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Jost Zetzsche's 'Tool Kit' Recommended Translator Software Tools

Jost Zetzsche writes the most informative and practical newsletter in the translation tools arena. Called 'Tool Kit' it is a biweekly newsletter for people in the translation industry who want to get more out of their computers. To subscribe visit www.internationalwriters.com/toolkit and enter your email address in the appropriate text fields. And did we mention it is free?

The 13 tools are shown below, where Amicus TransTec can provide the tool there is a link to the appropriate page on this site, otherwise an external link is shown: (please note Amicus TransTec cannot supply or give recommendations for use on software we do not supply)

1. Skype (www.skype.com)
2. MaxiVista (more information)
3. ClipMate (more information)
4. IntelliWebSearch (www.intelliwebsearch.com)
5. and 6. PushPin and TrayIt! (rosafamily.org/software/pushpin and www.teamcti.com/trayit/tray.htm)
7. Teleport (www.tenmax.com) (WebBudget XT)
8. PractiCount & Invoice (www.practiline.com) (AnyCount)
9. Translation Office 3000 (more information )
10. ASAP Utilities (www.asap-utilities.com)
11. SnagIt (more information )
12. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking)
13. Translation Environment Tool (MemoQ)

What follows is Jost's text from Tool Kit Issue 6-12-78 (the seventy-eighth edition) © 2006 International Writers' Group.

Thirteen tools of 2006 that have brought the most smiles to my face, most cheers to my heart, and most success in the mind-over-matter department (in no particular order)

Number 1: Skype
I love Skype. It may not be the coolest thing to be in love with a wildly popular tool, but I can't help myself. No other tool has changed my work habits more than this tool in the last couple of years.

So just for that one remaining reader who is not yet familiar with Skype (www.skype.com), here's a quick run-down of what it does: Skype is primarily a VoIP (Voice-over-Internet-Protocol) service that allows you to make free calls from computer to computer if the person you are calling also has Skype installed. In addition, it allows you to make cheap calls to regular telephones, organize telephone conferences (free if everyone is using Skype, cheap if people are using telephones), send text messages, send large files, and use a host of other services. In the new version it even offers my all-time favorite game -- backgammon -- as a standard plug-in, so I'm completely sold.

True, there's always a risk with programs like this that you'll waste time playing with all the features or simply chatting too much with your friends, but for me Skype has been a real productivity gainer. It's so much easier to text message or call with Skype when you are working in teams, want to talk to a project manager, or do some consulting with a client. And because of the mind-blowing success of Skype, chances are that your colleagues and friends are using Skype as well, thus circumventing the non-compatibility problems of other chat and VoIP programs.

Plus it's sort of cool that a tool from Estonia has made it big time, don't you think?

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Number 2: MaxiVista
After my second laptop recently breathed its last gasp, I went back and forth about whether I should include MaxiVista on my new one. You see, I'm not actually using it right now, but considering how much I used it this last year. . . .

I've mentioned it often enough in this newsletter so I won't go into great detail. MaxiVista is an ingenious tool that allows you to use the monitor of a second computer to expand your own (which is freakingly brilliant - that's MaxiVista-speak - if you work with a translation environment tool and you can have the actual translation on one screen and the content of the translation memory and terminology database on the other), or you can use it to control the second computer with the same mouse and keyboard. Of course, for both of these functions there are separate solutions. The first is supported by Windows when you use a laptop or a desktop computer with a second video card out of the box, and for sharing mouse and keyboard there are lots of hardware devices, but none other combines both quite so well and elegantly. Excellent productivity booster.

And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, there is also a free open source companion to this product: Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net).

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Number 3: ClipMate
I haven't mentioned ClipMate for some time because I'm not using it quite as much anymore myself, but when I do I always have a smile on my face (and after all, that's the title of this article). To make it short, ClipMate collects clipboard entries (the "clipboard" is the virtual area where stuff is stored that has been copied in Windows) between all possible programs and stores them for as long as you want, allows you to "glue" them together so you can paste them all at once, and makes it possible to edit and even print them right after you've copied them (great for programs that don't allow you to print, or if you only want to print a little snippet).

ClipMate is also one of those programs that wants to start every time you start Windows. I only give that permission to a select few, and I have recently withdrawn this privilege from ClipMate (you can do this under Config> User Preferences> General> Run at Windows Startup). There are some conflicts with tools that make heavy use of the Windows clipboard themselves, such as Wordfast or Trados, and ClipMate is not always particularly kind to the processing level of you computer. So I start it when I know I am going to need it and am thrilled about the time I save when I do.

Incidentally, Per Tangerud just mentioned last week that FlashPast (www.softvoile.com), which is available in a freeware light version, does most of ClipMate's tricks as well. So there may be a cheaper way to go.

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Number 4: IntelliWebSearch
IntelliWebSearch (www.intelliwebsearch.com) probably would be the winner of the popularity-vote-by-translators award this year. I mentioned that I stopped ClipMate from starting automatically, but IntelliWebSearch shall have this honor now and evermore!

