Results of Translation QA Tool Survey

Tamara Lukyanova and Julia Makoushina, of Palex Languages & Software, have concluded their work on the interesting survey of translation QA tools we announced here in August.

From August through September 2007 Palex performed a translation community survey to evaluate acceptance of translation quality assurance tools by the translation community, to define where such tools currently are, their advantages and disadvantages and to visualize their future capabilities and their role in the translation process. In parallel with the survey, Palex tested and benchmarked translation quality assurance tools currently available in the market.

Julia has recently given a presentation ("Translation Quality Assurance Tools: Current State and Future Approaches") at the 29th Translating and the Computer conference that took place on 29-30 November 2007 in London. In addition to the presentation (which can be downloaded from the previous link), Julia has also written a paper with the same title. Both paper and presentation are very interesting and well worth downloading (you can do so from the previous links) and reading.

Translation QA Tool Survey

Tamara Lukyanova and Julia Makoushina, of Palex Languages & Software, have set up an interesting survey about translation QA tools.

From 1 August through September 28, 2007 Palex will perform a translation community survey to evaluate acceptance of translation quality assurance tools by the translation community, to define where such tools currently are, their advantages and disadvantages and to visualize their future capabilities and role in translation process.

[...]

In parallel with the survey, Palex is going to test and benchmark translation quality assurance tools currently available in the market. The survey and benchmarking results will be presented at 29th Translating and the Computer conference that will tale place on 29-30 November 2007 in London, as well as in other industry publications.

According to Tamara and Julia, if you respond to the survey and provide your e-mail address, you will be able to receive the survey analysis as soon as the survey is closed.

Please feel free to point other colleagues to the questionnaire.

To access the survey, click here (or on the link at the beginning of this post).

Translation QA Tools

I've just added a page to TranslationQuality.com to provide links to QA Distiller, Error Spy, and XBench, three tools designed to perform QA checks on translation files.

As soon as I can, I will put up a table to compare the features offered by these tools.

If you know of any other translation QA tools, please let us know.

Update

Also added to the page a link to BlackJack.

ApSIC’s XBench: New QA Functions Help Providing Consistent Translations

Many translators have been using XBench, a free utility created by ApSIC (a Spanish localization company) as a handy program to check glossaries or exported translation memories. Its main use was probably as a convenient and simple tool to search the Microsoft Glossaries.

ApSIC has recently released an upgrade to the program; though it looks like a minor upgrade (from version number 2.6 to 2.7), it is in fact a major improvement, which adds many more file formats (including Trados and SDLX bilingual files), and, above all, powerful quality assurance tools.

The new functionality permit to define files as “key terms” or as “ongoing translation”; the two things are linked: the ongoing translations files are checked against the key terms glossaries, and any discrepancy is noted in the QA screen. In addition to that, the new QA functions warn of various other potential problems, including numeric or tag mismatches, and permit to run checklists against the translated files (I believe this could be useful, for example, to check against specific types of problems).

The new features make the program more complicated (though the basic glossary search functionality remains as simple as before), but they are clearly explained in the thorough help file.

All in all, XBench is now a program that should prove very useful to almost all translators, and at a price that is impossible to beat.

New page of translation quality links at TranslationQuality.com

We have just added a new page of
interesting links about translation quality at TranslationQuality.com, our web site devoted to translation quality issues.