Quantifying the Success of the SDL Trados Certification Program

Anybody remember this? Starting a few years ago, if you were a Trados license holder, you would regularly get spammed with invitations to become a certified user of Trados. This would allow you to prove to potential customers your expertise with the tool. You took a test and, depending upon the results, you had to take paid training courses to improve your level (even if you had been using the program for a zillion years).

Was it successful? Using ProZ.com's directory of freelancers, it appears that repetitive carpet bombing via e-mail only gets you so far.

ProZ.com, of which I am member, has 2,263 members who pay the subscription fee and describe themselves as English to Spanish translators. Out of that universe, 1,602 report owning some version of SDL Trados. This is a relatively high number (71%) that confirms the program as the industry leader. However, when you probe the directory to see how many are certified, only 28 have proven their bona fies as beginners for the 2006 version and a piddling 26 have done so in the beginner level for Trados Studio 2009 (totals are difficult to come by because the directory forces you to break down results among the different levels and among the different versions). The highest total is 57 for the beginnner level of SDL Trados 2007, a whopping 2.5% of the overall universe of paid members (3.5% of license holders).

Predictably, in my opinion, the program has fallen far short of becoming a must-have for the freelance linguist. So I guess all that spamming was unnecessary. The ATA's certification program has to be a much better investment of time and money. Now Lionbridge has come out with its GeoWorkz Translation Workspace. (What is the "z" for? How can it be trendier to change an "s" for a "z" unless you're a gangsta? Is Lionbridge the baddest homey in the translation 'hood?) Anyway, this attempt to reap marginal rents by leveraging in-house assets seems about as well-thought-out as SDL's certification program. Maybe Trados should have labeled its effort the "Zertification Program." Peace out, yo!

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Battle of the Alignment Tools: YouAlign Wins Hands Down

This week I needed to align two files, convert the result into .tmx and import it into SDLX. The problem is the files had *.docx extensions because they were created with Word 2007. I had at my disposal SDL Trados's WinAlign, Wordfast's align function and the free YouAlign online app offered by Terminotix.

Trados WinAlign, the one I'm most familiarized with, failed to process any of the files, even after converting them to .rtf and saving them as Word97-2003.

Wordfast's Aligner was simply unmanageable. It was my first time using it and, despite an interface that superficially looks like WinAlign, I was unable to make heads or tails out of it after several attempts.

I vaguely remembered something about a free alignment tool . A quick Google search brought me to YouAlign. It worked like a charm, on the first attempt and without a single mistake. Amazing. It is offered by the same company that sells Terminotix. Although I don't own their CAT program, the YouAlign experience made me feel fuzzy and warn towards them. Therefore, I highly recommend it next time you get tripped up by your licensed programs.

(Alas, the import into SDLX failed for whatever reason, but such is the way of the CAT tool.)

A Financial Translator Dabbles in Machine Translation: Can Google Translator Toolkit Replace a Licensed CAT tool?

