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Translating from a secondary source language in OmegaT
Thread poster: Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 18:34
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Dec 7, 2012

[I used Google Translate to translate the text in the screenshots, but normally Google Translate would not be used for this feature at all.]

One of the new, undocumented features of OmegaT is a rather limited but potentially useful ability to translate from a secondary language. Or you could say: to translate from two languages at once.

This feature makes it possible for the translator to see his source text in two langu... See more
[I used Google Translate to translate the text in the screenshots, but normally Google Translate would not be used for this feature at all.]

One of the new, undocumented features of OmegaT is a rather limited but potentially useful ability to translate from a secondary language. Or you could say: to translate from two languages at once.

This feature makes it possible for the translator to see his source text in two languages while he translates it into a third language. This is useful for rarer language combinations where the translator does understand the primary source language but prefers to be able to reference each segment against the same text in a secondary source language as well.

[This feature is not intended to make it possible for translators to translate from languages that they don't understand. If someone were to try that, he'd find out quickly that without any knowledge of the primary source language he is unable to use fuzzy matching, glossary matches, or context searches, since all of those are done on the primary source language.]

Here's a screenshot of a dummy translation from Spanish to Afrikaans:



This is what OmegaT would normally look like. The first segment is already translated in this screenshot.

Here's a screenshot of the same project, if a secondary source language (English) is loaded:



Where does this secondary source language's text come from? It doesn't come from machine translation, but from a human translator who translated this exact same source text segment from Spanish into English previously. The secondary source text is located in a TM called "ES-EN.tmx" which is placed in the project subfolder /tm/tmx2source/.

When you move to the next segment, the secondary source text disappears from the non-active segment. In the following screenshot, I've moved to the next segment, and the next segment does not have a secondary source text match, so it doesn't display a secondary source text:



You can have multiple secondary source languages. In the following screenshot the translation from both the Spanish-English and Spanish-Afrikaans translators were sent to the Afrikaans-Japanese translator who happen to be able to speak English and can understand Spanish as well:



The primary source language of the project remains the source language that is used in e.g. glossary matches or dictionary matches or in machine translation queries or in any of the source text search features. Any fuzzy matches displayed in the Fuzzy Matches pane will be using the primary source language and target language.

So... how does one use this feature?

It is important to note that the secondary source language will only be displayed if there is an exact match for the source text in the secondary source language TM. If the segment in the secondary source language TM is but one single character different from the source text in the source file, it will not be displayed as a secondary source language.

To test the feature, translate a test file from language AA to language BB. Then create a new project using the same test file, and copy the project_save.tmx file from the first project, and rename it to AA-BB.tmx, and place it in a new subfolder of the second project called /tm/tmx2source/. The secondary source language TM has to be named with the language codes used in that TM.

Do any other CAT tools have similar features? I know that Pootle has a function similar to this that allows you to see one additional source language, for exact matching source segments. Any others? ▲ Collapse
 
Milan Condak
Milan Condak  Identity Verified
Local time: 18:34
English to Czech
Interesting feature Dec 8, 2012

Samuel Murray wrote:

One of the new, undocumented features of OmegaT is a rather limited but potentially useful ability to translate from a secondary language. Or you could say: to translate from two languages at once.




Hi Samuel, it is interesting news.

I tested multilingual TMXs (created by LF Aligner 2.56) in standard OmegaT TM folder, one year ago.

OmegaT gave me fuzzy translations from EN-HU-CS TMX by testing translation HU-CS.

http://www.condak.net/tools/align-sentence/lf-align3-5/cs/03.html

I tested concordance search in 5languages-units TMX and I receive results in all languages:

http://www.condak.net/tools/align-sentence/lf-align3-5/cs/01.html

Milan Condak
 
Marco Cevoli
Marco Cevoli  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 18:34
Spanish to Italian
+ ...
Useful for multilingual projects Dec 8, 2012

Hi Samuel,

thanks for this piece of information. I wasn't aware of this feature.

This feature can come handy when dealing with multilingual projects, where the target languages must be printed side by side. Having a visual references of the other translations (of course, if they're not done at the same time) can be useful to avoid inconsistencies that could look quite bad when printed. This is especially true for the treatment given to toponyms, proper names, acronyms, ... See more
Hi Samuel,

thanks for this piece of information. I wasn't aware of this feature.

This feature can come handy when dealing with multilingual projects, where the target languages must be printed side by side. Having a visual references of the other translations (of course, if they're not done at the same time) can be useful to avoid inconsistencies that could look quite bad when printed. This is especially true for the treatment given to toponyms, proper names, acronyms, name of institutions or other formatting details that might be not agreed on at the beginning of the project, or simply to translate with the same style in all target languages.

Just my 2 cents.

Kind regards

Marco Cevoli
http://www.qabiria.com ▲ Collapse
 


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Translating from a secondary source language in OmegaT






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