| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Free tool to produce a TMX file ? Thread poster: Ron Barak
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Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 19:49
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| About wanting something for nothing | May 24, 2015 |
Christine Andersen wrote:
Sorry, that's not funny, but I fail to see why one minute translators are complaining that nobody will pay them rates they can live on, and the next they are looking for cheap or free versions of CAT software that developers have spent months or even years developing.
The internet is full of free things. It hurts no-one to start off by asking for free stuff. If developers who have spent months or years don't want to give away their work for free, then that's up to them.
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Samuel Murray wrote:
If developers who have spent months or years don't want to give away their work for free, then that's up to them.
Thinking software developers give away their work for free is not correct.
Some CATs are free to use, but they have a Donation link. So happy translators can donate if they want.
(you don't have to pay taxes over gifts received, btw, so in a way it's a good business model)
It's nice for beginners though, that their is a possibility to use a free and simple tools.
[Edited at 2015-05-24 13:38 GMT]
[Edited at 2015-05-24 13:39 GMT]
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Christine Andersen wrote:
You can't use the TMX without a CAT anyway, so why not use the aligner that comes with the CAT?
First of all, I don't see anything wrong with looking for free tools where possible. Of course one is generally better off paying for a better tool if they use it regularly, but for occasional use, free is usually fine.
As to why one would not use the aligner that comes with the CAT, at least two possibilities come to mind: 1) most aligners bundled with a CAT are rubbish 2) some CATs don't come with an aligner, which, in the light of 1), is not that tragic a loss.
| | | | | Three sentences. Plus an on-topic remark. | May 25, 2015 |
TalTranslations wrote:
Thinking software developers give away their work for free is not correct.
Some CATs are free to use, but they have a Donation link. So happy translators can donate if they want.
(you don't have to pay taxes over gifts received, btw, so in a way it's a good business model)
It's nice for beginners though, that their is a possibility to use a free and simple tools.
There are fully featured CAT tools that are free, are not supported in any way by donations or ads, nor in any other way, and are pretty darned good. They can be free for a number of reasons. Three examples (but there are dozens of free tools, and probably dozens of reasons why they are free - free as in "gratis"): OmegaT (FOSS fanatics), Heartsome (discontinued), AplpeTrans (discontinued, OS specific). There are free CAT tools for specific purposes - usually localisation of specific strings - that are limited, but pretty darned good for their purpose, more often than not to be preferred over general, paid CAT tools. Those paid CAT tools nowadays often offer features that are related to translations and the tool, but don't necessarily have to be integrated in it, like PDF text extraction and... alignment. In all or almost all cases, task specific tools outperform those integrated features, including alignment (one more vote for Andras Farkas here).
I hope that with "beginners" you don't mean beginning translators. Some experienced and excellent translators will argue that you don't need a CAT tool at all, or even that they ruin your translation. I don't agree, but I do admit using a CAT tool is not a guarantee for arriving at a brilliant translation, and it does have significant disadvantages, especially for "creative" texts. And I don't agree because even for creative texts, they still offer benefits.
"Beginning" CAT tool users tend to go for a tool that is imposed upon them by agencies or public opinion, not for the "best" tool, whatever that is, and not for "free and simple" tools. In fact, those free tools are not necessarily simple at all. I've been using (paid) CAT tools since 1997, but I sort of recently (only a few years ago) had a look at OmegaT because I was and still am interested in their tokeniser feature, and I had to give up. Too complicated for me.
However, I do think paying for tools you use for your daily activities makes a lot of sense. You stimulate development, you're entitled to support, and you have the right complain. And as an angry young old man who just happens to be old, I love to complain. Besides, even the most expensive - though not necessarily the best - CAT tools for translators cost peanuts if you do your maths, and especially if you pay tax. There aren't that many tax deductables in our profession, so go for paid tools.
On topic: [In 2010!] The OP asked for a free tool that can produce a valid TMX file. That is a very valid question. The fact that Ron doesn't know one, indicates that creating TMX files is one of his regular activities, so "free" is justifiable. It also indicates that he may not use a CAT tool since most CAT tools can create one once you have aligned the documents, even in 2010. In fact, I think he only wanted to create a TMX file - and I'm pretty sure he succeeded in it by now - because a client asked for it, or because he translated a document, and wanted to contribute his translation to a(n online) resource. I bet the latter is the case if his example (English-Latin) wasn't randomly chosen.
