[itzul] AppleTrans

[Gotzon Egia]

AppleTrans itzulpen memoriekin lan egiteko Mac-erako tresna da. Hona 
eskoziar itzultzaile «makero» baten iritzia (ingelesez):


I promised to keep various people updated with progress on AppleTrans 
but have been far too busy actually translating with it to right long 
eulogies or criticisms.

Having now used the tool for projects of various sizes - from tiny jobs 
to thousands of words - and for projects involving multiple files as 
well as single files, I have to say that my initial impressions have 
only been reinforced.

AppleTrans is fast - light years ahead of WordFast for example and 
easily as fast as Deja Vu on the dark side. Access to multiple TMs 
(corpora) and Terminology/Glossaries really is instant. It is also 
extremely accurate - I have yet to suffer the sort of problems often 
encountered with WordFast for MAC, where you know the phrase, sentence 
or word is in there somewhere but it doesn't show up.

In particular, I am increasingly stunned by the speed of the CONCORDANCE 
searching, no matter how many TMs I have open and how big they are. 
Occasionally, the number of hits is overwhelmingly large (again hardly 
the fault of the developer) and literally goes off the edge of the 
screen, but it is INSTANTANEOUS! Again, without wishing to criticise the 
excellent WordFast and its wonderful developer, the restrictions imposed 
by Microsoft in VBA mean that concordance searching in WF was always 
slow at best - often excruciatingly so. It is a whole different universe 
in AT.

The manual is not very clear for 'switchers' used to other TM 
programmes. Once you get used to a different way of working though and 
find things out by trial and error, it is actually quite useful for a 
second look. In particular it is worth recapping to work out all the 
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS - without them AT is very mouse-dependent, which not 
everybody likes. The shortcuts also speed up an already fast process, 
which was a nice unexpected bonus.

I have also now had the opportunity to try AT out on a pretty heavily 
formatted file. Unfortunately, when I saved the Word file as .rtf, it 
failed to include the footnotes, which was a hassle but not exactly the 
AT developer's fault. The formatting did get messed about quite a bit 
and I had to 'resurrect' it in Word afterwards. However, compared with 
some of the extremely slow segmenting I have suffered in heavily 
formatted Word files in WordFast (not to mention all the hassles using 
its Terminology functions), I still found the whole process relatively 
fast. It is just a different way of working.

Last week, I tried out the Sharing Corpora (TMs) over my Airport 
Wireless Network. Two of us worked on different translations but 
accessing the same TMs and terminology. Neither of us noticed any 
perceptible loss of speed. I believe it is also possible to share over 
the Internet but I have not tried it yet.

Due to the amount of actual translating I have been doing recently, I 
have not had a great deal of time to contact the developer. However, 
each time I have posted on his blog or e-mail list responses to my 
questions and solutions to my problems have been rapid and useful. Check 
out the Blog at http://appletrans.blogspot.com/ - the e-mail list is at 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/appletrans_sig

Needless to say, I have a few suggestions for improvements (see below) 
but I would recommend AT for general translating unless your work is 
extremely heavily formatted, has to be returned in proprietary TM 
formats or you are of an "ain't-broke-so-won't-fix- it" mindset :-)

Suggestions for improvements would include:

ICONS - they are a useful way of showing new users of applications how 
to do things.

More KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS - unless they are there already and I have just 
missed them, it would be good to have keyboard shortcuts for
1) switching from TM to Glossary to Text windows
2) for looking up, pasting from and adding to Glossaries
3) for concordance searching

A "Switchers Manual" to ease the learning curve for those used to other 
TM systems.

A section in the Manual about WORKFLOWS. I am pleased with the speed of 
the programme and the progress I have made in learning it but it would 
be good to see how others use it, so I can see whether I am getting the 
most out of it.

More FILTERS - for other file formats - e.g. Word, and a more intuitive 
filter for TRADOS files.

More visible STATS - I like to know how far through a file I am while I 
work on it.

Slàn leibh uile! Tam

-------------------
Tam McTurk
Language Consultant

-- 
Gotzon Egia
gegia a bildua gipuzkoa.net
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