This humble little application copies highlighted text from any Windows application with a number of user-definable shortcut keys; strips the text of paragraph marks, line breaks, or any customizable characters; opens your default browser and sends the copied text to up to 10 customizable search engines or on-line dictionaries. Once you have your search engines and dictionaries for your language combinations set up, it's incredibly easy to use and I promise that your fingers will think in IntelliWebSearch-terms from now on. (Mine automatically go Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B if I see something that I need to check on German Google, and I'm always terribly disappointed when I am doing something on someone else's computer that may not have it installed.)

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Numbers 5 and 6: PushPin and TrayIt!
Here are two more humble apps that also start every time I start Windows.

PushPin (rosafamily.org/software/pushpin) is a tiny application that adds a little "Always on Top" option to the menu when you right-click on a file or a program on the Windows Taskbar and makes that program stay on top of all other programs or files that you work on. This may not sound too overwhelmingly impressive at first, but if I could count up all the seconds I've saved by viewing a chat in Skype on top of the document that I'm translating or editing, or having the PO on top of the invoicing system that I'm entering its data in, I'd probably come up with a day at the beach
-- well, maybe a short day.

TrayIt! (www.teamcti.com/trayit/trayit.htm) is an application that also deals with space issues on your screen. We've all been annoyed by the crowded Windows Taskbar when we have five or six different programs open.
Though it is possible to enlarge the taskbar by pulling it up, it looks ugly and takes away other screen estate space. TrayIt! allows you to minimize any application to the system tray (the part of the taskbar that displays the clock) rather than the taskbar by simply pressing the Ctrl key while you click on the minimize button of any application (the underscore button in the upper right-hand corner of an application). If you have Windows XP, it's very easy to then control the display of the icons in the system tray by right-clicking on the taskbar, selecting Properties, and clicking on the Customize button.

Just as with PushPin, there is no real installation necessary. You just need to copy the .exe and .dll files in the .zip file you download to a location of your choice, double-click the .exe file, and be happy ever after.

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Number 7: Teleport
Teleport (www.tenmax.com) is a website copier or webspider. While this is still sort of a tool from the early days of the Internet (people used it to download complete web sites so that they could browse them offline), it is also something that has proved very helpful for us translators. It does what you would expect a "website copier" to do: it copies websites (including image or multimedia files), which is wonderful if we have to quote the translation of complete websites. As I've mentioned before, it is important to remember to ask for the actual source files before the translation is started, but it is an invaluable tool to get an overview of a website, including its file structure or files that you would surely miss if you were just to browse through the site or to make a word or image count.

Here are some variations on this tool. If you need to look at a secure website (starting with https rather than http), you will need to use the more expensive Teleport Ultra version. If you don't want to spend any money to start with, you can also look at the freeware tool HTTrack (www.httrack.com) which many translators use and love. And if you want to have one tool that allows you to download websites and translate them right away, there is also WebBudget (click here for more information). WebBudget is not "just" a webspider, it's also a translation memory tool specifically geared toward HTML and other tagged formats. Unlike the "regular" web spiders, none of the downloaded HTML files is modified during the download process.
And though its translation memory component does not have the sophistication of the larger translation environment tools, the program is very simple to use, while at the same time offering a great number of HTML-specific options. If you're not using any other translation environment tool (shame on you!), this may be a very good choice.

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Number 8: PractiCount & Invoice
Since we just talked about word counts, I would strongly advise you to invest in a word count tool. Without going into the whole complexity of word counts again, here's what I think you should look for: a tool that allows you to count in a variety of formats (including all MS Office formats, PDFs, and tagged files would be the minimum) while using the parameters that MS Word does without its problems.

What?

MS Word's word counts are, as most of you know, notorious for their problems (text boxes, WordArt, and many other elements are not counted), but chances are that your client will still use Word to count words and check your invoice. So the tool should use the same logic in counting words that Word does while including the parts that Word happens to happily forego (and we typically need to explain that to the client). I use PractiCount & Invoice (see www.practiline.com) for this task and love it, but there are a good number of other tools that do very similar things, including AnyCount, TextCount (www.textcount.com), or Total Assistant (www.surefiresoftware.com/totalassistant).

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Number 9: Translation Office 3000
Everybody has strengths, and accounting is definitely not one of mine. My wife knows this for sure. So it's not too surprising that I love the program that takes care of most of my accounting for me while at the same time requiring little more than the most basic data entry. Translation Office 3000 is available in two versions. Version 7 is more basic and offers the core features of managing clients, quoting, jobs (including word counts with the integrated AnyCount, see above), and invoicing. The much more complex version 8 also has job-tracking features and more complex reports.  With my simple mind, I prefer version 7, but I'm looking forward to a version that has been announced which will combine the simplicity of version 7 with the feature richness of version 8.

Readers of this newsletter know that there are plenty of competitors out there, each catering to different segments of the market (freelance translators, agencies, translation buyers, etc.). I will take this up again in the new year when there will be an interesting major release for a translation-related project management and accounting tool. Interested?
Stay tuned!

