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Five years ago I discovered a much-needed gap in the world: there was a tragic shortage of open Chinese-Hungarian dictionaries on the Internet. I soon decided that it was my mission to fill this gap.

There was one small problem I had to overcome to do this. I don't really speak Chinese.

Here is, then, what I learned about the translation industry as I created CHDICT, the world's first open-source, collaboratively edited Chinese-Hungarian dictionary.

Wait... what is CHDICT?

It is any and all of the following:

• A downloadable text file with an open public license where each line contains one Chinese word and its senses in Hungarian
• A website where you can look up Chinese or Hungarian words, or find the meaning of hand-drawn Chinese characters
• The translation into Hungarian of the English senses in CC-CEDICT, an established Chinese-English dictionary
• An online collaboration space where people add, improve, and correct dictionary entries

I seeded CHDICT between February 2015 and May 2017 with about 11 thousand entries. The main approach in this initial phase was the translation of the English part of CC-CEDICT, focusing on the most frequent Chinese words, plus those less frequent ones that are included in the PRC's official language examinations.

Afterwards, I used machine learning to extract bilingual vocabulary from 3 million Chinese-Hungarian movie subtitle pairs. This way, I was able to manually review and add another 4 thousand entries to CHDICT in only a few months. Over the same period, CHDICT began to attract contributors, who added or amended hundreds of entries on their own.

Deriving dictionaries for niche language combinations is a nice hobby for some; but I want to use this opportunity to share the insights I've gained during the process about professional translation more broadly.

1: Everything you translate is another translator's input

A dictionary is typically an input that you use as a translator, and not the output of your work. When you translate a dictionary, then, that turns everything upside down.

Yet as I thought more about this, I realized that most of our output as translators is a direct input into the work of other translators. That's clearly the case when you build a shared glossary. But even when you just commit segments into a TM, you are growing a resource that another translator will probably use later. From this angle, translating a dictionary no longer seems particularly special.

And here's the thing: every translation that is ever stored digitally will eventually be vacuumed up by a machine translation (MT) engine. Certainly that will happen to every piece of content published on the Internet; but rest assured, even highly confidential internal-use-only texts will find their way into the inner parameter space of a highly confidential, internal-use-only MT engine.

2: Clarity about IP and copyright is super important

I could not have done CHDICT, or at least not done it this way, were it not for CC-CEDICT's public license. Intriguingly, that license was not always in place. CEDICT operated without any explicit license until 2007, when the person running the project simply disappeared. That was a really tough spot to be in for the people who wanted to carry on the torch! Things were eventually sorted out, and the dictionary added "CC" to highlight the now-official Creative Commons license.

But what sort of intellectual property (IP) is a dictionary? Language is a common good; nobody owns the words in its lexicon. Think of it like this: nobody owns gravity, but the physicist who writes a book about gravity does own the book's IP.

While modern dictionary-making has always been a commercial enterprise in the UK and the US, it is typically an academic pursuit elsewhere. In both cases, it's clear the dictionary stands as a work on its own, and its IP is jealously guarded by the holders of private licenses.

What is the IP in the case of a translation, whether it's that of a dictionary, or any other content? It's the translation industry's major debt that we never properly resolved this. The active conversation from 10 to 15 years ago simply subsided. And now that it's become clear that every translation is somebody else's input, we're in a situation where MT services can serve millions of translation requests a day and not pay a cent to the creators of the sentence pairs that the engines are trained on.

2b: A public license is the best guarantee for a work's survival in the digital age

Before the digital revolution, humanity's knowledge was stored in libraries in the form of physical books. Today, humanity's knowledge is stored digitally, online.

Online digital content has very different survival patterns from printed books. If you stop maintaining your server, the content is gone; think link rot. On the other hand, copies long outlive the original; think Google never forgets. The best strategy for the long-time survival of any digital work, then, is a copy-free public license.

If I get run over by a bus, replicas of CHDICT's data file will still be stored in many places, and eventually someone else will revive the project and re-publish the dictionary.

>Contrast that with the thousands of out-of-print books that the publisher has no incentive to re-print. Or with a non-public digital work whose copyright holder gets run over by a bus.

