Linguee Professional – Your favorite Dictionary on your Desktop (Beta Review)

 

Most translators are aware of the excellent Linguee website. While it’s limited in terms of the language combination it offers (Spanish-English, German-English, English-French, English-Portuguese, for some reason…), it does its job exceptionally well, in fact, it’s dictionary and translation memory all rolled into one. Or, as they call themselves, a Dictionary and Translation Search engine.

Of course, as translators, what we really want is for terminology lookup to be as fast and efficient as possible, and therefore, a variety of tools are available for one-click terminology research, like IntelliWebSearch, a tool which brands itself as “the ultimate terminology research experience”, but is brought down by its horrific interface (and website).

The good people behind Linguee are going the same route, and have released a beta version of their desktop software, which as far as I understand will soon be available to professional translators on a subscription basis. (That’s right, not free.) I was lucky enough to find an invite to their beta program in my inbox the other day, just as I was working on a particularly tough project with loads of technical terminology, giving me the perfect chance to test its real-world credentials.

What Linguee Professional does is very simple. Anywhere you are, just click into a word of phrase and the program will look it up in the huge Linguee database. Nothing wrong there.  The result is presented in a nice little speech  bubble above the text (and it works in SDL Trados Studio, too!). However, while the idea is good, the implementation, so far, is not. It has one or two additional benefits compared to just using the website. For example, there is need to mark the whole word, just click into it. When two words which stand next to each other are recognised, the corresponding result is shown instead of the single-word translation. So if you clicked into the word “table”, and the following word were “tennis”, Linguee Professional would be clever enough to understand that you were looking for the term “table tennis” and look that up for you.

One-click lookup in MS Word with a nice looking speech bubble.

However, at least at this early beta stage, there are a number of shortcomings/bugs which still need to be ironed out in order for this to be ready for prime time:

• The website sometimes fails to load, even if you have a working internet connection.
• While single-click lookup is great, it is not possible to mark two or more words for more precise term lookup, meaning that Linguee Professional tries to second-guess you too often.
• The default keyboard shortcut is control+left mouse-click. Now try and select more than one file to attach to an email and you’ll see that it’s just replaced one of the most commonly used shortcut in Windows. While you can still change this in the settings, this is a terrible oversight on behalf of the programmers.
• If you use a dial-up or USB modem, and your connection is not active at start-up, Linguee Professional will actually show an error message warning you that it has failed to connect to its server. A bit aggressive, I would think. I mean, give us a second to log onto that internet connection, okay?

Linguee Professional starts at five euros per month if you pay for a yearly subscription (and that’s for the slimmed-down “Premium” version). As things stand today, it is not worth the money for something that is basically just a wrapper for their (freely accessible) website, just like the worst mobile apps that are produced by the bucket load today. The bottom line: If you bring it to the desktop, give it some desktop features, otherwise the only thing we are doing here is pay a monthly fee to access a free website.

Let’s be careful here because this is not the finished version yet but in terms of a beta review, I would have to say that this is not good enough.

You can give the Linguee Professional beta a spin here. Take it for a test drive and let us hear your opinion in the comments.

SDL Trados Studio Language Course for Beginners

 

Where’s that CENTRAL DIRECTORY again?

I have, as many of my readers will probably know by now, a love-hate relationship with Trados SDL Studio 2009 (and 2011). I love it for what it can do, but I have previously posted about how it can properly drive me up the wall when it decides (completely at random, like a difficult girlfriend with Naomi Campbell-like mood swings), not to work. And I’ve previously poked some fun at SDL for seeing the need to introduce an own file format for error messages.

See, the main issue with SDL Studio is not that it throws up bugs every two weeks, just when you least need it. An even bigger problem is that it stubbornly refuses to explain what’s wrong. (Like my girlfriend when she puts on that face of hers, and when asked what the problem is, comes up with a sweet "nothing”)Sometimes I think we would need a language course to be able to communicate with Trados Studio.

