Re: [Freecats-Dev] Interface/vote

[Dave Simons]

Kirk asks me

> > personal rather than project terms. Remember, translators want to see some
> > benefit for themselves and consistency is probably not the main issue for
> > them.
>
> In what way is consistency not the main issue? What do you mean by
> consistency here?

Consistency of the vocabulary used in long-term or multi-translator 
projects. Though this is laudable, the main issue for me as a translator is 
how much faster does it let me work. Customers often think all the benefits 
should be for them.

> Don't forget us Mac users.  :-)

Oops sorry! -- though I think what I said applies even when we reintegrate 
you Mackers into the picture.

> > Once these two interfaces are out of the way, then yes, a stand-alone
> > interface would be great (read "indispensable"), especially for html/xml
> > and perhaps other stuff too. It's interesting to note that Abiword uses an
> > XML-like file format so that should be easy to cater for with our XML-aware
> > interface.
>
> By stand-alone you mean like Deja Vu, which presents texts in a simple table
> form?
> I far prefer the Trados approach, where you can at least see the type of
> formatting in the text. It helps by giving some context as to what level of
> text you are translating, at least in docs with several levels of headings.

I basically don't like (and don't trust) having to convert HTML/XML to .doc 
and back again.

I've never used déjà vu but I had a play with SDLX and Transsuite. Both of 
these show you the text in a stand-alone window, with little widgets in the 
case of transsuite and colours in the case of SLDX to represent tagged 
text. You can move the tagged sections about when the sentence structure is 
different in the two languages. You can also switch to a "normal" view of 
the document if you need context.
Also, since these interfaces don't rely on MS Office's built-in scripting 
like Trados and Wordfast, the interface is MUCH snappier. You don't seem to 
get that processing and screen-redrawing pause you get with the others.

Dave