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In light of the current situation, ATA Chronicle editor Jeff Sanfacon asked me to write something connecting technology with our all-consuming health crisis (I write regular columns in the ATA Chronicle and the ITI Bulletin and sometimes publish that content in the Tool Box Journal as well).

I really liked Jeff's idea, so I turned around and asked the same question of the technology vendors themselves. (Since I had to limit myself, I asked only translation environment tool providers and developers.) This is the message I sent them:

I am working on an article about what vendors of translation-specific tools are doing to respond to the coronavirus. Clearly, these are very, very difficult times for all of us, personally and professionally. I'm aware that you may see a significant decrease in sales in the next few weeks and maybe months as much translation life slows down. Still, this is a good opportunity to reach out to translators with offers specifically geared toward this crisis, offers of training, digital meetings, and other kinds of engagement. What you are planning in this regard?

You won't be surprised to hear that virtually all vendors replied to outline their efforts. I will list them here in alphabetical order. (I edited the answers to cut text that seemed too promotional or offers that listed special sales of existing products. Also, nearly all respondents mentioned that their staff is working remotely while at the same time ensuring all services and necessary uptimes required -- so I also cut that out of their answers.)

Atril (atril.com)

Atril has been trying to help our customers and partners face this difficult situation. For example, in China, where we partner with a large number of universities, we have equipped the university staff and students with free Déjà Vu X3 Pro licenses so they can still study and learn while being at home.

For translators who are already using DVX3 but who need an additional license for another computer during this crisis, we are also providing them with temporary activation codes.

memoQ (memoQ.com)

• We have published an e-book to support the switch to home offices
• memoQ provides local and international organizations and software developer companies fighting COVID-19 with server licenses during the crisis at no cost
• memoQ provides free server licenses for NGOs and life science companies fighting the virus as well as dealing with crisis communication
• memoQ aims at building a forum that supports translators to promote their services and be available for LSPs in need of a certain language combination

SDL (sdltrados.com)

• Increase the allocation of free machine translation characters to SDL Trados Studio users. At this time there may be a greater need for urgent translations. Some businesses may also be suffering from a reduction in people actively at work. Therefore, for our SDL Trados Studio customers who are currently on a neural machine translation package, provided by SDL Machine Translation, we are doubling the number of free characters per month for the next two months. This change shall be automatically applied to your account, and should help you cope with any surge in demand.
• We will provide new virtual events and additional educational activities. To ensure we continue to deliver content, virtual networking opportunities, and educational activities that contribute to your continued professional development, we plan to digitize a number of our in-person events over the next few months. More details will follow on these.

Smartcat (smartcat.ai)

The issue that most concerns our freelance users during this economic downturn is confidence in timely payments.

• Payment Insurance by Smartcat for projects contracted through and carried out on the Smartcat platform.
• Prioritized Payment. Guaranteed payment within 30 days of project completion regardless of the standard payment schedule of an end buyer.
• Enhanced Support -- answers to your support request within 12 business hours.
• For those of you who have issues working with customers because of AB5, we will have you covered as well.

You can find more information here: smartcat.ai/freelancer-offer.

For language service providers, Smartcat is eliminating per-user licenses, together with our payment and vendor-sourcing components.

Text United (textunited.com)

Some of our clients are from industries that are suffering major effects (hospitality, travel, and automotive). We are trying to ease the financial aspect to them by delaying their payments by two to three months. Also, we are offering these clients free use of our TMS until the end of April (for now).

To those outside our client base, we will provide media channels support in translation of articles and video subtitles to help them reach a wider and international audience, making sure many people understand the situation and the precautions they need to take.

Translated (matecat.com, modernmt.com)

To help our community of customers and translators, we decided to offer our best adaptive machine translation service, ModernMT, for free until May 30. We will not limit usage; the only limit will be the capacity of our infrastructure (hundreds of GPUs).

Visit modernmt.com to see the range of APIs plans we have for enterprises and professional translators. Pick the plan that best fits your needs and add a credit card (only to avoid spam, you will not be charged).

Wordbee (wordbee.com)

It is important, now more than ever, that health-related information is available to all our co-citizens in as many languages as needed. To assist the healthcare industry in its efforts, Wordbee is instantly launching a support initiative by offering Wordbee Translator, our cloud-based translation management system, for free for two months.

It includes everything you need to translate, revise, and manage your projects. Five users can work simultaneously. These users can be in-house managers, editors, and external freelance translators.

On top of that, the Wordbee team will offer a free-of-charge online training to help you kick-start your translation efforts.

These conditions will apply for those of you working in hospitals, scientific or diagnostic laboratories, pathology clinics, residential health facilities, nursing homes, companies that produce biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and other scientific services.

Eligible are also medical device manufacturers and NGOs that help support the delivery and financing of health care services among large segments of the population.