I witnessed a unicorn kind of event while working on CHDICT: the open-sourcing of Taiwan's "official" Chinese dictionary, MOEDICT. That came out of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. Urged by the students occupying Parliament, the government created a digital ministry, appointed an anarchist hacker to lead it, and started accommodating regular "gov0" hackathons. One of these hackathons looked at MOEDICT, convinced the officials that it was a public good, and published it under an open license. Don't tell me dictionaries are boring stuff!

3: Linguists will become NLP wizards (also, translation defined)

OK, I'm obviously a geek, and one obsessed with CAT tools at that. I coded my own DTE™ (Dictionary Translation Environment) to make translating CC-CEDICT entries really, really efficient. It looks like this:

The functionality is slightly different from a regular CAT tool, but yes, the goal is to make all the items on the left turn green, and yes, the shortcut to confirm an entry is Ctrl+Enter.

I'm not suggesting that linguists will all be coding their own CAT tools in the future. But the real underlying work about CHDICT, particularly in the second phase, was about mobilizing natural language processing (NLP) techniques to tease lexical information out of heaps of bilingual and even monolingual data. The details would be tedious here, but I wrote an article about it that won best paper award at MSZNY 2018; if you're really into this stuff, you can read it here.

You see, my situation was that I only knew my domain (the Chinese lexicon) superficially, so I had to do lots of research to understand what my source words meant. That's not unlike what happens in a normal translation setting. At the outset, we're not experts in the domain of a particular text, and we do research to make sure we get it right. Then, we reproduce the text's message and intent in the target language; and between us, we have a really, really good command of that target language. Translation = Research + Mastery of the Target Language.

NLP gives you superpowers for the research part. It's your brain augmented to access the information encoded in millions of segment pairs, and more. Actual understanding, and artful expression, are the human privilege in the mix.

4: Tools encode the social dynamics of collaboration

You would normally think of a dictionary's users as those who look up words in it. But because CHDICT is a collaborative, open dictionary, the smaller number of users who add to it and edit it are equally important.

How that contribution and collaboration happens is directly driven by the website. English Wikipedia is a free-for-all: anyone can make an edit with a single click, and the change is immediately published. This apparently works with a very, very large pool of contributors.

CC-CEDICT, by contrast, uses a pretty rigid process: registered users can submit edits and new entries. These get queued up, and they only go live if someone from a small, closed circle of reviewers processes it. This seems to work fine for CC-CEDICT, although the dictionary's been getting less activity in recent years.

For CHDICT, I knew I could count on a much smaller pool of contributors. So I chose not to add many obstacles before someone could start contributing, but still include a mechanism that drives changes through a four-eyes review process for quality.

The meta-story here is that the forms of engagement, authority, power relations, and overall social dynamics are all coded into the tools we use to collaborate. Since translation has become a fully collaborative online process, that gives tools an immense power to shape the industry's dynamics. Tool makers are well advised to wield this power wisely and ethically.

5: Some of the best things don't have a business model

CHDICT has been online for about 2.5 years now; I have a pretty good idea about its usage statistics. It has over 100 monthly users who spend an average of 20 minutes on the site for each visit; roughly 2000 words are looked up each week.

These figures are in line with my original expectations, which I based on the usage statistics of the Chinese-German dictionary HanDeDict, and on a rough estimate of people professionally interested in Chinese in a population of under 10 million.

These are also figures that constitute approximately €0.00 monetizable value. And that is fine with me. Most of the best things in life do not come with a viable business model. I only wish that as a society we could figure out a way to better compensate, in particular, amazing translators of truly complex texts. I mean the likes of Emily Wilson or Ken Liu, but also the hundreds of highly skilled people who translate valuable works that do not make it to the bestseller lists.

Gábor is the Head of Innovation at memoQ Translation Technologies and you can find him on Twitter at @twilliability.

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Do you remember when Memsource's only translation interface was Microsoft Word? Most of you probably won't. (That's okay. It didn't last for a particularly long time before being replaced by a web interface and its offline editor clone.) The point is that things are moving so fast with this Czech company that now it's trying to have its users connect with their projects via a third interface: mobile devices.

