Translation is not always about big jobs. Sometimes you receive those little jobs that are too small to schedule but too big to squeeze them in easily. Sometimes they are also annoying, not to talk about stressful. Charging those little jobs by your word rate is not affordable often. Who can set up a TM, translate, edit and deliver within a few hours for only € 2? Nobody. That’s why there is the minimum fee. But hey, they help clients too…
One of the most important things for translators is Quality. In translations not only the linguistic quality matters, but also the quality of your service, the overall quality of the files delivered and the value you offer for your client’s money. Sloppy sentences are bad but they can to some extend be compensated by your service. But when you deliver bad service too (missing deadlines, bad communication) you don’t need to expect clients to come back. In the end that can mean the end of your translation business.
To help you and to share what works for me, I defined 5 steps you that can improve your translation business.
LionBridge is as a massive translation agency with an enormous and vibrant community. For its cloud infrastructure for projects, translation memories and term bases the company developed its own software, ‘Logoport Xliff editor’. To get this software working you should download both the Xliff editor software itself and a dedicated MS Office plugin. I did and it worked…
However, after installing both software components every call of a MS Office feature, like opening MS Word and using the spell check in other software suites like Trados and Wordfast resulted in an annoying Visual Basic error: Error 53 – The following file cannot be found: Logoport.dll.
I found a solution which I would like to share with you…
We all know the Periodic Table of Elements. That table we learned about in secondary school: an overview of gases, metals and other stuff – as far as I remember. I am not a beta so all I know is that it exists.
As a freelance translator I do not have to know that table although I think it’s good to know about it. To do my job properly I need to know what CAT tools are, what I am talking about in terms of subjects and terminology and how I can work efficient and profitable. That’s where Trados comes in.
In my previous blog post (‘Export Idiom TM’) I wrote about a way to export an Idiom Desktop Workbench TM to a TMX file. Honestly, that process with 7 steps was not very straightforward and perhaps too difficult for some translators. I want to stress that it nevertheless works as a charm, not only for Idiom TMs but for other ‘TMs’ or source/target files as well. I experienced it last week for a text file with 67,500 segments (137,000 rows in Excel!).
However, I was pointed to a much easier process to export Idiom TMs which I want to share with you as well. After reading this blog post you can export Idiom TM within a few minutes.
In my previous blog article I wrote about opening XLZ files in MemoQ. To benefit from MemoQ’s feature to translate XLZ files we need to have a TM too. Creating a TM in MemoQ is not that difficult but using the legacy TM from Idiom Worldserver Desktop Workbench is. MemoQ offers an option to import a translation memory in TMX or CSV format, but Idiom Worldserver Desktop Workbench not even offers an option to export Idiom TM’s.
So, to make use of the TM your client provides or to use the translations you collected in all the years you use Idiom Worldserver Desktop Workbench, you need to have a workaround which allows you to use all translated segments in another CAT tool. You need to export Idiom TM. That’s what I will explain below.
In my blog post two weeks ago, I explained how you can run Idiom Worldserver Desktop Workbench on Windows 8. I got some nice reactions on that post: people finally got Idiom Worldserver Desktop Workbench running on Windows 8.1.
Until now I did not receive comments from people for whom this solution did not work out. Nevertheless there can be situations in which it can be preferable to open Idiom Desktop XLZ files in another CAT tool. This blog post is dedicated to opening XLZ files in MemoQ. Later this week I will add an article dedicated to Export Idiom TM.
Translation requires knowledge, dedication and accuracy. Translation agencies and end clients require us to do our job good and to deliver in high quality. Typos and spelling errors are odious. And that’s justified: many translations are for a big audience. Those who read them need to understand the translation like winking and there should be no misunderstandings about the meaning of a particular text. However, there’s no omelet without breaking eggs.
And fails can even occur when the translation is perfect. I noticed it last week…
Many localization professionals now: those localization companies that work for the bigger software companies often require freelance translators to work with Idiom Desktop Workbench. Idiom Desktop Workbench is a CAT tool with a not too steep learning curve. However, the software is no longer supported and moreover, the newest version is years old. Running the software on a newer machine can be a real pain. In fact, theoretically it is even impossible!
In this blog article I will share how you can accomplish Idiom Desktop Workbench Windows 8.