After a spell in which I reinstalled Windows several times in the space of a few months because of an array of hardware/software problems and the purchase of a new PC, I basically decided not to trust computer hard drives with long-term storage. I now consider my main PC’s hard drive as an empty shell for temporary storage of non-essential items and some of the most recent files I use. The heavy lifting of my real storage is done by my Carbonite account (which backs up my data in the cloud, for a fee after 2GB) and external hard drives. Redundant? Yes, but I now no longer worry about my backup failing.
Now, every time I encounter intractable PC problems (at least for a user with middling computer literacy), I simply reformat my HD and reinstall my OS, which, of course, erases any data on it. This, however, creates the inconvenience of also erasing all my programs and settings, forcing me to spend an entire day re-teaching my PC to think like me. This is particularly uncomfortable for my CAT tools, which feature relatively roundabout ways of reinstalling licenses in order to avoid piracy. Wordfast forces you to reinstall, obtain an install number, visit their website, punch in an account name and password, and “re-license” your product by obtaining a new license number for your install number. Trados’s softkey procedure similarly implies logging in to their support site using an account password, downloading a new .txt document, saving it on your hard drive and then navigating to it from Workbench. The program then identifies the file as a new license and unlocks the program for use with large TMs.
Needless to say, these procedures, while simple, are never hassle-free. There are always hiccups along the way and several restarts are necessary before the software starts to work.
This led me to wonder about CAT tools in the cloud-computing sky. After all, cloud-based software is the wave fo the future. Eventually, our hard drives will not contain hardly any software. Our PCs will simply be a hub to connect with all the programs we need, lodged in the servers of software providers. Many of us use e-mail that way, never downloading messages to our PCs but rather reading and storing messages via our browsers.
To avoid the mess of reinstalling software on the latest reinstallation of my Windows environment, I decided to try out Google Translator Toolkit (GTT). I heard of Lingotek a few years back, which featured sharing of large TMs among thousands of translators, but they have since adopted a B2B business model, apparently, and only provide maintenance of the tool to people who originally signed up for it.
I was familiar with Google’s machine translation through the plug-in in Wordfast. And I knew the expanded Toolkit featured some limited CAT capabilities. I decided to give it a spin as a CAT tool to see whether it could supplant paid programs that require fussy re-licensing procedures. As many know, GTT combines certain aspects of machine translation with CAT capabilities. You can upload a small translation memory (TM) of less than 50 GB. The downside is that this material automatically becomes the property of Google Inc., with the attendant confidentiality problems. The work of the users uploading TMs and processing sentences in the Google environment is then used by the company to enrich the quality of its own machine translations (MT).
The conclusion, sadly, is that GTT is not ready for prime time as a replacement of CAT tools. The main drawback: the way it scans tables and visual elements of Word docs. Instead of leaving visual elements in the same state as in the original Word document, it scans it partially or whollly and then translates elements that do not need translation (such as letterheads), forcing the user to backtrack over the document at the end of the project and manually insert translations, reinsert originals, make little tweaks here and there, copy-paste, paste-copy, etc.
The key word here is “manual”. Everyone knows that anything that has to be done manually on a computer augments exponentially the amount of mistakes.  So that is a strike against the use of GTT as a replacement of heftier CATs (or TEnTs, as they are also known).
Another major drawback: the tool translates everything in the text, as opposed to one sentence at a time the way CAT tools do, which usually work segment by segment. This can create a lot of headaches. GTT doesn’t contain an “Insert original” (like say CTRL+C or CTRL+O) option. Which forces the professional translator to cut and paste (a lot in some cases).
Another (rather bizarre) aspect of Google Translator Toolkit: the Help info in other languages is… well… (how shall I put this?)… er… translated by Google Translate. Which means two out of three sentences are complete gibberish. Of course, this makes sense in some sort of twisted Silicon-Valley way only a Sheldonian computer engineer would understand. “If we’re designing a machine translation tool, wouldn’t it be hypocritical to use a human editor to translate the output in our Help files spit out by that very MT tool?” Well, not if you want your users to actually embrace the tool. This kind of laudable intellectual honesty mixed with utter idiocy is probably a major reason why more translators don’t embrace projects such as Google’s GTT.
Finally, I hesitate to mention this… After all, it is a free tool. You get what you pay for, right? I (rather naively) sent a message making suggestions to improve the tool to the contact address of the team devoted to maintaining GTT and promptly got a “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” reply from the server. The developer’s contact addresses no longer exist on the Google servers (!), which may mean that any further improvement or expansion of GTT has been either called off or postponed indefinitely. Hardly encouraging.
In any case, TEnT developers do not need to lose any sleep… at least for now. I guess the option for me would be to try out open source CAT tools, since by definition they do not require messy re-licensing. The problem is I am not familiarized with any, so self-training from ground zero would be a requisite. Furthermore, I do not even know if they require the use of Linux, with which I am totally unfamiliarized. We shall see…