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specialties in technology translation.
There were a couple of other interesting tidbits. When it came to the topic of terminology management, the responses of the tool vendors made it very clear that there really are two very different approaches to terminology: the glossary-like approach assumes that a termbase consists essentially of a source term/target term terminology list, whereas the much more complex terminology approach satisfies not only the immediate need of the translator but also that of the terminologist. Clearly, tools like SDL MultiTerm, Star TermStar, Kilgray qTerm, and LogiTerm fall into the second category, while the various Wordfast products (Wordfast Pro,Classic, and Anywhere) fall into the glossary category.
The two (statistical) MT providers that responded (KantanMT and Tauyou) are now at least aware of the requests that freelance translators have for their tools, in particular that there is an immediate need for the MT engine to learn when the translator adds corrections in the postediting process. (KantanMT already has an Instant Segment Retraining technology, whereas Tauyou is more cautious: “In some cases, [instant training] is possible, while not in others (or too dangerous).”
Beyond these and many other results (which you can find in the Excel spreadsheet), there were two more immediate action items.
Since there was a strong feeling among participants that it would be beneficial to have an exchange standard for keyboard shortcuts between different tools, I provided the tool vendors with a list of the 20 most important processes within a TEnT that would be helpful to be exchanged. I have also passed on a plea to revive the SRX standard,which is the standard that is concerned with exchanging segmentation rules between different tools. While the first of these requests is selfexplanatory, the second was brought up in connection with the desire to have different sets of segmentation rules for different types of texts (and,of course, languages). It would be great if these kinds of rules did not have to be developed for each tool but could be shared between the different technologies. SDL Trados Studio does not currently support SRX, and this would be a very helpful change.
Oh, and there is one more outcome from my first webinar. We will have another comparable webinar in January 2015 to see what progress we have made with our requests and whether there are new ones that have risen to the top of the list. Stay tuned for the announcements.
