[Freecats-Dev] Re: Trados/other CAT, Python/Java, German/English

[Keith Godfrey]

Henri Chorand wrote:

> As translators, our first aim was to provide a full-fledged standalone
> translation editor, because it might be the most productive solution. We
> then quickly realized that we would need as many conversion filters as
> possible in order to be able to translate whatever customers require, 
> and we thought about the huge job done by Open Office team. We soon 
> realized their conversion filters would have to be integrated into 
> Free CATS client(s). 


Building a standalone translation editor of good quality, capable of 
representing source files of different natures reasonably well (forget 
accurately) will be a significant undertaking, imho, and one that will 
be very difficult to accomplish in a cross-platform manner.  One 
possible solution would be to take an open source word processor that 
has some filters to start with (such as Abiword) and build upon that, 
but then you're tying yourself to a specific platform.  On the plus 
side, you've already got a solid infrastructure to start from.  A CAT 
tool imbedded within OpenOffice.org, if it were possible, might provide 
the most optimal solution, but I've never heard if such a task would work.


> There are two options there:
> - We find a way to build this interactive translation editor (this means
> we have to adapt Open Office's filters)
> - We build a tool that works from within OO, like Trados with MS Word 
> (we can reuse these filters without any extra work).
>
> In an ideal world, translators might ask for both a standalone
> translation editor (like OmegaT) and integration within a word processor. 


My background would suggest that a focus should be made on one or the 
other techniques - trying to satisfy both will be significantly more 
complex and likely never be completed.


> I can't pretend we dwelved deeply into OO's internals, but we found out
> the following:
> - OO has no macro language. Something may be done at a later stage.
> - OO's API is well documented, so it might be rather doable to do
> something, especially if we only implement a toolbar calling a set of
> external functions. 


Intead of using Abiword, it might be worth considering making a custom 
build of OOo with built in Trados like features (and port the parts of 
other open source tools, such as OmegaT, that would be needed to make 
the CAT side work).

> The other solution we see is (assuming we start from OmegaT, which is 
> an option I would personally favour):
> - Separate client & TM server features in OmegaT
> - Design a more sophisticated GUI interface (I believe we can bring a
> number of clever ideas here) 


One thing to consider - all of the file filters in OmegaT would require 
a complete rewrite if text style information needs to be extracted, and 
seperate output filters would need to be created if the user is allowed 
modify the file formatting.  OmegaT's filters are reasonably simple - 
they extract bits of text from a stream of data (the source file) and 
simply replace that text with translated text when writing the 
translated file.  That method provides very strict enforcement of no 
formatting changes outside of the proper word processing editor.  Unless 
one goes with a high quality word processor (such as OOo), it may be 
dangerous try to modify formats - clients may end up with files that 
don't work for them (I've spent several years as a localization engineer 
and have seen plenty of corrupted files - another reason for OmegaT's 
strict formatting policy)


> We would all very much appreciate if you could provide us with a
> general description of OmegaT's indexing & fuzzy matching features. 


See my other email for this


> At this stage, we need to know IF (and to which extent) OmegaT keeps 
> all such formatting (as found in OO's native XML format files). 


As mentioned above, OmegaT ignores all formatting information - it's 
only interest is in whether or not the formatting tags are 'hard' (like 
paragraph boundaries) or 'soft' (like formatting boundaries).  The tags 
are discarded after identification.

BTW - I'm not subscribed to the list so if someone wishes to contact me, 
please do so directly.

Keith