Oferta electrónica

(3) the dominance of Windows operation systems; (4) the support of more document formats; (5) the support of more languages for translation; and (6) the dominance of Trados as a market leader.

(1) The emergence of more commercial systems

Before 1993, there were only three systems available on the market, including Translator’s Workbench II of Trados, IBM Translation Manager / 2, and STAR Transit 1.0. During this ten-year period between 1993 and 2003, about twenty systems were developed for sale, including the following better-known systems such as Déjà Vu, Eurolang Optimizer (Brace 1994), Wordfisher, SDLX, ForeignDesk, Trans Suite 2000, Yaxin CAT, Wordfast, Across, OmegaT, MultiTrans, Huajian, Heartsome, and Transwhiz. This means that there was a six- fold increase in commercial computer-aided translation systems during this period.

Déjà Vu is the name of a computer-aided translation system developed by Atril in Spain after 1993. A preliminary version of Déjà Vu, a customizable computer-aided translation system that combined translation memory technology with example-based machine translation techniques, was initially developed by ATRIL in June to fulfil their own need for a professional translation tool. At first, they worked with machine translation systems, but the experiments with machine translation were extremely disappointing, and subsequent experiences with translation memory tools exposed two main shortcomings: all systems ran under MS-DOS and were capable of processing only plain text files. Then, ATRIL began considering the idea of writing its own translation memory software.

Déjà Vu 1.0 was released to the public in November 1993. It was with an interface for Microsoft Word for Windows 2.0, which was defined as the first of its kind. Version 1.1 followed soon afterwards, incorporating several performance improvements and an integrated alignment tool (at a time when alignment tools were sold as expensive individual products), and setting a new standard for the translation tool market (http://www.atril.com).

Déjà Vu, designed to be a professional translation tool, produced acceptable results at an affordable price. Déjà Vu was a first in many areas: the first TM tool for Windows; the first TM tool to directly integrate into Microsoft Word; the first 32-bit TM tool (Déjà Vu version 2.0); and the first affordable professional translation tool.

In the following year, Eurolang Optimizer, a computer-aided translation system, was developed by Eurolang in France. Its components included the translator’s workstation, pre- translation server with translation memory and terminology database, and project management tool for multiple languages and users (Brace 1994).

In Germany, Trados GmbH announced the release of the new Windows version of Translator’s Workbench, which could be used with standard Windows word processing packages via the Windows DDE interface (Brace 1994). In June 1994 Trados released

MultiTerm Professional 1.5 which was included in Translator’s Workbench, which had fuzzy search to deliver successful searches even when words were incorrectly spelt, a dictionary-style interface, faster searches through use of new highly compressed data algorithms, drag and drop content into word processor and integrated programming language to create powerful layouts (http://www.translationzone.com).

In Hungary, Tibor Környei developed the WordFisher for Microsoft Word macro set. The programme was written in the WordBasic language. For translators, it resembled a translation memory programme, but provided a simpler interface in Word (Környei 2000).

In 1995, Nero AG was founded in Germany as a manufacturer of CD and DVD application software. Later, the company set up Across Systems GmbH as a division, which developed and marketed a tool of the same name for corporate translation management (CTM) that supported the project and workflow manage ment of translations (Schmidt 2006; German 2009: 9–10).

During the first half of 1996, when Windows 95 was in its final stages of beta testing, Atril Development S.L. in Spain began writing a new version of Déjà Vu − not just porting the original code to 32 bits, but adding a large number of important functionalities that had been suggested by the users. In October, Atril released Déjà Vu beta v2.0. It consisted of the universal editor, Déjà Vu Interactive (DVI), the Database Maintenance module with an alignment tool, and a full-featured Terminology Maintenance module (Wassmer 2007: 37–38).

In the same year, Déjà Vu again was the first TM tool available for 32-bit Windows and shipped with a number of filters for DTP packages − including FrameMaker, Interleaf, and QuarkXPress − and provided extensive project management facilities to enable project managers to handle large, multi-file, multilingual projects.

