Yet again: Trados fuzzy match woes (Expanded)

Continuing from my post of August 25, some further evidence of just how badly designed the fuzzy matching algorithms are in Trados:

So, according to Trados, "INSTALLING DISPLAY" is a 67% match for "Installing Display", while "Ownership of the Services and Marks." is a 65% match for "Description of the Service and Definitions."


A smarter matching algorithm would give more importance to meaningful words ("Description", "Service", "Definitions") than to grammatical ones ("of" "the" "and"), and would treat a difference between upper and lower case as much less significant than the chance similarity of two sentence structures.

By the way if "Installing Display" is changed to "Installing the Display", it does not come up as a fuzzy match at all (unless the fuzzy threshold is set extremely low), since it becomes a mere 40% match:


The worse thing is that all these problems have been known for years, but Trados (and now SDL/Trados) programmers have done nothing to improve the situation.

Trados: which bugs have been fixed?

I've just received a rather pushy call from an SDL/Trados representative. He wanted to know if I was considering upgrading from Trados 2007 to the newest version. When told that I was actually consider whether to change to a competitor's product, he asked why.

The reason I gave him was defects in the program, and old bugs never fixed.

I wonder however, if any of the more persistent bugs have been fixed with the latest releases - as far as I know, they haven't, but I would be happy to learn otherwise.

In particular, I'm thinking of such longstanding defects as the poor quality of low-fuzzy matches (see the previous post), the fact that formats are often mangled in MS Word documents, the irregular behavior of Workbench when translating MS Word tables with multiple columns (when Set Close/Next Open Get skips entire rows), the absence of shortcuts to open directly the previous segment, or the feebleness of the search functions within Tag Editor.

As far as I know, all development efforts were focused on supporting Vista/Office 2007, on corporate features, and on fixing some really disastrous new bugs (if any were introduced or discovered recently).

No real improvements to longstanding bugs, defects and annoyances as mentioned above. Does anybody know if this is still true, or which defects (if any) have been fixed after, say, version 7.1 and which improvements have been implemented?

Yet again: Trados fuzzy match woes

I sometime wonder whether SDL Trados programmers even understand the concept of fuzzy matching, or, if they do, whether they care or have pride in their job - only incompetent programmers would create or use a fuzzy matching algorithm that leads to ludicrous results such as these:


That's right: according to Trados, the segment "Ownership of the Services and Marks." is a 65% match for "Description of the Service and Definitions."

After all, "of the" and "and" are exactly the same in both sentences.

Translator v. linguist

One thing that riles me is the habit many translation companies have of calling us "linguists". According to my dictionaries, a linguist is either a specialist in linguistics or a person who knows more than one language.

Neither meaning directly applies: not all translators are specialists in linguistics, and most specialists in linguistics are certainly not translators. And though all translators do know more than one language, not all people who know more than one language have what it takes to be translators.

Tautology

Tautology, according to the Visual Thesaurus, is (among other things), "verboseness resulting from excessive repetitions."

For too many technical writers - especially, in my experience, those drafting ERP software manuals, a verbose, leaden and tautological style seems to be the only one they are able to use. Hence such pearls as

"The Server Date information is displayed for informational purposes."

In our translations we can, in such instances, improve on the original. For example, "La Data server è visualizzata a scopo informativo" provides the same information in Italian and is more concise.

Besides omitting redundant words, the translation can be shortened by rearranging the sentence structure:

"You can create a link in the Documents frame to link to a file or a Web page,"

May be translated more concisely and without loss of information as "Nel frame Documenti si può creare un collegamento a un file o a una pagina Web" .

"File received, thank you!"

Sometime it's the small things that make a difference. Such as a translation company always sending an acknowledgment whenever we send them back the translated files.

That way we don't have to worry whether the files have actually been received, or know that there is a problem only the day after the deadline, when the PM sends us a message asking where the files that we were supposed to send yesterday (and that we did send yesterday) are.

Of course, that cuts both ways: we also should acknowledge messages and files as they arrive, and not let the PM wonder whether we actually got what they sent us or not.

Should we haggle like Levantines?

I was recently contacted by a translation company with a good reputation. They asked us for the usual information, including our rates and our résumés, and asked that we do a free translation test.

Since the test was of reasonable length, I agreed, and scheduled it for next week.

Today they called me asking for urgent help with the translation of a short document. I'm already overbooked, but I wanted to start on the right foot with a new customer, so I agreed to help.

They then proceeded to beg for a discount: could I do it for our minimum rate, instead of the price that would result from our word rate? The difference was minimal (about 5 dollars), but I declined, and refused the job.

We may have lost the chance at a new customer, but I prefer that to the prospect of haggling every time we receive a project.

