Thousands of translation glossaries

Inbox Translation, a UK translation company, has published on its website a categorized list of several thousand translation glossaries.

You can check them at 3000+.Translation Glossaries.

(Hat tip: Multilingual News)

Real-time terminology sharing with Google Docs

One of my partners and I are working on the same project. In a way, it is a throwback to an earlier era: a pdf project that we could not convert using OCR.

We took the opportunity to test the Google Docs spreadsheet as a remote real-time shared terminology tool. We wanted to know if it would allow us to open our glossary at the same time to check terminology and add, change, and delete entries.

The Google Docs spreadsheet does a remarkable job of allowing simultaneous use by two translators.

At first, we set up the spreadsheet so the approved entries were in one page, my partner's additions in a second one, and mine in a third one. We feared that typing a new entry on the same page simultaneously could unintentionally overwrite data. After a while, however, to test the limits of the application, we tried to write at the same time on the same line of the same page.

We could not do that: Google Docs prevented us from accidentally messing up each other's entries.

This was by no means a stress test: perhaps many simultaneous users on the same page could damage a document and lose data. But for two people working far away at the same time on the same project it is a useful tool: data sharing in real time without the need to set up any server or other network application or hardware.

Best of all, it is free, and the data is frequently saved by Google.

In a later post I'll give a more detailed description of how to set up such a shared Google Docs spreadsheet.

Terminology search and confirmation with Google

Last week, my partner had to find a good translation into Spanish for "wireless hot spot". A first search in the Microsoft language portal suggested "zona interactiva inalámbrica" (2 hits), while a search in the KudoZ glossaries gave "zona local de cobertura" (1 hit only), although, of course, we found plenty of results for "hot spot" and for "wireless" not combined in the same string.

We turned to Google, searching for "hot spot" and "inalámbrico". Among the 9,640 hits we found "hot spot inalámbrico" and "punto de acceso inalámbrico hot spot" (besides many pages with "inalámbrico" and "hot spot", but not in the same string). This suggested "punto de acceso" as part of the solution.

Now we searched for the exact string "hot spot inalámbrico", limiting the search to pages written in Spanish. This gave us 501 hits. "Hot spot inalámbrico" was a possible candidate, then, although not the best: it sounded too colloquial and it had far too few hits for such a widespread technology.

We tried again, still restricting the search to pages written in Spanish. This time we searched for the exact string "punto de acceso inalámbrico". Result: 155,000 hits, an excellent candidate translation.

For confirmation, we tried the translations suggested by Microsoft and by KudoZ, searching only pages in Spanish. "Zona interactiva inalámbrica" yielded 10 results in Google; "zona local de cobertura" only two hits, and both of them about cell phones, rather than wireless Internet hot spots.

So we finally chose "punto de acceso inalámbrico".

This search strategy gives excellent results and can easily be adapted to other languages and fields. An experienced translator, however, should develop a feeling for the number of hits given by a candidate term. Too few hits mean that you are on the wrong track (especially if there is a large difference between the number of hits for the source string and for the candidate term). But "too few hits" is relative: 500 hits could have been a good candidate term for some less widespread technology.

EU - multilingual summaries of legislation

The European Union provides tons of information online that can be a real treasure. Sometimes there is so much that is difficult to know where to start.

An excellent resource is the “Summary of legislation” site, where you can find useful information on the EU in eleven different languages. The site include detailed EU glossaries with clear explanation of 233 key EU terms.

But probably the best place to start is the “Eurojargon” glossary (this in 20 languages); a “plain language guide” aimed at untangling for the general public many confusing terms often used by EU insiders.

These are not real translation glossaries: they don’t include an easy key to the translation of each term. But since all this material is in at least eleven different languages, it should prove useful to many translators.

The links provided here get you to the English version of these pages. In each page you can then select your language.

Microsoft's Language Excellence: new life for the MS Glossaries

Microsoft Language Excellence's team (formerly MILS) launched today the Language Portal, a new terminology Web site.

The new site makes available more of Microsoft's linguistic resources than ever before.

Using the Language Portal interface, one can search Microsoft terminology and UI strings from most released products: Language Excellence has thus made available the MS Glossaries, once hidden under MSDN.

The portal offers a page for sending terminology feedback back to Microsoft, a link for downloading Microsoft's Style Guides, a "Language Portal Blog", articles, links to events and to other linguistic resources.

In the search interface one can look up a word or string and search its translation in any of the dozens of languages in which Microsoft products are translated (of course, the coverage for some of the languages will be more extensive than for others).
The search may be run on all the products available, or restricted to a specific piece of software.

