Category Archives: Translation Tools

Albanian translation app for the iPhone

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on August 26, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Albanian Translation, Translation Languages, Translation Tools

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I discovered yet another iPhone translation app, it’s only meant for Albanian - English translation and produces pretty satisfying results. It’s called iLanguage and allows the user to translate from Albanian to English and vice-versa quickly and easily. It would specially be helpful to business people and travelers.

Operating iLanguage is as the cliche goes ‘child’s play’, all you have to do is type in a phrase either in English or Albanian and hit enter to be presented with the translated version of the phrase in authentic lettering.
Other helpful features include a quickly searchable history of recent translations and no limits to how much one can translate at one go, whether it is one word or a whole paragraph. Check out http://arcticgerbil.com for more details.

Excellent Subtitle Translation Applications

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on August 17, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

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The famous and delightful television series, “Friends”, is not only popular in the United States where it was produced but also in other countries which are not only far away in terms of distance from the United States but also in terms of language and culture. Similarly Japanese, Chinese and Iranian movies are quite popular in English speaking countries, especially in the United States.

This cross cultural popularity of videos has created a great demand for subtitle translation. There are many good sites on the Internet which serve as databases for subtitles. But avid watchers of global movies, television series and the like have quite often found themselves in situations where they cannot find the required subtitles in their native languages. If you are one of them dear reader, then you can kiss this problem goodbye as listed below are three of the best subtitles translators available on the Internet.

Open Subtitle Translator
Open Subtitle Translator automatically translates subtitle (srt) files line by line with the help of Google language tools.

Subtitles Translator
Subtitles Translator translates subtitles only in MicroDVD format that is ({start_frame}{end_frame}subtitles_line). The program does not support automatic translation, and one has to translate manually translate every line.

Gnome Subtitles
Gnome Subtitles works for the GNOME desktop. It supports subtitle translation, editing and synchronization for most of the common text-based subtitle formats.

Your personal language assistant

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on August 5, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

Hot deal welcomes 2010 - 10% Discount on any translation order.
Use the coupon code "Tomedes10" !


Came across a very interesting new gadget on the Internet. It’s called the Trinvo talking translator. Its an amazing tool which helps you learn how to speak instantly in a language not known by you! The Trinvo talking translator serves as an assistant which translates words spoken by you to any of the 12 other languages that it supports right now.

This little magical tool has an inbuilt dictionary with a database of over 2,500 words, as well as 750 commonly used phrases in 12 different languages. The languages supported by Trinvo at present are English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Turkish Chinese (Mandarin), Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Japanese and Spanish.

For those who are persistent, Trinvo also helps in learning the languages that its supports. It can used as a personal multilingual teacher which helps the user learn new foreign words and phrases. It comes equipped with a 3.5 mm jack which can be connected to a headphone.

Language translation on your BlackBerry

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on August 4, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation News, Translation Tools

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Interlecta published its latest Text Translator for the BlackBerry on App World recently. This application is meant for translating sms, email and text on BlackBerry, and going by the number of downloads in the days after the launch it seems that the application is already quite successful.

Interlecta has developed the Text Translator specifically for business people and travelers who frequently require to lead and translate their emails and other correspondence on the fly. The company has incorporated features from many of its existing translators to make it much more functional. Right now the app is only available for the BlackBerry Bold and Curve 8900, however it is expected that the company will soon release a version which works on other models as well.

Check out Interlecta’s site at http://home.interlecta.com to check out their translation applications for Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and J2ME platforms. The company is also actively working on developing language translation apps for desktops, chat environments web, and social networks.

Free and Useful translation tools - II

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on August 2, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

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Across Personal Edition

This application provides a full range of translation functionality and is especially useful for freelance translators.
The Across Personal Edition makes it easy to control processes, re-use content and maintain a high quality level. The end user’s advantage is that the application quickens the process of delivering high quality translations and also reduces workload by a satisfying degree.