Just like SDL and XTM (see the report in the Tool Box Journal 276), Memsource already had an app that made it possible for project managers to connect to projects via a mobile device and make quick changes or respond to any urgently needed request by collaborators and translators.

This month (July 2019), Memsource revamped the app to also serve as a translation platform. To find out more, I spent some time with Vojtěch Novák, the software engineer in charge of the tool. While still in its early stages with a good number of things on the short-term to-do list (such as auto-complete, different interfaces for tablets and phones, and a QA module), it was interesting to see a tool that is certainly workable. The team's strategy was to use as much as possible from the functionality and visuals of the web interface while at the same time completely redesigning the interface to make it workable on mobile devices.

Once you enter the translation mode, you won't see a bilingual list like you would in the other interfaces; instead, you'll see a list of source segments followed by a symbol that indicates whether the segment has been translated. (Unfortunately, the symbol for "not translated" looks like a symbol to delete the segment in question.)

Tapping on a segment on the list opens the segment in question with the cursor in the target field and the keyboard activated. TM, MT, and termbase matches are only shown when tapping the corresponding icon, and the same is true for a tool to enter tags. ("Since the keyboard takes most of the space on the screen, there was not enough space for all of it.")

On the other hand, it's nice that propagation works great; rather than going back to the initial screen to open the next segment, you just swipe through the segments horizontally; there is a preview feature for the most common formats in the iOS app (in the Android app there is a download feature instead); you can communicate with other linguists or project managers through the app; and there is a fairly easy-to-use navigation feature to jump to any segment in the file on the initial screen.

So . . . it makes me kind of happy to say that this is not going to replace working on a big screen for large projects (I'm afraid this preference shows my age). But for small projects or quick corrections, or even for looking up what the editor has done to your precious translation, it's great, even though it will need some touch-ups around the edges.

• Available within Memsource and memoQ
• Compatible with all CAT tools.
• Fast log-in for Proz members.

With your permission, I'm going to step away from discussing technology and interpreting this month and share with you an inside look at a creative journey I started earlier this year.

First, some background. In 2018 and 2019, several high-level, closed-door meetings between world leaders that included interpreters found their way into the news (for reasons I won't get into here). For a fleeting moment, the spotlight was fixed on the interpreter's role in these meetings. The world was asking: What does the interpreter do? What can the interpreter say about the meeting? Should the interpreter's notes be subpoenaed? The discussions in the national and international media often fell short because of a lack of accurate information about the interpreting profession, what it takes to do our job, and our professional code of ethics.

So, in early 2019, when media pundits and commentators were still hypothesizing about what went on in those closed-door meetings, I was contacted by the creative team at WIRED.com. They invited me to collaborate with them on a project to explain just what goes on in closed-door diplomatic meetings when interpreters are present. The videos would be a part of the WIRED Masterminds series. The opportunity was just too good to pass up. I dove in head first. What ensued was a months-long process to craft the script of an engaging, entertaining, educational, and most importantly, accurate depiction of how conference and diplomatic interpreters work in these meetings.

Making a video about what interpreting is like is a lot harder than you'd think. Interpreting has grown into a vast professional field with different techniques, expectations, and codes of ethics, depending on where an interpreter works.

The creative process involved multiple meetings, brainstorming sessions, and script revisions. I am indebted to former chief interpreter at the US State Department Stephanie Van Reigersberg for her guidance and willingness to listen to my initial ideas on how to approach such an important and sensitive topic. One thing was clear from the beginning. We had to have real interpreters in the video for the greatest impact. So, I'm equally indebted to my fellow AIIC colleagues Katty Kauffman and Adnane Etayebi for their willingness to contribute their time, talents and reputation to making these videos. A special shout-out to Joe, Phil and Vara at WIRED: they are masters of their craft who were as dedicated to getting these videos right as I was.

