Análisis de mercado

Translation Memory

Management

LF Aligner

Download LF Aligner

What is LF Aligner?

LF Aligner is a powerful alignment tool which makes it easy for translators to create translation memories from bilingual files and previously translated documents.

System requirements and languages

Operating systems supported: Windows (XP or higher), Linux/Unix, Mac. LF Aligner is available in: English.

Working with LF Aligner, at a glance

Using LF Aligner is extremely easy, as the interface is designed to guide the user step-by-step throughout the process. To align files, you just need to:

 Launch LF Aligner to open the wizard;

 Select the relevant input file type from the options list;

 Select the number of languages, and the source/language combination;  Select the source and target files from your hard drive, and confirm.

After LF Aligner has done its magic, users can choose to accept the sentence segmentation or revert back to the paragraph segmentation; then they can review the aligned file to fix any incorrect pairings. The reviewing step can be either performed using the built-in graphical editor or generating an xls file (which comes with instructions for extra peace of mind).

After reviewing the aligned file, users can choose to generate a TMX file to import the translation memory in a CAT tool environment, or just get the tabbed txt for the project.

Features, flaws and benefits

LF Aligner provides quick and effective alignment for several file formats (*.txt, *.rtf, *.pdf, *.doc, *.docx, *.html, *.odt, *.tmx). The tool supports simultaneous alignment in up to 100 languages, which makes it suitable for handling large-scale projects for the most sophisticated customers.

Furthermore, the tool supports automatic download and alignment of EU legislation, European Parliament reports, and European commission proposals, thus making it an excellent solution to build large-scale corpora.

LF Aligner - Alignment wizard: selecting TM languages

LF Aligner also lets you align web pages directly from the web (users just need to provide source and target URLs). This feature has proven to be very effective with plain text web pages with fewer graphical features, whilst aligning web pages with strong formatting might need a bit more work when checking the aligned file. Still, even in such cases, this Hunalign-powered tool is more efficient than the good old “copy, paste, sort” process.

The installation process is quick and easy, and the tool does not require any additional software to run smoothly. The complete software package also features some additional conversion and filtering tools, which can be used independently at your convenience. The general LF Aligner

Readme file includes information on how to prepare input files and use the tool, as well as

information about OS compatibility, troubleshooting and more. For further information on the individual features and additional tools provided, users can refer to the relevant readme files provided.

Overall, LF Aligner’s superior capabilities rank it amongst the best free alignment tool, and a must- have for translators who want to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by CAT tools.

Notepad++

Download Notepad++

What is Notepad++?

Notepad++ is a source code editor and Notepad replacement, perfectly suited to perform TM management routines quickly.

System requirements and languages

Operating systems supported: Windows (2000/XP/Vista/7/8).

Notepad++ is available in: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Aranese, Aragonese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Extremaduran, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Farsi, Finnish, French, Friulian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Korean, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Ligurian, Latvia, Malay, Macedonian, Marathi, Nynorsk, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Samogitian, Sardinian, Telugu, Turkish, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Argentina), Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Uyghur.

Working with Notepad++, at a glance

Notepad++ is a source code editor which was designed for software programmers – still, you won’t need to know about coding and programming to use it for translation memory management purposes.

More specifically, Notepad++ is especially useful for its powerful search and replace function, which supports simultaneous search within multiple files. This is extremely helpful in case of last minute changes – in just a few clicks you can replace words and phrases, fix missing tags or edit capitalisation in a single document or even multiple TMs at once.

To use Notepad++ to edit your TMs or documents, all you need to do is click on File > Open. Files load very quickly and you can immediately start working on them. The user interface has a clean layout, featuring a menu bar, a toolbar and a write-in edit area. Also, the toolbox features Microsoft Word-style icons, thus making it user-friendly and intuitive even for the non-techies out there.

Features, flaws and benefits

Despite not being prominently designed for translators, Notepad++ has shown to be very effective when tasked with projects requiring frequent last-minute changes and updates. Specifically, its superior search capabilities make it a good fit both for quickly editing TMs as well as to spot specific coding errors within a TM.

