Does the nature of translation projects justify this volume? Are there this many large projects in the translation market? I am not even sure that many of the truly large projects ever get to the free translation market. If a large company has an ongoing need for translation, is it not more economical for it to purchase or develop the program that best satisfies its specific needs and perform the work in-house or by building up a relationship with a bureau that specializes in that industry? If the amount and nature of projects do not justify it, what explains this buying frenzy? On the one hand, it is actually due to panic, i.e., fear of technical obsolescence and loss of orders. On the other hand, it is because these programs offer a number of functions that are actually helpful in the translator's work. I would emphasize two factors: the emergence of corpuses and automatic performance of repetitive tasks. Since no other program offered translators a solution for building and managing corpuses or an intelligent project-level search and replace function, it is understandable that many people considered the purchase of a TM program worthwhile from purely rational considerations. Many buyers are or will be disappointed. I know several translators who hardly use the program they purchased or do not use it at all. Tunneling through hundreds of pages of a manual, learning the use of a new interface, the concept of databases, etc. are particularly difficult for those who would like to focus on translation, rather than technology. I've been developing the WordFisher for MS Word macro set since 1994. It started out as a glossary management program, but later, as I became familiar with TM programs, I became "envious" of their functions and attempted to implement as many of them as possible in the macro language of Word. I realized that there is a gap between advanced word processors and heavy-duty TM programs. WordFisher intends to fill this gap, and its current version can be regarded as a full-fledged translation aid program. The new version of WordFisher requires MS Word 6.0 or above, but it also works under Word 2000. The program is written in the WordBasic language. For the translator, it resembles a TM program, but provides a simpler interface in Word. The main functions of WordFisher are:
When translating by overwriting, the translation's bilingual corpus is built automatically. Corpuses can be later input in any TM program without time-consuming preparatory work. This function alone makes working in WordFisher worthwhile. WordFisher has a built-in aligner to convert previously done translations into corpuses. Although corpuses can be searched by WordFisher, larger corpuses are better handled using external programs. In my experience, dtSearch (http://www.dtsearch.com) is ideal for this purpose. dtSearch uses indexing, can process almost any file format, and can even search using fuzzy technique if needed. The result of a search can be better viewed in dtSearch than in most TM programs. It has been shown under actual working conditions that projects theoretically (by the agency's theory) requiring a TM program can be handled using WordFisher and dtSearch without affecting quality or speed. All TM programs are capable of exporting their translation memories into a parallel text and of importing parallel text pairs into their translation memories. These functions are used in fitting WordFisher to TM programs. The customer sends the exported translation memory and the glossary of the project. If their combined size does not exceed 1 or 2 MB, WordFisher can handle the reference material by itself. If there is more reference material, it is convenient to combine it with the files received and to handle them together, for example, using dtSearch. The translation project is created in WordFisher from the files to be translated. This process is automated�no user intervention is required. Translation is then performed by overwriting. During the translation process, the reference material must be constantly monitored, and whatever is found there must be taken into account. Repeating expressions only have to be entered once; WordFisher does the replace in all the files. Upon completion of the translation, the program prepares the tables containing the source-language and target-language sentences. These can be returned to the customer along with the translated files, and the customer can then enter them into the translation memory of his own TM program. The answer to the question posed in the title of this article: WordFisher cannot be considered an alternative to TM programs where these are used for their originally intended purpose. But it can be an alternative wherever the nature of the task does not justify the use of a heavy-duty TM program, i.e., in smaller MS Word projects, which constitute the bulk of most translators' everyday work. The home page of WordFisher can be found at: |