I’ve just released version 1.5.5 of Felix.

You can download the latest version here.

This release mainly includes improvements to the search page, additions to the automation interface, and some bug fixes. This is the last planned release before version 1.6, which will have an improved TM manager.

The main improvements are described below.

General

• Expanded automation API (for macros/scripting)
• Felix can now load glossaries in tab-separated text format
• Bug fix: Fixed error in number placement with numbers containing commas
• Bug fix: Felix no longer scrolls to the top of the window after editing an entry in place
• Bug fix: A bad date format in a record will not cause the TM/glossary to fail to load
• Bug fix: Felix would fail to load TMs/glossaries when many were selected at the same time
• Bug fix: Text was deleted from the “Quick Search” dialog after each search
• Concordance matches are now highlighted for regular expression searches
• Bug fix: The “last modified” date was overwriting the “created” date
• Memory and glossary windows have uniform search menu items

Search Window

• Bug fix: Bad date formats in the Search window could crash Felix.
• Improved navigation in search results
• Bug fix: After an entry was edited or deleted, the results would return to the first page

Remote TMs (Memory Serves)

• Performance improved for remote TM/glossary look-ups

PowerPoint

• Certain abbreviations (e.g. “Ms.” and “Dr.”) are no longer recognized as being segment ends

I’ve just released version 0.2 of XLIFF Translator.

You can download the latest version here.

This is still beta software, so please use for evaluation only.

Here are the main improvements to this version:

• Support for opening single XLIFF files

  When you open an XLIFF file, the file’s directory is opened as the current project, and the XLIFF file is selected in the translation view.

• Wide range of XLIFF files passing test suite.

  An XLIFF Translator user kindly supplied me with a variety of XLIFF files, and XLIFF Translator can handle all of them.

• Japanese localization finished.

  There were a few strings that didn’t have Japanese localizations. I’ve added those translations in this version.

Thanks to user ysavourel who provided great feedback in the Felix forums.

About XLIFF Translator

XLIFF Translator is a free (MIT license) Windows desktop application for translating XLIFF files. XLIFF is a standard XML format for translation.

I’ve just released version 1.6 of Memory Serves.

You can download the latest version here.

Here are the main improvements in this version:

• Global search and replace

  Now you can search and replace in all memories/glossaries at once

• Download search results

  You can download the search results as a TM file. This is useful for things like creating a TM/glossary for all entries added in a given date range, created by a specified user, or containing a certain word.

• You can add records from the Web interface.
• Records on browse page and in search results are edited in place.

  Before, when you clicked “Edit” for a record in a search result, after editing you would be sent to the search page with your search cleared. Now, you edit records in place, so you stay on the same search results page.

I’ve just released version 1.5.4 of Felix.

Download the latest version here.

This release doesn’t have a lot of new features, but it includes major bug fixes and some performance improvements. Because this version includes several bug fixes, I recommend that everyone upgrade if that’s possible.

A summary of the new features/improvements follows.

Felix

• Bug fix: In the Search Window, searching using an invalid date format would crash Felix.
• Improved performance with Memory Serves remote memories.
• Bug fix: Word did not stay in review mode when switching documents.
• Made search menu items uniform across memory window and glossary window.
• Bug fix: When a translation was shown in review mode, clicking “Edit” in Felix would bring up a different entry.
• Bug fix: Editing a record would also change the “created by” and “date created” values.
• Improved wording used in Japanese UI.
• Bug fix: Bad date formats were causing Felix to fail to load TMs. Felix now falls back to using the local date/time when it finds a bad date format.
• Bug fix: an error would appear if a macro was called on Felix while the main window wasn’t visible.

Excel

• Bug fix: “Look up next” command (Alt + L and the menu command) did not work.

PowerPoint

• Certain abbreviations ending in periods (“Mr.”, “Dr.”, “Mrs.” etc.) are no longer recognized as ending the segment.

I’ve just released the first beta version of XLIFF Translator, a free tool to generate and translate files in the XLIFF format using Felix.

Go to the XLIFF Translator home page

Documentation

For this project, I’m experimenting with a new documentation system called Sphinx. The documentation it puts out is very pretty, and it’s easy to write as well.

See the XLIFF Translator documentation

Forum

I’ve created a forum on the Felix forum site for discussions, bug reports, and feature requests regarding XLIFF Translator.

XLIFF Translator Forum

Other Support

You’re also welcome to contact me directly with any questions or problems using XLIFF Translator.

This is an initial, beta release, so expect bugs. Your feedback will help me greatly to improve XLIFF Translator and get out a great 1.0 release.

I converted the Tanaka Corpus of aligned Japanese and English sentences into Felix translation memory (TM) and TMX formats.

The Tanaka Corpus is a collection of around 150,000 Japanese-English sentence translation pairs, compiled over several years by university students, with later cleanup and correction by Jim Breen and his colleagues.

Download the Felix/TMX versions of the Tanaka Corpus here.

There was an interesting question on the Japanese-language Felix forum about displaying the glossary/memory name in the Felix search results (from the new search window).

Right now, you can view the memory/glossary name if you click on the “Details” link, but it’s not visible by default. I plan to make it visible in a near-future update, but in the meantime, you can modify the search-matches template to show this information in the current Felix version.

