translation task easier. This particular translation project will be easier if you use translation memory software, because there is so much repetition across manuals and in the online help. If anyone here is interested, let me know, and I'll make the introductions.

We started working on our English -> Japanese translation of our software a year ago. It's been a very long year. In fact, the translation was the easiest part of the project, because our Japanese distributor paid for a Japanese translation company to do the work. I insisted on doing an in-house review of the translation because our software is used in a clinical setting. I was worried about flawed translations that could affect (1) patient safety; (2) Software usability; and (3) Data integrity. We hired a Japanese-Canadian woman to review and correct the translated GUI strings. Our QA department decided to perform full quality assurance testing on the Japanese translation. The same woman was hired to run the tests, and upon seeing the strings in context, she found and corrected other translation errors. Interestingly enough, translations can lead to technical issues. We found bugs related to Unicode and to double-byte characters. We also had issues with hot keys (these are handled very differently in Japanese), concatenated strings, and variables. We found solutions/workarounds for everything. So this past week, we had a party to celebrate the release of the Japanese version of the software. Everyone who worked on the project got a formal invitation, and the rest of the employees were asked to crash the party. We drank a sake toast to the release, and Hisako brought Japanese crisps and snacks. It was a fitting end to a lot of hard work by a great team of people.

A few weeks ago I got new glasses. I needed them; my cockatoo has made so many beak marks on the lenses of my old bifocals that trying to see through them is like looking through fog. So, off I went, and when the optometrist wrote up my prescription, I asked her to write a second one, for glasses to be worn specifically for working on the computer. I spend 8-10 hours daily on the computer, and it seemed like a wise investment. Well, it was. After four weeks of wearing my computer glasses, I find my eyes are less strained at the end of a day, and I have fewer headaches. What are computer glasses? They're like reading glasses, a prescription for a single focal length that focuses on the computer screen. Unlike with my bifocals, I don't need to keep moving my head around to get a clear focus on my computer monitor. Everything beyond that distance, of course, is out of focus. But I can switch back to the new bifocals when I'm not actually working on the computer.   In addition, I kept my old glasses, and I wear them when the cockatoo is out and about; he can't do more damage to the old lenses than he already has. So just as I have "computer glasses", I also have what I call my "parrot glasses". So, if you wear glasses (and especially if you're at the age where you start needing bifocals), my experience might be of benefit to you. Cheers!

Our company's latest folly is the selling of our product under other corporations' brands. As the person responsible for maintaining our manuals and help files, I see my workload increase each time a new English version is added to the list. And as it's not a translation, I can't really outsource it.   So I'm looking for single-source editing tools that will allow me to maintain all the common material in a single version, but also use variables to replace brand names, product names, and other changeable text. So far, the tool that seems to be most appropriate for what I want is Madcap's MadPak Suite, which includes Flare, Lingo, and X-Edit.   Does anyone here have experience with these tools? Especially Flare or its baby brother, Blaze?

Our Japanese dealer agreed to pay for the translation of our software and manuals into Japanese. We proposed a local translator who is personally known to me to do the work, but no, her rates were much too high. So he hired a Japanese translation house to do the work. That's his prerogative, and if he felt he could trust them better than our person, well, that's understandable.   I told my boss that I wanted our local person to review the software translation as part of the quality assurance. He agreed. But when he got the invoice, he appeared shocked to have to pay so much. After all, the dealer hired a translation house and spent a whacking pile of money to get the translations, right? So why do we need to spend the extra money on our side?   I sat with Hisako and we reviewed the strings one by one to ensure that they were correctly translated with respect to three specific issues: patient safety (our software is used with biomedical hardware), usability (it is a very complicated software that requires training to use correctly), and data integrity (many of our users are clinical researchers and they don't want their data to be compromised).    It isn't the first time I've encountered this attitude about our translations; it's how the company handled the English to German translation and as a result we sold a substandard product in German-speaking Europe for about 4 years until I got THAT project under control.   Okay, I know that it's THEIR dime, and that they don't want to spend any more than they have to for translation. But why are they so EFFING cheap about it????????

I maintain our translations with Across software. I've received a Japanese translation made in Trados. The translators sent it to me in TTX format, and I can import this format into my translation memory.   What I can't do is align the TTX file with my source document. Source document is a DLL with string numbers, and the TTX contains string numbers, so in theory I should be able to match the translations by string number.   My quick and dirty workaround was to open the source document in Across's translation workdesk, open the TTX in an XML editor, and copy& paste the translations between the two documents. However, this defeats the purpose of the "computer-assisted" part of computer-assisted translation. And it works only for relatively small documents; I have a DLL with over 1800 strings that still needs to be brought into Across.   Has anyone else run into this kind of problem? Any suggestions?