Amongst its most notable features, the tool supports:  Drag ‘n’ drop, also across multiple files;

 Syntax highlighting and syntax folding, for easier document search;

 Tabbed documents and multi-view, for easier fitting of multiple documents on a single screen;

 Search and replace using regular expressions;  Document bookmarking.

Notepad++ supports over 50 languages – still, at times specific languages might glitch and would be displayed incorrectly. If this is your case, you can fix the bug by changing the language settings of the file (Language > Define languages).

Another smaller but annoying glitch: opening larger files might freeze the programme for a few minutes, or might result in unexpected behaviour of the file during the session. Apart from these known bugs, the tool presents with high compatibility with a variety of programming languages, thus making it fit for virtually any basic translation-related needs.

Notepad++ - Menu and toolbar

For advanced users, the tool also offers an option to record and playback macros (via the dedicated Macro menu), and to add custom plugins (Setting > Import > Import plugin). Notepad++ also offers a large variety of free additional plugins, which are downloadable via the Plugin Central. On this note, I recommend Text FX, which presents with quite a few nice language-specific commands including, amongst others,

 Deletion of blank lines;  Capitalisation options;  Trim trail for spaces.

If you ever get stuck using Notepad++, user guides are available for download on the Notepad++ Wiki (in English and Russian). There are also dedicated fora in different languages that are open for discussion and general support.

Olifant

Download Olifant

What is Olifant?

Olifant is an open source translation memory (TM) editor.

System requirements and languages

Operating systems supported: Windows (98 or higher). Requires Microsoft .NET Framework v2.0 or higher.

Olifant is available in: English.

Working with Olifant, at a glance

With Olifant you can create or edit translation memories in *.txt or *.tmx format, thus making the tool compatible with all CAT tools supporting TM export in such file formats.

The user interface can look a bit old fashioned, yet it is extremely functional and intuitive. In addition to a classic menu bar and a convenient toolbar, the main window features the edit area (where you can manually edit source and target segments) and the so-called grid, displaying the complete list of entries of the TM you are working on. For extra versatility, users can customise the layout of the main window (View > Layout) as well as colours and fonts for the edit area (File > User preferences > Display).

Changes can be made at database level or at translation unit (TU) level, and include:  Manual addition of new entries;

 Deletion of duplicated or irrelevant entries;  Manual editing of the individual TUs;  Deletion of unnecessary tags;

 TM merging;

 Search and replace;

 Change general TM settings.

Features, flaws and benefits

Olifant is a handy tool you can use to keep your translation memories up-to-date and uncluttered. Searching for duplicated entries and other common errors (such as empty source or target, or segments with identical text in source and target) is not complicated, and the convenient entry flagging systems makes it easy to fix said problems in just a few clicks.

Amongst its many valuable features, Olifant has a powerful find and replace function supporting the use of regular expressions. Please note however that the tool only searches from top to bottom, so if you want to search a whole TM you would need to make sure that the cursor on the grid is on entry no. 1 of your TM.

Olifant - Flag entries panel

One rare but notable bug is that sometimes Olifant doesn’t work on computers running a version of .NET Framework higher than 2.0. Even though the project is continuously maintained and updated by the development team, such an inconvenience still occurs from time to time. If this is the case, you might need to downgrade your version of .NET Framework to be able to use Olifant. Apart from such minor glitch, Olifant has proven to be extremely flexible, usable, and reliable. In the test phase, a total of 12 TMs (ranging from 1,754 to 34,987 TUs) were analysed and edited, performing both batch tasks as well as manual editing operations.

Results were extremely good, with only one case where changes to the TM weren’t saved as expected, and saving the TM as a new file resulted in massive corruption of the database. Considering the average volume of such TM, and that similar TMs from the same source worked smoothly after that, the error was likely caused by some internal errors in the source file rather than from misbehaviour of the tool itself.

As an added bonus, Olifant comes with a thorough help guide, which also features a few How to

tutorials with step-by-step instructions for performing useful tasks such as removing duplicated entries, reversing source and target language in a TM, and more.

Overall, Olifant is probably the best translation memory editor you can get for free. Its convenience of use, combined with the completeness of the batch check criteria and the advanced functionalities, makes it a perfect companion for translation looking for a smart TM editor they can use with little to no previous experience.

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