I’ve created modified versions of the English and Japanese-language versions of the templates, and made them available for download.

Download the English version

Download the Japanese Version

To install the template file, do the following.

On Windows 7/Vista:

1. Download the appropriate file above.
2. Open the file Explorer.
3. In the address bar, enter the following:
   %LOCALAPPDATA%\Felix\html\en
   Change the “en” to “jp” for the Japanese version.
4. Unzip the downloaded file, and place it in this folder.

The next time you do a search, the file name will appear in the results.

On Windows XP/2000:

1. Download the appropriate file above.
2. Open the file Explorer.
3. In the address bar, enter the following:
   C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Felix\html\en\
   Change UserName to your actual user name.
   Change the “en” to “jp” for the Japanese version.
4. Unzip the downloaded file, and place it in this folder.

For more details about what you can customize in the template files, see Customizing Felix Templates in the manual.

I’ve just released version 1.5.3 of Felix.

You can download the latest version here.

This release includes several bug fixes and feature enhancements, especially relating to remote memories and adding glossary terms. See below for details.

Improved Support for Remote Memories

• Bug fix: Editing a remote translation/glossary entry from Felix added a new one, instead of editing the existing one
• Bug fix: Mixed half/full-width glossary entries were not always found in Memory Serves
• Bug fix: Name showed up as [New] in Memory/Glossary Manager
• Bug fix: Name showed up as [New] for concordance searches
• Bug fix: Created by/modified by information was not preserved in remote entries
• Bug fix: The source and target languages were not shown in the Memory/Glossary Manager dialog boxes

Easier to Add Glossary Entries

• If the a glossary text box is empty, the selection on the left is used as the source/translation
• Bug fix: F3 button brought up blank Add Glossary dialog when reviewing translations or viewing a query with no translation candidates
• Bug fix: Text was not preserved between source and HTML tabs
• Bug fix: When editing advanced properties in the Add Glossary dialog, it is not necessary to enter a source or translation
• The Advanced dialog for glossary entries has a “Make defaults” checkbox, to set default values for all glossary entries added
• Bug fix: If all text was removed from the glossary text boxes, the formatting was retained
• The “Add to” list box setting is preserved after closing the Add Glossary dialog box.

Improvements to Search Window

• Keyboard shortcuts: New Search (Alt+N), Search Page (Alt+S), Replace Page (Alt+R), and Show/Hide Help (Alt+H)
• When all filters are deleted, does not show all records
• The number of records changed is displayed after the Replace All button is pressed.

Other Felix Improvements

• Bug fix: Switching views in glossary windows did not always cause new search to be conducted
• Bug fix: Glossary window background color preferences were not reflected in saved preference files
• Bug fix: Match coloring did not use CSS preferences for the word-based algorithm
• Bug fix: Needed to run as admin to use “Check for updates” feature from Windows Vista/Windows 7

Improvements to the Microsoft Office Interfaces

Excel:

• Maximum cell length for adding glossaries/TMs increased from 1,024 to 32,767 characters

Word:

• Common abbreviations are no longer recognized as ends of sentences (“Mr.”, “Mrs.”, “Ms.”, “Dr.”, “e.g.”, and “i.e.”)
• Bug fix: Canceling Felix Preferences dialog in Word still changed settings

… plus other minor fixes and improvements

I’ve just released version 1.5 of Memory Serves.

Download the latest version here.

Below is a list of the fixes and improvements in this version:

• Runs as single instance: if you try to run Memory Serves and it is already running, it will open a web page to the Memory Serves site and exit. This prevents errors due to two instances of Memory Serves competing for the same port.
• System tray icon. This lets you easily see if Memory Serves is running. You can also right click the icon to launch Memory Serves in your browser, or quit the server. Display of the system tray icon can be controlled in the preferences.
• Rudimentary statistical information is displayed on the view memory/glossary page (% of records validated and reliability rating stats).
• The memory footprint was reduced slightly.
• Other minor tweaks to the view pages

About Memory Serves

Memory Serves is a free application that lets you share Felix translation memories (TMs) and glossaries over your local network or VPN.

Until recently, there was no real way to browse through your TMs and glossaries in Felix. One technique was to save the TM/glossary as an Excel file, and view it from Excel, but that obviously isn’t really satisfactory.

With the new Search feature in Felix, however, you can browse, edit, and delete your TM/glossary entries right from Felix.

The trick is to enter a search condition that will match all your entries, and then browse the results. I prefer to set the search term “created-before:2050″, which means “Show me all entries created before the year 2050″. Unless you own a time machine, this should match all the entries in your TM/glossary.

See below for some screenshots illustrating how to do this.

Assuming you want to browse a glossary, in the Glossary window, click the Search toolbar button.

Search button in Glossary window

The Search window appears. In the search box, enter “created-before:2050″.

Enter parameter in search window

All results are retrieved, and displayed in page view.

The entire contents of the glossary are displayed in paged view

You can browse through the results, edit entries, delete entries, and so on. Incidentally, for this demonstration I used the Felix glossary created from the EDICT Japanese-English glossary file.