Across Personal Edition offers the following features -

  • crossCheck - A quality management tool.
  • crossDesk - A multi-format editor that can work independent of document format.
  • crossSearch - A research tool that helps connect with terminology resources available on the Internet.
  • crossTank – Serves as translation memory.
  • crossTerm - A terminology system. Serves as the central platform for all types of corporate language resources

OmegaT

OmegaT is a free translation memory program developed for use by professional translators. It offers the following features -

  • External glossaries
  • Fuzzy matching
  • Match propagation
  • Simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects
  • Simultaneous use of multiple translation memories
  • It’s compatible with other translation memory apps (TMX)
  • Supported document file formats include: Plain text, HTML and XHTML, XML - Microsoft Office 2007, OpenOffice.org, MediaWiki – Wikipedia and XLIFF – Okapi.
  • It also supports Unicode (UTF-8) and non-Latin alphabets
  • Supports right-to-left languages

OmegaT+

OmegaT+ includes the following features –

  • Translation memory,
  • Full and partial matches,
  • Search engine,
  • Glossary function,
  • Support for a variety of document types and translation projects that are presented in a simple and easy to use style.

OmegaT+ 1.0 is still in development, the latest development version being 1.0.M 2.3. It has been tested on real translation jobs over a substantial period of time and has proven reliable.

WordFisher

WordFisher aids in translation project management. Benefits and features include -

  • Automatic creation of a simple folder and file structure
  • Document indexing
  • Enhanced Search and replace functions
  • Ability to create a bilingual table that contains matching sentence pairs contained in the source and target files. These tables can be used as translation memory.
  • Glossary management - New entries can be added to glossaries without actually leaving the document being worked upon. Glossary creation is simplified with the Quick Alignment and Glossary Builder modules with which glossaries can be built simply by aligning a document and its translation followed by selection of corresponding terms.
  • The source and target documents can be aligned at any time and synchronized.
  • Consistency Check is a unique feature that allows translators to check within a group of aligned files and know whether or not the required translations were consistently used in a project.
  • Trados support

Free and Useful translation tools - I

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on July 30, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

Hot deal welcomes 2010 - 10% Discount on any translation order.
Use the coupon code "Tomedes10" !


Anaphraseus

Anaphraseus is a Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool that can be use for creating, using and managing bilingual Translation Memories in various languages.

Anaphraseus offers the following features -

  • Inexact (Fuzzy) search in Translation Memory
  • OpenOffice.org Extension
  • Plain text and Unicode UTF-16LE TM
  • Terminology Recognition
  • Text Segmentation
  • Unicode UTF-16LE TMX Export/Import
  • User Glossary
  • Can be readily localized in any language

MT2007

MT2007 offers the following features -

  • Machine Translation (with Google online translator)
  • 21 dictionaries, including many specialized ones
  • Translation Memory
  • Access to Multitran online dictionary from MT2007 interface (www.multitran.ru)
  • Enables working with tags
  • Creation of user segments

As present the program only supports a single source file for each project. Supported formats includeMS Word 2007, MS Word 2003, TMX files and xml files.

Transolution

Transolution is a free CAT tool that supports the XLIFF standard. It includes a XLIFF Editor, translation memory and filters for converting various formats from and to XLIFF.

Benefits offered by Transolution include -

  • Interactive Translation Memory
  • Works for documentation as well as software
  • Sentence segmentation
  • Platform independent
  • Tag protection
  • Open source

The XLIFF editor offered by Transolution is especially helpful when the content that is required to be translated contains placeholders and tags. It helps the translator in changing only the translatable content keeping the tags protected.

What type of dictionary do you use?

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on July 18, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Language Translation Advice, Translation Tools

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Dictionaries can be easily counted among the most important tools that a translator uses. We use them almost every day. You might be ready to buy the best dictionary available, but what type of dictionary would that be? I am talking in terms of bilingual and monolingual dictionaries.

I prefer using monolingual dictionaries. The reason… while using a dictionary for any translation project, I don’t look for the word in the target language which is equivalent or nearly equivalent to a word in the source language. I am looking for the right words to convey the information contained in the source document as authentically as possible in the target language. This means understanding the context in which specific words are used, and what they mean.