In 1997, developments in France and Germany deserve mentioning. In France, CIMOS released Arabic to English translation software An-Nakel El-Arabi, with features like machine translation, customized dictionary and translation memory. Because of its deep sentence analysis and semantic connections, An-Nakel Al-Arabi could learn new rules and knowledge. CIMOS had previously released English to Arabic translation software (MultiLingual 1997). In Germany, Trados GmbH released WinAlign as a visual text alignment tool as the first fully- fledged 32-bit application in Trados. Mircosoft decided to base its internal localization memory store on Trados and consequently acquired a share of 20 per cent in Trados (http://www. translationzone.com).

The year 1998 marks a milestone in the development of translation technology in China and Taiwan. In Beijing, Beijing Yaxincheng Software Technology Co. Ltd. 北京雅信誠公司 was set up as a developer of translation software. It was the first computer-aided translation software company in China. In Taipei, the Inventec Corporation released Dr Eye 98 (譯典通) with instant machine translation, dictionaries and termbases in Chinese and English (http://www. dreye.com.tw).

In the same year, the activities of SDL and International Communications deserve special mention. In the United Kingdom, SDL began to acquire and develop translation and localization software and hardware − both for its own use in client-specific solutions, and to be sold as free-standing commercial products. At the end of the year, SDL also released SDLX, a suite of translation memory database tools. SDLX was developed and used in-house at SDL, and therefore was a mature product at its first offering (Hall 2000; MultiLingual 1998). Another British company, International Communications, a provider of localization, translation and multilingual communications services, released ForeignDesk v5.0 with the full support of Trados Translator’s Workbench 2.0 and WinAlign, S-Tagger. Then, Lionbridge Technologies Inc. acquired it (known as Massachusetts-based INT’L.com at the transaction) and later in November 2001 decided to open-source the ForeignDesk suite free of charge under BSD

licence. ForeignDesk was originally developed by International Communications around 1995 (MultiLingual 2000).

In June 1999, Beijing YaxinCheng Software Technology Co. Ltd. established Shida CAT Research Centre (實達 CAT 研究中心), which later developed Yaxin CAT Bidirectional v2.5 (Chan 2004: 338). In June, SJTU Sunway Software Industry Ltd. acquired one of the most famous CAT products in China at the moment − Yaxin CAT from Beijing YaxinCheng Software Technology Co. Ltd., and it released the Yaxin CAT v1.0 in August. The release of this software signified, in a small way, that the development of computer-aided systems was no longer a European monopoly.

In France, the first version of Wordfast PlusTools suite of CAT (Computer-Assisted Translation) tools was developed. One of the developers was Yves A. Champollion, who incorporated Wordfast LLC later. There were only a few TM software packages available in the first version. It could be downloaded freely before 2002, although registration was required (http://www.wordfast.net/champollion.net).

In the United States, MultiCorpora R&D Inc. was incorporated, which was exclusively dedicated to providing language technology solutions to enterprises, governments, and language service providers (http://www.multicorpora.com).

In the United Kingdom, following the launch of SDL International’s translation database tool, SDLX, SDL announced SDL Workbench. Packaged with SDLX, SDL Workbench memorized a user’s translations and automatically offered other possible translations and terminology from a user’s translation database within the Microsoft Word environment. In line with its ‘open’ design, it was able to work with a variety of file formats, including Trados and pre-translated RTF files (MultiLingual 1999).

The year 2000 was a year of activities in the industry. In China, Yaxin CAT v2.5 Bidirectional (English and Chinese) was released with new features like seventy-four topic-specific lexicons with six million terms free of charge, project analysis, project management, share translation memory online and simultaneous editing of machine output (Chen 2001).

In Germany, OmegaT, a free (GPL) translation memory tool, was publicly released. The key features of OmegaT were basic (the functionality was very limited), free, open-source, cross-operation systems as it was programmed in Java (http://www.omegat.org; Prior 2003).

In Ireland, Alchemy Software Development Limited announced the acquisition of Corel CATALYST™, which was designed to boost the efficiency and quality of globalizing software products and was used by over 200 software development and globalization companies worldwide (http://www.alchemysoftware.ie).

In the United Kingdom, SDL International announced in April the release of SDLX 2.0, which was a new and improved version of SDLX 1.03 (http://www.sdl.com). It also released SDL Webflow for managing multilingual website content (http://www.sdlintl.com).

In Germany, Trados relocated its headquarters to the United States in March and became a Delaware corporation.