Wordfast (wordfast.net)

• We implemented, early in the pandemic, a measure for employed translators who must comply with containment measures and work from home. We amended our EULA's terms to move in-company licenses to translators' personal computers for free.
• We remain committed, as has been the case for 20 years, to grant free technology to humanitarian and relief efforts. During the COVID-19 emergency, our offer is extended to government-backed efforts, not just NGOs.
• We are working on a Project Management extension for our online translation environment (Wordfast Anywhere) that would greatly help translation workforces get up and running overnight.

We appeal to Machine Translation providers, such as Google, Microsoft, and DeepL, to grant free access during the COVID-19 crisis for translators working from home.

I have also summarized the offers into these tweets.

And since it didn't make sense to prod others to be generous but not do it myself, I will be sending out my Tool Box Journal Premium edition to everyone for the duration of this crisis, including access to the journal archive going all the way back to 2007.

Enjoy.

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This easy-to-follow training is available in several languages.

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I have written about GT4T in the past (see here) as a little tool for Windows and Mac that connects you to a large variety of machine translation engines via a single mouse click. The presently available MT engines are DeepL Pro, Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, NiuTrans, Yandex, Systran, Baidu, Youdao, Tencent, and Sogou. You can call up translation suggestions from one or several at the same time; you can use your own API key (with a minimum extra fee) or you can pay GT4T to use their API connection; you can replace words in the suggestions with words from your own dictionary; and you can exclude words from translation, look up dictionaries and glossaries, etc., etc.

Recently, Dallas Cao, GT4T's developer, has been working on an additional feature: the possibility to add complete files and pretranslate them. This works for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and PDF files (the latter's conversion routine is not particularly impressive, so I would not encourage you to use that). But maybe more interestingly, it also works for bilingual files in SDL Trados, memoQ, Wordfast, Cafetran, Memsource, and Déjà Vu X formats.  

 

I've often confessed that I don't really like post-editing MT suggestions from a single MT source (I prefer working with multiple engines and use more of a fragment-based approach rather than pretranslating whole segments -- if, in fact, the text I'm translating lends itself to the employment of an MT engine in the first place), but I know many of you do. And while many of those engines can be called up via their API directly within a translation environment tool, some cannot and some, such as DeepL, can be used only with a lump sum fee-per-month that has to be paid with a European payment option. In contrast, with GT4T you pay just a character-based license, no matter where you're from.

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Do you remember when Windows 95 or 98 computers tended to be super-sluggish if the available animation options were enabled? Oh, many of you don't remember that? OK, then, maybe I am old, but I'm cool with that! (See how "young" I can still talk?) All right, let's just drop it!

Gosh!

Anyway...

With my recent computer problems that I described in the last Tool Box Journal, I was forced to look at all kinds of things I had never expected to research in the age of Windows 10 and speedy computers. One of them -- believe it or not -- was animations. There are indeed animation settings in Windows 10, and they do make a difference if you don't mind exchanging speed for silly animations.

To go there, you'll need to open the System Properties dialog by pressing the Windows key + R, entering sysdm.cpl into the ensuing dialog, and then clicking OK (or you can right-click My PC in the File Explorer and select Advanced). Under Performance, click the Settings button. The Performance Options dialog that opens up should display Visual Effects. If not, select that tab. And right in there you can either disable everything (by selecting Adjust for best performance) or selectively disable all these options you didn't know existed in the first place.

You're welcome.

And since we're talking about the Windows Key, Microsoft just enabled a new keyboard shortcut on the latest version of Windows 10 that originally was limited to the Microsoft Surface (methinks). WinKey+W opens links to two things: the Microsoft Whiteboard, a collaborative space you can use for freehand markings or typed text (very easy to share with others -- just click the person icon and enable the creation of a shared URL); and Fullscreen snip, a new way to take a screenshot of your current screen and immediately start marking it up. (For other ways to take screenshots, check here.)

Oh, and I imagine you will have already read about this elsewhere if these languages are relevant to you, but DeepL has added Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese to its supported languages.

Just before I was going to send this, Serge Gladkoff from Logrus contacted me, asking me to mention a new release of the free TBX and TMX editing tool Goldpan. I have not actually tested it, but many of you will have much more time these days, so why not clean your translation memories and termbases (and, by the way, test ModernMT while it's still free -- see above).

Stay strong.

Keep calm, stay home, and sharpen your business tools.

If you are a medical translator, just write to support@translation3000.com and get them for free.

Otherwise, get them with an unprecedented 80% discount at special.translation3000.com/staystrong 

GT4T is an intuitive MT add-on to all your Windows/Mac apps. It is now also a file translator that supports a great number of file formats. Get your Office documents or CAT files pre-translated without having to upload to a server.