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Number 10: ASAP Utilities
Here's what I wrote awhile back about ASAP Utilities (see www.asap-utilities.com):

"I read somewhere that the typical software user uses only about 5% of the available features of the software programs that he or she uses day in and day out. Spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel are examples par excellence of programs like this. They are often only used for simple tables (such as glossaries), a far cry from the original idea of this mathematically advanced program. The irony of using Excel for glossaries is that its text-related features are not particularly advanced, making it a potentially frustrating experience.

"While it is always possible to copy and paste Excel tables into other more text-friendly programs (such as Word), perform the work there, and then copy and paste it back, this is not exactly the most efficient way to work.
ASAP Utilities (see www.asap-utilities.com) is a very helpful add-on that makes many of the text-related (and other) tasks in Excel a lot easier. It contains more than 300 (!) different utilities that streamline working in Excel. Some of my favorite functions include the ability to count characters in individual cells (a command in the Information submenu), helpful formatting, sorting, and selection functions, or the ability to write numbers with a leading zero. After the easy and free (!) download, you will be asked whether you would like to have it started every time you start Excel (I chose "Yes"). ASAP Utilities shows up as a separate menu in Excel (or as a toolbar -- the applicable command is available in the System submenu). If nothing else, you'll enjoy seeing what some of the other 95% of Excel's unused features are . . . ."

I rediscovered ASAP Utilities this year, and with a bit of poking around there seems to be nothing you can't do with tables in Excel with this tool.

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Number 11: SnagIt
There are a plethora of applications that support the generation screenshots (pictures of the computer screen) aside from the Windows-internal way of Alt+PrintScreen for the active dialog or PrintScreen for the complete screen. For the longest time I didn't use a separate program for this, but I have been a happier man since I changed my ways.

With a screenshot application like SnagIt (click here for more information), you can automatically save the image in a file format of your choice (under Output> Properties> Image File) and paste it into your email or elsewhere in that format (with the standard Windows way you always end up with a several-MB-large BMP file). You can also take screenshots that extend beyond the screen, or have intact hyperlinks, or multi-window screenshots, or screenshots of dialogs or lists of files and directories where the text can be saved as a text file. Or you can add graphic or text elements to screenshots. And the list could go on and on. Folks who communicate with me by email will be able to assure you that my emails have become much more colorful lately -- lots of screenshots in there. Especially when it comes to explaining a computer-related problem, a picture is worth - mm, how do you say? - a thousand words!

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Number 12: Dragon NaturallySpeaking
I like to "think with my fingers" and I've also become a reasonably good typist over the years, but I gotta tell you, if I'm under pressure to get a translation done super-quick, or if my medical condition keeps my hands from working the way I want them to, there's nothing like speech recognition. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking), which is now available in most major Western European languages and Japanese, is stunningly accurate, requires little or no training, runs well on computers with fast processors (no need for superfast processing), works with essentially every Windows program, including translation environment tools, and is surprisingly inexpensive.

The two tips that I would give are these: a) Take some time to get used to not "thinking with your fingers." Instead, try to preformulate longer segments and then speak them coherently for better results. And b) don't try to be a purist -- just because you could theoretically do everything with voice commands, to me it seems much faster to intervene with the keyboard if it seems the faster way to go.

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Number 13: Translation Environment Tool
Well, how could I leave this out? Truth be told, my translation environment tool is by far the one tool that has given me the most joy this year (and during the past 10+). How else would I have accessed my translations and terminology that I stored last month, last year, or even five years ago for my project today? How else would I be able to work in virtually every file format without needing to become a master of each? And how else would I ensure that my translations are consistent, free of formatting and other errors, and adhere to my client's glossaries?

My main tool for many years has been Déjà Vu, but I have used many other tools in production situations, including Trados, SDLX, Transit, Wordfast, WorldServer, Multitrans, Catalyst, Passolo, and others. The two main reasons I have liked Déjà Vu are mainly these: Déjà Vu offers a feature that it calls "assemble" which pieces together text from segments in the translation memories and terminology databases, including the ability to "repair" these -- a very powerful and time-saving feature. And it allows access to its databases with user-definable (SQL) commands, which means that the only limit as to what you can do with the databases is the limit of your own computing experience. On the other hand, I have been increasingly frustrated with the decreasing speed that Déjà Vu shows when the translation memories become truly large (500,000+ translation units).
So I will be looking for a new primary tool in the new year, and my search will include the newer ones like MemoQ, across, MetaTexis, and Heartsome.

But again, I'm asked so often what translation environment tool is the right one, and I'm always quite sincere when I tell the inquirer that it does not really matter. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and what matters most (by far) is that you actually use one.

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The fifth edition of Jost's popular book, A Translator's Tool Box—A Computer Primer for Translators, is now available. You'll also find subscription information for his free computer-related Tool Kit newsletter for translators.

New in version 5: Quality assurance procedures and tools for translation environment tools and working with Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Amicus TransTec aim to supply as many of the tools (or at least one of each type) Jost recommends as possible, and why don't or can't we promise to provide links to where you can find the tools. Email us if there is a tool you need contact us.