Marc Prior reports that the website for Omega T has been done up.
Omega T is a free translation memory program written in Java. It can be used by Mac and Linux users, and others.
In Blogos, Andrew Joscelyne reports on a site by Jeff Allen that collects links to translation memory and machine translation materials online.
As Andrew points out, the Jeff Allen site is not a single author site – you need to scroll down. There are the links to the Michael Benis articles that I can find only through Google when I want to recommend them. This is an excellent resource. I can’t discuss tools I don’t know, and most translators don’t know enough about the systems. I recently wrote some comments on Trados Workbench and Multiterm, which a client has kindly made available to me, which I implicitly compared with Transit, which I know quite well. But that’s as far as I can go. These articles will fill the gap.
I was having a look at a copy of the Language Technology Supplement (late 2002) to Multilingual Computing and found this article by Jonathan T. Hyne, Jr.:
bq. Tom had just reached 55 km/hr down his favorite mountain road when he felt the pager buzz against his back. At the bottom of the hill, he turned his bicycle onto a side street and checked the number in the pager window.
It was a translation company in Paris. He found a quiet area near a picnic table and called them back with his cellular telephone.
bq. A half-hour later, he took a shower while his computer booted up. When he sat at his desk, he connected to the Internet and opened his e-mail. The message from Paris contained the specifications of the job and a twomegabyte compressed file attached to it. While the file downloaded, he opened his accounting software and started an estimate/job order form. Within a half-hour, he had opened the files, inspected them, verified the clients word count and sent his estimate as an e-mail attachment to the client. He decided not to use dictation software for this assignment, so he put a CD of Schuberts Third Symphony on the stereo and went to work.
bq. The assignment consisted of engineering reports to the main office of a multinational oil company. Tom had done some of these the year before, so his translation tool had them in memory. He opened the tool, imported the job
and examined it on the left side of the screen.
It reminds me of some children’s sci-fi writing. But it isn’t much unlike what I do, except 1) I haven’t been cycling down a mountain road 2) TM does not help me with sentences and 3) No Schubert’s Third – I’m listening to Sandi Toksvig on LBC on Internet radio.