Today, I came across a particularly interesting example. I received a file from a client as text painted into an email. I then created a word file in the client’s directory with the intention of pasting the text into it, but forgot to actually paste it in and left it on my clipboard instead. To which, on creating the project and preparing the file for translation, Studio had the following to say: “Could not find central directory”. Luckily, by that time I had realized my oversight and thus was able to translate what Studio was trying to tell me:

“Could not find central directory” is SDL language for “Your word document is empty”. Hilarious, isn’t it?

The Truth about memoQ Server

 

In today’s blog post, Kilgray, the company behind the popular memoQ translation memory and server software, indirectly attacked SDL for spreading false truths about their product, memoQ server. It alleged that either because of misunderstandings or intentionally, some people on the web have claimed that memoQ server could only be accessed by one person, i.e. translator, at the time. The company compares such a scenario with a cell phone which “runs all kind of apps but is unable to place phone calls”. In other word, the product would not deserve the term “server” if this was true.

 

Kilgray's blogger also demands that “so-called experts in translation” check the facts before writing about their products, and that people spread the word that memoQ server, in truth, has no such problem and is perfectly accessible by various translators at the same time. Which is what we’re doing here. MemoQ server is another excellent product by Kilgray, and deserves to get credit for it, in our humble opinion.

 

Gabriel

Finally, a new SDL knowledgebase portal

 

Remember those links to the SDL knowledgebase, only to be greeted with the error message, “The article you are looking for does not longer exist”… etc…? Generations of translators are used to not finding absolutely anything on the SDL knowledgebase, no matter how hard we tried. Which is somehow a pity, considering that SDL’s software throws up so many error messages and crashes so frequently that we need to get some help, well, from somewhere!

And the good news? Well, all that’s set to change! No more desperation! SDL have a new knowledge portal which organizes content in a slightly more useful way. Here’s what it looks like:

What’s new?

The URL to access the knowledgebase is still the rather abstract http://kb.sdl.com. New sections include a YouTube section with links to rather useful video tutorials. Articles now feature icons to effortlessly print or share documents, and search has been greatly improved, with many more options to choose from and different categories which make it easier to find what you are after.

While the whole SDL/Trados software/customer support package is still far from being user-friendly, to say the least, we are thankful for any improvements made and it’s good to see that a lot of attention is paid to these services.y

Do you STILL translate in Microsoft Word?

 

 

That is the question which SDL ask in a Webinar to take place on Tuesday 10th April at 15:30 BST with the SDL consultant Ziad Chama. It might well be another opportunity to marvel at just how far Translation Memory applications like SDL Studio have come, and, according to the official description, Learn how SDL Trados Studio 2011 can help you translate faster and more easily.

 

The webinar takes place on 10th of April and you can register for it in the company’s TRANSLATIONZONE.

 

Should be fun if you have nothing better to do, of course.

Is MemoQ ever going to catch up with SDL Studio?

 

For a couple of years now, the folks at G.Brunner Translation have actively tried, on various occasions, to replace good ol’ Trados Studio with alternative software which would do the same job a bit more smoothly, you know, without the error messages and incompatibility issues which have plagued SDL’s flagship product for years.

This year, Trados Studio 2011 is out and it’s supposed to do away with most of the inconveniences which have always been typical of (all versions of) Trados/SDL Studio. Which is why we are asking ourselves: Is it actually still worth your while looking for an SDL alternative for computer-assisted translation or is Trados Studio now just fine, in its latest version?

Has anyone of you thought about switching or made the transition? What’s your opinion of MemoQ? Sound off in the comments.

Terminology Webinar from SDL

 

 

Terminology is a big word and not all of us are sure how to handle it. For German translators or those professionals who have some grasp of the German language, this webinar could prove interesting: On  Thursday, 12 April 2012, SDL hosts a talk by a representative from the translation agency TRANSLATION PROBST about how they manage their terminology in-house and perhaps most interestingly, the advantages of such terminology management for the client.

Gabriel

professional German translator