Our creative efforts culminated in a marathon 14-hour video shoot in April at a studio in Lower Manhattan. It is really true that movies and videos are shot in small pieces and usually out of order. So, we didn't have a clear idea how the final product would look. Katty, Adnane, and I were on pins and needles until the videos were released in June. Katty and I were especially nervous, because the WIRED team sprang the idea of the second "challenge" video on us the day of the shoot. Being asked to interpret material we hadn't prepared for at increasing rates of speed in front of a camera to see where we made mistakes and why-and then trusting the post-production team to put together a video that would shine a positive light on the profession-was a leap of faith, to put it mildly.

The first video focusing on how interpreters usually work in closed-door meetings was released on June 24, 2019. It went on to garner over 250,000 views in the first 24 hours and surpassed one million views in less than a week.

The second video focusing on the challenges of simultaneous interpreting was released first on paid streaming services like Roku and AppleTV and later made public on YouTube on July 3, 2019. As of the writing of this column, it had been viewed some 725,000 times.

What will the ultimate result of these videos be? I'm not sure, but they have already reached an audience of millions all over the world, far exceeding our expectations (over 2.7 million views on YouTube as of the writing of this column). And I am told by WIRED that they will be of interest to the general public for many months to come. The reaction from the general public has been overwhelmingly positive. Oddly enough, just a few days after its official release, there was already a bootleg version of the first video with subtitles circulating on the Chinese Internet, clearly showing interest in the subject beyond the English-speaking world.

Subtitling is either completed or underway in Spanish, French, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. If you have experience subtitling and are interested in helping expand the reach of these videos in additional languages, please contact me.

Do you have a question about a specific technology? Or would you like to learn more about a specific interpreting platform, interpreter console or supporting technology? Send us an email at inquiry@interpretamerica.com.

Free webinar from SDL: '10 habits of successful translators & interpreters'  

Part of SDL's "The Freelance Translator's Road to Success" series.

This webinar takes place on July 18, 2019 at 15:00 BST  

This is the first in a series on tips and tricks with hidden features in common translation-related tools. Up next month: Across. Let me know if you're interested in writing a guest article for another tool.

If you are working with memoQ, chances are you have noticed by now that is has an incredible number of features. It does not really show at first, but if you have a quiet moment or two, click your way through the different menu items and actually read the names of the options in the different dialogs. You will realize that there is more than meets the eye at first.

A lot of the features are very useful for everyday work; some of them only ever matter if you want to do something special, like running a term extraction, for example; and a few of them are so hidden that you might only stumble across them by accident.

I have collected some of these and would like to make them known to you, in the hope that one or the other will further enhance your experience of memoQ.

The right mouse click

This is one of my favorite, because it usually reveals things that are scattered across several menus or might not be available through a menu option at all. So go ahead, right-click anything you see in the user interface. :-)

If you right-click the name of a document tab, you will get a choice to copy the file name or the whole file path to the clipboard. This is a useful feature if you need to tell someone about something in a specific file and don't want to type the file name.

If you need a full list of file names, try the right-click in the list of documents and choose the last option (Copy Path), which will let you copy file names and absolute or relative paths to all selected files.

In the list of projects, on the other hand, a right-click will give you the option to export a project report (of one or all selected projects) to a CSV file. The report details everything, from project name to names of the documents (even name changes for re-imported documents), the name of the person who imported the files, the filters that were used, assignments of the files (for project managers), numbers of segments and words, and so on. This is very useful if you want to create statistics on how many words were translated for a specific client, for example.

Also, there are many icons that you can click on, even if at first you don't realize that they are clickable. For example, note the small arrow pointing down at the top right of the Project Home window. This allows you to jump to a specific file tab or close all tabs at once. Again, this is very useful for project managers who deal with many files in parallel.

Have you ever noticed that the eye symbol above the results list is sometimes open and sometimes closed? This shows that memoQ either shows all available matches or hides some, usually duplicates. Click on the closed eye once to show all available matches; double-click the eye to get to the settings dialog behind the results list. All of these settings are also available in the options dialog, but this way is faster.

Keyboard shortcuts

Moving from the mouse to the keyboard, you will find that there are many key combinations available that do not have an associated icon on the menu ribbons. For example, pressing Ctrl+F opens the quick find dialog (as this is a standard Windows key combination for opening the search or find dialog, I guess everybody is aware of that one), but did you know that pressing Ctrl+F+F (yes, pressing the F key twice) will open the full search dialog?