Cheers,
Hans
[Edited at 2015-05-25 00:34 GMT]
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esperantisto
Local time: 20:49
Member (2006)
English to Russian
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SITE LOCALIZER | Utterly wrong | May 25, 2015 |
Just a bunch of wrong assertions and assumptions.
Christine Andersen wrote:
Translators are underpaid (or some are), so they can't afford CAT tools and want them free.
So what? It’s just business: if your income does not cover your expenses, either raise your income (by raising your rate or your workload) or cut your expenses (by using cheaper tools). That’s it.
If the CAT tools are free, then the developers would not be able to afford the time to develop them, clean out the bugs, keep up with new versions of other software and so on.
Utterly wrong for a number reasons such as:
1) Free software is about freedom, not about price.
2) Software developers are motivated not solely by money (so are translators, aren’t they?).
3) Linux and BSD operating systems, KDE and Gnome desktop environments, Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice office suite are only few examples of free software projects that are much better (more safe and robust, less prone to crashes and crackers’ attacks etc.) as compared to proprietary software, are being steadily developed with releases of new versions. And their development teams are normally much better accessible (your requests go to coders, not to clerks from marketing departments of big companies that don’t give a fart to needs of particular users) and bugs are squashed much quicker.
If we want to be paid viable rates ourselves, then we must also expect to pay others for the services they provide for us.
Then go and pay. All free software projects known to me accept donations. And such donations seem to be more efficient than paying for overpriced licenses.
| | | | | 'free' software and donations | May 25, 2015 |
esperantisto wrote:
1) Free software is [url=http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html]about freedom, not about price
@Hans
OmegaT has a donation page.
If you use it regularly, I think it's fair to pay something.
Quote from ... --- see link below ----
Donations
OmegaT+ needs financial donations to progress and move forward with improved functionality. Here we are asking for financial contributions to make this a reality.
...
When we speak of “free software”, we're talking about freedom, not price
...
BTW, to the topic starter: OmegaT doesn't have an align feature, as far as I know.
[Edited at 2015-05-25 11:40 GMT]
| | | | esperantisto
Local time: 20:49
Member (2006)
English to Russian
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER | Some corrections | May 25, 2015 |
TalTranslations wrote:
OmegaT has a donation page.
If you use it regularly, I think it's fair to pay something.
Quote from …
You mix up two projects. The link is to the page of omegat+ project that is a fork of OmegaT, but not OmegaT. Omegat+ seems to be a dead project for a couple of years and contributing to it won’t be efficient. Thus, consider donating to OmegaT.
TalTranslations wrote:
OmegaT doesn't have an align feature, as far as I know.
Wrong. OmegaT does provide alignment for Java properties bundle files.
[Edited at 2015-05-25 12:13 GMT]
| | | | | link deleted | May 25, 2015 |
Hi Esperantismo
Sorry, for the wrong link - I deleted it from my post
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Koksal Uslu
Türkiye
Local time: 20:49
English to Turkish
+ ...
| Thanks a lot. | Apr 8, 2018 |
FarkasAndras wrote: Any aligner should be able to do this. Here's one I wrote (Windows only at the moment, free and open source): http://sourceforge.net/projects/aligner/ It takes UTF-8 txt or HTML files, aligns them and creates a TMX. The package also contains a TMX generator tool in case you already have a tab delimited file (spreadsheet with English in one column and Latin in the other) and want to create a TMX from it. I haven't tested the TMX files it generates very thoroughly at all, but the script has worked flawlessly for me and I received no bug reports from users so far. Read the readme, try it and come back to me if you have problems. Another option would be apsic xbench, but that isn't an aligner (i.e. it will only create a TMX from a previously aligned tab delimited file). If you have Trados, you could also use Winalign, which I can't recommend at all. It's pretty awful. Plustools is also a possible solution, but I'm not sure it does TMX output and it has its limitations, too. Note: using Winalign, Plustools or any other aligner I know of is extremely tedious if you have a lot of text to align. To my knowledge, my aligner is the only somewhat user friendly solution that integrates an autoaligner and a TMX generator. Second note to Plustools users: I recently added instructions to Aligner.bat that allow you to use a mixed workflow. I.e. you can run Aligner.bat to segment/preprocess your text and generate an automatic alignment and then use Plustools to review/correct the sentence pairings. After that, you can either generate a TM with Plustools or return to Aligner.bat and create a TMX with that. The point of the whole operation is that you may find Plustools more convenient for merging/splitting segments while Aligner.bat can provide automatic alignment, HTML processing, TMX generation etc.
Thank you so much, your program is working well, it will help me so much. Thanks again.
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