In France, Wordfast v3.0 was released in September. The on-the-fly tagging and un-tagging of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) files was a major breakthrough in the industry. Freelance translators could translate HTML pages without worrying about the technical hurdles.

Not much happened in 2001. In Taiwan, Inventec Corporation released Dr Eye 2001, with new functions like online search engine, full-text machine translation from English to Chinese, machine translation from Japanese to Chinese and localization plug-in (Xu 2001). In the United Kingdom, SDL International released SDLX 4.0 with real-time translation, a flexible software licence and enhanced capabilities. In the United States, Trados announced the launch of Trados 5 in two versions, Freelance and Team (http://www.translationzone.com).

In contrast, the year 2002 was full of activities in the industry.

In North America, MultiCorpora R&D Inc. in Canada released MultiTrans 3, providing corpus-based translation support and language management solution. It also introduced a new translation technology called Advanced Leveraging Translation Memory (ALTM). This model provided past translations in their original context and required virtually no alignment maintenance to obtain superior alignment results. In the United States, Trados 5.5 (Trados Corporate Translation Solution™) was released. MultiCorpora released MultiTrans 3.0, which introduced an optional client-server add-on, so it could be used in a web-based, multi-user environment or as a standalone workstation. Version 3 supported TMX and was also fully Unicode compliant (Locke and Giguère 2002: 51).

In Europe and the United Kingdom, SDL International released its new SDLX Translation Suite 4, and then later that year released the elite version of the suite. The SDLX Translation Suite features a modular architecture consisting of five to eight components: SDL Project Wizard, SDL Align, SDL Maintain, SDL Edit and SDL TermBase in all versions, and SDL Analyse, SDL Apply and SDLX AutoTrans in the Professional and Elite versions (Wassmer 2003). In Germany, MetaTexis Software and Services released in April the first official version 1.00 of MetaTexis (http://www.metatexis.com).

In Asia, Huajian Corporation in China released Huajian IAT, a computer-aided translation system (http://www.hjtek.com). In Taiwan, Otek launched in July Transwhiz Power version (client/server structure), which aimed at enterprise customers (http://www.otek.com.tw). In Singapore, Heartsome Holdings Pte. Ltd. was founded to develop language translation technology (Garcia and Stevenson 2006: 77).

North America and Europe were active in translation technology in 2003.

In 2003, MultiCorpora R&D Inc. in Canada released MultiTrans 3.5 which had new and improved capabilities, including increased processing speed of automated searches, increased network communications speed, improved automatic text alignment for all languages, and optional corpus-based pre-translation. Version 3.5 also offered several new terminology management features, such as support for additional data types, additional filters, batch updates and added import and export flexibility, as well as full Microsoft Office 2003 compatibility, enhanced Web security and document analysis capabilities for a wider variety of document formats (MultiLingual 2003). In the United States, Trados 6 was launched in April and Trados 6.5 was launched in October with new features like auto concordance search, Word 2003 support and access to internet TM server (Wassmer 2004: 61).

In Germany, MetaTexis version 2.0 was released in October with a new database engine. And MetaTexis version ‘Net/Office’ was released with new features that supported Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel files, Trados Workbench, and could be connected with Logoport servers (http://www.metatexis.com).

In Russia, PROMT, a developer of machine translation products and services, released a new version @promt XT with new functions like processing PDF file formats, which made PROMT the first among translation software that supported PDF. Also, one of the editions, @promt Expert integrated translation memory solutions (Trados) and a proprietary terminology extraction system (http://www.promt.com).

In France, Atril, which was originally founded in Spain but which relocated its group business to France in the late 1990s, released Déjà Vu X (Standard, Professional, Workgroup and Term Sever) (Harmsen 2008). Wordfast 4, which could import and translate PDF contents, was also released (http://www.wordfast.net).

Some developers of machine translation systems also launched new versions with a translation memory component, such as LogoVista, An-Nabel El-Arabi and PROMT (http://www.

promt.com). Each of these systems was created with distinct philosophies in its design, offering its own solutions to problems and issues in the work of translation. This was aptly pointed out by Brace (1994):

Eurolang Optimizer is based on an ambitious client / server architecture designed primarily for the management of large translation jobs. Trados Workbench, on the other hand, offers more refined linguistic analysis and has been carefully engineered to increase the productivity of single translators and small workgroups.