Translation workflow

Here is my understanding of the general translator’s workflow. Take this, add that, I believe that I’d be mostly right. That’s based on the freelancer daily routine.

• Cost Evaluation: receive work proposal – count word, multiply by word value. Send number to customer
• Import document(s) into Translation application/suite
• Translate
• Export
• Invoice

Would you mind contradicting me if something’s wrong? I will focus on the 3  elements in the middle (import, translate, export) and try to provide facilities for all of these.

About Import… what are the most commonly imported document types? doc, html, various xml, text files, pdf? I’m certainly missing a lot of them there.

If you know translators that may be interested in my project, I will gladly take their answers too.

And to finish, adding a poll here,

Drawing on a canvas

Here’s where I am now: I’m working on the canvas… Nothing really superb and beautiful but I am getting used with the Cocoa drawing system.

I’m now loading the sample xliff from http://www.oasis-open.org/. And that gives us:

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This means I’m able to load and display an Xliff document!

Now is time to play. This was just to keep the few curious updated.

Designing a Translation Application – Part One

I mentioned this morning that I was “working” on a project. It’s a translation application for Mac OS X. There’s a lack of such tool in the Mac OS world and that seems so very complex.

So where does this project stand now? Not very high, not very high…
What I have done is something that can read and go through xliff with a minimal UI. I have also added some syntax coloring. All of that is very basic and not worth any money nor even being shown (hence the absence of screenshot).

What’s next? The next big thing is now to get a canvas for displaying and editing on screen several segments. That task asks me more brainpower and free time and dedication. I need to be able to focus on it and have the specs of what and how I exactly want things to get on screen. It’s not very hard but I must learn to concentrate.

And on the long term? There are few important features that need to go in. First one: today, translators can’t be competitive without a translation memory and fuzzy matching. That’s the big “What’s next”. I also have to bind all the editing to the system spellchecker. I want to add some features to make it easier for consistent translations. A terminology database would be handy, isn’t it? That should be able to…

I’m talking too much already Let’s post this entry.

First post! A few words about romot

Yeah… Finally, I ended up creating a blog like the common folks. I guess it’s to keep me going on that project of mine I started.

Why using romot? It’s a play on robot and mot (word). I like text processing. Maybe I’d talk about other things here than my few attempts to understand how text can be processed through computing… Let’s time tell.

Welcome to any visitor that can pass by, and if I have 3 visits today, that’d make my day.