GTS Blog

2009 is almost over. On New Years eve champagne glasses will be guzzled, kisses will be traded and a new decade will dawn. 

An extra reason to rejoice tonight is the official burial of 2009, which was a terrible year for business in general and for the translation industry in particular. Many companies in the USA and in Europe scaled back their budgets, delayed their translation/localization projects or cancelled them altogether. Translation companies, translators and other language professionals felt the crunch while under-employment prevailed.

But the signs of recovery began in Q4 of 2009. The color returned to the cheeks of many in the translation industry as orders started to pile up. Land at last! It seems that translation/localization services are essential to companies that are looking to grow their business. As the global economy looks for recovery, more and more corporations will invest in translation projects as the way to gain their competitive edge. Many of us in the translation industry will prosper as a result.

2010 will be a great year for people in the translation business. HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone!

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Having been affected with annoying advertisements that were popping up on my Windows system (a Windows XP machine installed under VMware on my MAC OS/X) , I downloaded and installed the Internet Security trial product from Kaspersky Labs. And while the product solved my ad popup problem, it did so many other bad things to my system that I removed it after about one day of use. What did it do bad, you ask? Well for one thing, it was a total drain on the CPU as well as on the Internet connection bandwidth. It seems that the application spent a lot of time looking for updates, scanning the computer and reminding you to pay for the license (”29 days left . . . “). So much so that the other applications had no room to breathe and were working very sluggishly or not working at all. I guess that after saying that, the other things are insignificant in comparison.

Before I decided to remove the Kaspersky application, I tried to disable it (without uninstalling). That way, I thought I would able to use it once in a while when I needed it. Using the Windows System Configuration Utility, I tried to disable the Kaspersky startup items so they would not be executed at reboot. That proved to be impossible–Kaspersky has some strong hooks in there. I then tried to remove the application entirely, but that also proved to be difficult. The first attempt failed and crashed the Windows entirely. After another attempt, I finally succeeded in removing Kaspersky and my Windows came back to life.

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Lingoes is a free tool which aggregates several free text translators and hundreds of free dictionaries, delivering a wealth of language resources in one application. Once installed you can use Lingoes to translate texts, lookup words using hundreds of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, play texts out loud using text-to-speech, access helpful information such as currency conversion rates and more. Lingoes works on Windows-based computers. You can download the tool from http://www.lingoes.net.

Lingoes is an intriguing tool which many users may find useful, but some users may find it to be cumbersome since it is fairly CPU intensive and also takes control of some Windows keyboard shortcuts. There also is nothing incredibly unique about Lingoes and any savvy PC user will be able to use Google and Yahoo to get  access to the same features without having to install another application on their machine. It is valuable in that it provides links to hundreds of free language resources which you may not have heard about.

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Karel Kosman is a young African man with a vision: harness the power of the Internet to improve the lives of poor African natives. His approach is brilliant in its simplicity. Karel travels throughout Africa to remote villages in areas that may not even have electricity. Using solar panel technology, he hooks up the village to the Internet so that the natives can learn basic PC and Internet skills. As they become more proficient in using the web, people are encouraged to get online jobs in the fields of translation or web design. By investing some of the revenues back into the business, villages can grow their operations and provide more jobs and more income. 

Internet in Africa

Further information about this project can be found on http://africa-charity-project.org/.

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SDL is the industry leader in CAT (Computer Aided Translation) software. SDL Trados is perceived to be the best in its class among its peers of Translation Memory software. But is it worth the money? According to the results of a poll that GTS has conducted recently among a group of independent professional translators in several countries, the answer is NO. Many translators have stopped using Trados, have not upgraded their product or have found much cheaper alternatives such as Wordfast. Google’s foray into the Translation Memory space, with their Google Translator Toolkit, may also be driving translators away from SDL Trados and into the cloud concept that Google offers. 

SDL prices its products in Euro, which is making it a very expensive proposition to users in the US as well as to users in other non-Euro block countries such as Canada, Japan and Latin American countries.

Additionally, SDL Trados has not come out with significant new features in the last few years. The Trados Workbench still uses the same outdated GUI which has not changed much in a while. And the product has a number of well-known bugs which SDL has not bothered to fix.

Maybe the people at SDL should descend from Olympus and address the needs of their customers and potential customers. But first and foremost they should ask themselves if the very high price tag is not pushing translators out of their market.

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