Our customers should remember this is a professional service, not a fish market. If they don't, it is up to us to remind them.

Update

They wrote again today, without reference to our phone call and messages yesterday, thanking us for our availability and asking a 15% discount from our rates. Declined again, of course.

Top 100 Language Blogs

LexioPhiles has published a list of the "Top 100 Language Blogs". The top of the list is dominated by blogs about learning languages (especially English), but there is a fair number of translation blogs.

About Translation chips in at number 42.

Other translation blogs of note on the list: Über Setzer Logbuch (23), yndigo (34), fidus interpres (43), Translation Blog (52), Blogging Translator (53), Musings from an overworked translator (69), Brave New Words (78), “la parole exportée” (87), Freelance Chinese Translator (90), and Thoughts On Translation (100).

Check out the other blogs as well: they cover a broad range of subject from linguistics to grammar and from ancient languages to "exploring the effects of Web 2.0 on the English language".

Rush Jobs

Corinne McKay has an excellent post on "How to do an acceptable job on a rush job".

I would add a few things:

1. Set a rush rate with your customers, and demand it for rush jobs. When you set a rush rate, also remember to define what a rush job is for you, for example:
   

   "Rush/weekend rate: from +30% to +50% of base rate, depending on the project. Rush: projects that require the translation of more than 2,500 words, or the editing of more than 7,500 words, or the proofreading of more than 10,000 words in a day. Weekend: projects that require a substantial part of the work to be done on Saturday, Sunday or other holidays."

2. The importance of QA is greater on rush jobs - the quality is already going to be lower because of the time constraints, and the chance of making errors increase when we work faster. All the more reason to devote the necessary time to QA.


3. If you are translating with a CAT program, use a Translation QA tool (XBench is a good one, and is free; you can find a list of other QA tools in this post from Translation Quality Blog). A QA tool helps catching such errors as untranslated and inconsistent segments. The latter are particularly slippery: in the flux of fast translation you may accept a fuzzy match without changing the translation, but you do not notice that a small word completely changes the meaning of the sentence. A QA tools is also very useful to catch inconsistent numbers and measurements, and wrong terminology (if you have a key terms glossary).


4. Both in your source segments and in your target ones, search for those words which, by themselves, are liable to completely change the meaning of a sentence. It is just too easy to forget (or add) a short word such as "not" and completely change the meaning. After all, "Do not pay attention to him" and "Do pay attention to him" look remarkably similar, when you are in a hurry (especially when you see them as suggested matches in a CAT tool).

On a lighter note: if you can listen to music while translating, put on your earphones (to help your concentration), and some fast music. If you enjoy classical music, the William Tell overture helps establishing a fast typing rhythm. When you are in a tearing hurry, Khachaturian's Saber Dance from the ballet Gayaneh is just the ticket.

How to win back discontented Trados users

Today I received a phone call from an SDL representative: he had seen that I had accessed the SDL site (to download an updated copy of WorldServer Desktop Workbench), and tried to sell me some new service or product.

Unfortunately for my caller, I had just loaded a new termbase in MultiTerm, so some of the glaring shortcomings of SDL technologies were fresh in my mind. The phone call, far from a successful sales pitch, soon became a diatribe against some of Trados' long-standing problems.

I then received a follow-up e-mail:

"...[I] am sorry you feel discontent with our products. I would like to win back your commitment to our technology, just let me know in what direction we can possibly do that."

My answer summarized some of the more pressing (and annoying) problems with Trados and MultiTerm:

1. MS Word interface: fix the formatting problems - it is unacceptable that Trados consistently messes up the formatting of even simple MS Word documents. Other TM products that also use MS Word as an interface (for example, Wordfast) experience far fewer formatting problems with MS Word (or none at all).
   Please note:
   
• advising translators to use TagEditor instead is a cop out, and, at best, only a partial solution,
  
• saying that the MS Word document should be formatted some other way, that styles should be applied in some other more controlled manner, or similar advice is useless for translators: we translate the document we get, not the document we wish we would get.


2. Concordance search: a translator should be able to search not only on the source language, but also on the target.
   
3. TagEditor: recommending the use of TagEditor for the translation of MS Word documents would be more acceptable if TagEditor were a richer text editor. For starters, it should offer more powerful search functions (at least the equivalent of MS Word wildcard searches; better still, full regular expressions).
   
4. MultiTerm: a more user-friendly and less counterintuitive interface and process would help.
   
5. Artificial limitations to the freelance edition of Trados. Two translators who acquire two different freelance licenses should be able to run them on the same home network, without the need to purchase a more expensive version of the program.

What are the things that bug you most as regard Trados, MultiTerm and the other SDL products? What would you add to my list (or remove from it)?