During translation or review we often have to deal with tags, and most of you probably know the F9 key to insert the next tag from the source segment at the current cursor position in the translation. Some other useful combinations are Ctrl+F6 to arrange all tags in the target segments in the same sequence as in the source, or Ctrl+F8 to delete all tags from a target segment. The latter is also quite useful to clean up a file. Example: a PDF file shows too many tags after import, and 90% of those are not really needed? Select all (Ctrl+Shift+A), copy the selection to the target column (Ctrl+Shift+C), delete all tags (Ctrl+F8), and export the file. You now have a clean file that you can import again without having to deal with all the useless tags.

And for those of you who are asked to change text within tags themselves, select the tag in the translation and press Ctrl+F9. This opens a small dialog where you can edit the text inside of the tag.

Speeding things up

For those of you who deal with many files within one project, you probably use the "view" feature where you can collect segments of all files into one long list and work on that one. But did you know that you can even manipulate files without opening them? Select the files and call up the Find & Replace dialog (Ctrl+H). Whatever you enter here, including regular expressions, will be run on all selected files. This saves time compared to using a view if you have to work on 2500 files at the same time. Creating, opening, and working on a view can be tediously slow, depending on how many segments you have.

And here is a feature that also might be worth a try, although I have to admit that it is not perfect. If your document contains more than one language, you usually want to lock all segments that have a language different than the one set as the project's source language. Take a look at the dialog to lock segments (Ctrl+L or Preparation menu -> Lock/Unlock Segments). At the bottom of the dialog there is an option to lock Rows in a different language. Give it a try-it might save you some time.

Machine Translation -- not only for segments

In one of the last versions, memoQ added a feature to use a machine translation plugin (the one you are subscribed to and have activated in the project settings) for concordance searching. You can select a word or phrase, use the MT Concordance (open the concordance features with the small arrow below the concordance icon), and receive a machine-translated result in the results list for your selection. Under Options -> Appearance -> Lookup Results you can also choose which color this match should have (by default it uses the same color as the MT results for whole segments) and where in the results list it should appear.

If you don't have an MT plugin activated but would still like to use one of the free machine translation platforms, you can add the platform in the list of online dictionaries, which also lets you add the web address of search engines. Now you can use the web search (select a word or phrase, click on memoQ Web Search in the ribbon, and memoQ will open a browser window and run the search for you). But please note that, like with many free services, the platform will keep the text you copy into it for its own usage. If you have a paid subscription with an MT provider, they usually refrain from doing so.

Tools

And last but not least there is a tool that gets installed with memoQ but does not appear in the list of installed applications or inside the memoQ user interface. It is the TM search tool. You can start it with the key combination Ctrl+Shift+Q. In the settings dialog you can specify all TMs to be searched, regardless of their language combination.

Now, when you are within an application like Word, PowerPoint... and want to look something up, simply select the text, press Ctrl+C to copy the text to the clipboard, and the TM search tool will execute a search for the selected segment in all TMs.

Please note that this does not work within memoQ itself, and a TM that is used in the search tool cannot be used at the same time in memoQ. But the search tool itself is rather for those situations where you have something small to translate (like an e-mail) or the text cannot be imported into memoQ (like text in an embedded diagram in PowerPoint), but you still want to check whether your TMs contain anything useful.

These are just a few of the features that are hidden a little too well by memoQ. I hope some of it might be useful for you.

About the author:

After a degree in translation (1995) from the University of Bonn, Germany (Chinese, Japanese, Computational Linguistics), Angelika Zerfaß worked for the Japanese Embassy in Bonn and later for Trados GmbH in Japan, the US, and Germany before going freelance in 2000 as a trainer for translation tools.

Angelika is based in Bonn, Germany, and provides consultancy, training, and support for users of translation tools (mainly memoQ and SDL Trados). She delights in the more complex things like finding workarounds, creating filters for XML-based files, and using regular expressions for anything that the tools don't do by themselves.

She works for clients worldwide and serves enterprises, LSPs, and freelancers alike. 

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