Consider the following scenario, which has come up a few times in our company: we need to translate a web site that has got lots and lots of files, all of them called “index.html” nested at different levels in their own folder. I’m told that this is a nightmarish situation to manage with some Management [...]
Author Archive
Renaming Files for Website Translations
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012UTF-8 vs UTF-16
Friday, August 24th, 2012Most, if not all, translators nowadays use some kind of CAT tool to help them with their work. Trados has been the standard for the past few years, and it still is the most widely used CAT tool. The encoding used by this tool for its working documents (TTX, sdlxliff) and exported memories (TMX) is [...]
Processing TMX with sed
Friday, August 10th, 2012This entry is a bit complex, but possibly some translators with a technical lean might find it useful. Some time ago I wrote about the TMX format for translation memories. These TMs can be very big files, spanning many thousands or even millions of lines. Processing these files with traditional methods sometimes can become a [...]
Character encoding in HTML
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012For historical reasons, the English alphabet and many of its punctuation marks are encoded in electronic devices in a universal and unique way. This encoding is called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). However as soon as we step outside this narrow character set, problems are waiting for the unwary. Any letter that is [...]
More on ambiguity and logic
Tuesday, July 10th, 2012In a previous post we mentioned the ambiguity of or in day-to-day speech. There is another construction that also exhibits this kind of ambiguity, but while the dual meaning of or is legendary and well documented, the one I’m writing about now is far less known. As a matter of fact, I have never seen [...]
A tale of two translations
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012A couple of weeks ago, in the weekly Chess tactics lesson of my local club (Oh, no! Not another entry about Chess!), the game we were considering contained the following funny sentence: ¡nunca se sabe por dónde saldrá el sol! (you never know where the sun will rise!) I didn’t notice at the time, but [...]
Chess across languages
Tuesday, June 12th, 2012Surfing around, I came across this page, which presents the names given to the chess pieces in other languages: foreign names of chess pieces. It is very interesting to see how many cross-relationships there are among these names. To start with, all of them seem to agree on the fact that the most important piece [...]
Evaluating SymEval
Tuesday, June 5th, 2012SymEval is a tool written in Python for measuring the effort invested in the Post-Editing (PE) process. It reports the edit distance between segments in two different translations using the Levenshtein algorithm. To test SymEval we first prepared four TMX files. The first one had the source and the result of translating it with an [...]
The ambiguity of “or”
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012One of the most curious ambiguities that I know of is the two different meanings of the connective “or”. It’s got an “inclusive” and an “exclusive” meaning, and both of them coexist happily in everyday English. Which of the two is intended in a particular case is usually clarified from the context. Among the reasons [...]
Do Aliens dream of electric ships?
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Planet Earth. Saturday 12th September 2048. Huge spaceship. Humongous. Hovering over Sao Paulo, USB(1). A few others in other big cities. Finally they are here! They send us a message but nobody understands what it means. Quickly, let’s get in touch with Trusted Translations, the one and only translation services in the world now. “Can [...]