Monolingual dictionaries are the best tool to develop that understanding. When you use a monolingual dictionary, you understand the meaning of various words in their original language. In other words, you are understanding the language from the perspective of a native speaker. This enables you to understand how native speakers use those words across different contexts. All this leads you to select the words which convey the meaning of the original text as authentically as possible, and of course improve your working knowledge of the target language.

A round up of the best online translation tools

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on July 14, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

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We are living in a fortunate time when we have access to professional translation services wherever we are and whenever we want, from almost any language to any language. But that’s not the end, many free but quality automatic translation services also exist. Though they may not be as good as human translation, if your translation requirement is not of a critical nature (you might just need to know the gist of given content say an email, learn a few standard phrases in a foreign language to impress your neighbor, or send tweets to foreign speakers) you can readily use any of the effective translation tools mentioned below–

Babel Fish – Babel Fish is of course very well known and rightfully so, because it lets users translate large chunks of text and even websites between many language pairs through a user-friendly interface.

Google Translate & Bing Translator – Both Google Translate & Bing Translator offer services which are similar to Babel Fish. Bing Translator offers a very useful additional feature which is the ability to detect the language of given content. Google Translate on the other hand has been integrated with Gmail and enables users to translate emails as well.

BabelWith.Me: Yet another highly innovative tool which helps users chat in languages they don’t know! It does this by translating chats in real time and supports 45 languages at present.

TweetTranslate: TweetTranslate moves to the area of micro-blogging or Tweets. It can work seamlessly with Twitter accounts enabling users to translate tweets into over 40 languages.

Forvo – This is an excellent language site that relies on crowdsourcing. Forvo allows users to share audio clips which help them practice correct pronunciation in different languages. The site is quite user friendly with the various audio clips being mapped by the speaker’s region.

Identifying Languages with LangID

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on July 1, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

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Just came across this extremely interesting web site called LangID, check it out at http://langid.net. LangID is the simplest and fastest way to identify an unknown language. Now why would you need that for?

Well it can be helpful in quite a few ways one of which is, let’s say you come across text in a language which you need to understand. You can use a free language translation service and get the translated text immediately, but before that you need to know which language the text is in; you would need to enter details like name of the language for the free translation service to work. This is the step where LangID would help you out by identifying the unknown language.

LangID has a user-friendly interface; you can post your query by typing or pasting the text or uploading the document, you can email LangID or even get your query resolved through Twitter. If you are taking the email/Twitter route, you will get your answer within 5 minutes. Apart from providing the name of required language, LangID also provides its ISO code and displays an icon that represents the flag of any one major country where the language is spoken.

At present LangID supports 85 languages.

iPhone - Translation Apps

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Posted by Faisal Kalim on June 30, 2009 – 10:00 am
Filed under Translation Tools

Hot deal welcomes 2010 - 10% Discount on any translation order.
Use the coupon code "Tomedes10" !


The phone everybody has been talking about since much before it was first released doesn’t stop to amaze. Yours truly is one of those addicts who just cannot get over their iPhone. With the latest version, iPhone 3G S released just a few days back, I thought it was a good time to talk about iPhone and language translation.

There are at present, somewhere around 50,000 apps available at the iTunes store for the iPhone. Not all are remarkable, but there is a decent number of simply amazing apps which include a few for translation as well. Some of the good ones are –

BdTranslator
This app enables its user to translate around 250 commonly used phrases between 16 languages. You need a 3G or WiFi connection to use it, but with options for 16 languages provided, it is a must buy for people who frequently travel to a variety of countries or have a large circle of foreign language speaking friends, business partners and acquaintances.

Talking Phrasebook
This app features dictionaries and commonly used phrases in 6 languages. The languages included are French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The application also packs in audio which allows you to hear phrases as you are translating them. So when you are in a foreign country you can listen to the translation and repeat to whoever it is you want to communicate with, or let your iPhone do the talking. Best part – This app is free.

Linguo
Linguo is one of the most user-friendly translation apps around. It features 400 preset phrases accompanied by audio clips in Spanish, German, French and Italian. One also gets custom translations for 20 languages and they can be saved as well. Linguo features a simple UI and users can translate with a simple click.

There are a few more iphone translation apps; I mentioned the above as I found them more interesting. You too dear reader can chip in with your opinions.