The results page is divided between a Terminology pane, which provides Source, Target, Definition and Product, and a "Software strings" pane, with Source, Target and Product.

Searching through this interface will probably not be as quick as searching on the Microsoft's glossaries stored locally on your computer hard disk; on the other hand, the results obtained should be more up to date, and searching for translations in several different languages will no longer require downloading several gigabytes of zipped files on the off-chance that they may come handy one day.

New version of XBench adds QA functionality

ApSIC has recently release a new version of XBench, adding very useful QA functionality to the tool, which was previously used mostly as a search tool for Microsoft Glossaries or other text-based reference materials.

You can find a more detailed review of the new version here (from my Translation Quality blog).

IATE, the successor to Eurodicautom , finally available

IATE, or "Inter Active Terminology for Europe" is finally available, and replaces Eurdicautom, which was no longer maintained while IATE was being made ready for use.

It offers twenty-languages (of course not all terms are available in all languages) and the possibility of saving one's own search preferences.

It permits limited wildcard searches (only the asterisk "*" to indicate any character or multiple characters, and the underscore "_" to indicate any single character: no full RegEx search), and also the possibility to restrict the search to specific domains (such as Agriculture, Business, etc.) and types of search (Term, Abbreviation, Phrase, or All).

There are some more features; you can find a full description in the online help to the database.

All in all a useful addition to most translators' collection of reference links.

Microsoft Glossaries Available Again

Microsoft has now released updated versions of the Microsoft Translation Glossaries.

These are now available through the Microsoft Developer Network for MSDN subscribers (and no longer through the free FTP site), and include the terminology for Microsoft Vista.

(Hat tip to Nick, who left the news as a comment in a previous post devoted to the demise of the MS Glossaries)

Microsoft Glossaries RIP

As I mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft has released a new multi-language glossary of about 9000 terms.

Unfortunately, at the same time they have removed the old Microsoft glossaries that have been so useful to many IT translators: the only thing left on the old ftp site is a short readme file, which announces the new glossary as containing "more up-to-date terminology, [...] that is easier to use".

The old material is still available, but only to MSDN subscribers:

1. Go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/
2. Use the Sign In button to sign in to your MSDN account.
3. Click the "Subscriber Downloads and Product Keys" link.
4. Navigate to Tools, SDKs, and DDKs\Microsoft Glossaries.

I think it is a pity that the old, fuller glossaries are no longer available: it is true that some of the information there had to be taken with a grain of salt, as the glossaries contained many inconsistencies and even errors, but they were not really difficult to use (as Microsoft's readme file implies) - at least for people who knew something about software, or who used some of the various tools available on the web for making full use of the glossaries.

Several people knew about the impending demise of the old glossaries in advance, and I think many made full downloads to save their own copies of the most recent files.

Unfortunately, even those who have backup copies of the old glossaries will have to do without updated copies of the Windows and Office glossaries at the very moment when new and much updated copies of both are on the point of being released.

So no Windows Vista glossary, unless, as I believe, specific terminology information is going to be provided to the companies engaged in the localization of the newer Microsoft products. Even so, translators who would have relied on the updated Microsoft terminology to translate other software products will have to make do without.

New Microsoft glossary

Microsoft has released a new multilingual glossary, which can be freely downloaded from here.

According to Microsoft,

To provide users with more up-to-date terminology, Microsoft has replaced the glossary content that was previously posted to the Microsoft ftp site with a more concise document that is easier to use.

The new document is definitely more concise than those available before: 9000 lines instead of hundreds of thousands (the old XP glossary alone contained more than 100,000 lines).

I doubt that the new glossary is as complete as the previous ones, but I hope it will be at least more consistent. On the plus side, for those that have to manage multilingual projects, this glossary contains translations of the English terms into up to 45 different languages (not all English terms are translated into all available languages).

(Hat tip: Christof)

Virtual Terminologist

Virtual-Terminologist is a website that offers customization and import services for Trados termbases.

Additionally, they make available for free download a few termbases (French-English language pair only, so far), and have an informative page on the Cardinal Virtues in Terminology Management.

BBC America - Dictionary of Slang

When I studied English, I was more familiar with the British variety, including accents and slang. Now I've been living in the USA for a dozen years, and what I've not forgotten, is woefully out of date.

Help is at hand, however, from the web site of BBC America: they have an online dictionary of contemporary slang, so if you are puzzled by what they are talking about when they say "This place is quite a good battle", or "I don't know what's up with the telly...it's all over the shop", give it a look: it might help.

(Hat tip: scotsman.com)