Translation data can come in a wide range of formats; this is especially true of glossaries. Felix supports a variety of translation-memory and glossary formats, and by using the Felix import features in Excel, you can get data in many different formats into Felix.

Below are some of the many file formats that you can get into Felix.

Translation Memory Formats

Glossary Formats

In addition to the formats listed above, any tabular/table-based file that can be opened in Excel can be imported into Felix. For example, you can download a glossary in HTML format from the Internet, open it in Excel, and from there import it into Felix.

If you have an existing translation and original, and want to create a translation memory from it, then I suggest using the free Align Assist tool.

If you have the need to import a file format that’s not supported now, please let me know in the comments, or from the contact page.

The latest version of Felix (1.6.4) has an expanded COM API. One of the new things you can do with this API is control the size and focus of the memory and glossary windows.

As an example, here is a Word macro that will raise Felix to the top of your screen, while keeping the keyboard focus in Word. This is useful if you return to Word after an internet search, etc., and don’t want to go searching around for the Felix window.

Sub ActivateFelix()

    Dim felix As Object
    Set felix = CreateObject("Felix.App")
    felix.Visible = True
    Call felix.app2.MemoryWindow.Raise

End Sub

Now if you assign a keyboard shortcut for this (in Word 2010, it would be File >> Options >> Customize Ribbon >> “Customize” keyboard shortcuts button, then select Macros >> ActivateFelix >> “your keyboard shortcut”).

You could also create a “document changed” event handler, so that every time Word gets focus, Felix is raised to be visible. The code for this is a bit too involved for this blog post, but you can see the Microsoft documentation for how to write document event handlers.

In a future release of Felix, I plan on making functionality similar to this (also remembering the widow sizes and positions) available as a Felix option.

I’ll be updating the API documentation soon with all the new stuff, but for the meantime, here are the APIs for the memory and glossary windows:

App.App2.MemoryWindow:

• Raise (method)
• Left (int)
• Top (int)
• Width (int)
• Height (int)

App.App2.GlossaryWindow:

• Raise (method)
• Left (int)
• Top (int)
• Width (int)
• Height (int)

The current version of Analyze Assist can’t recognize the new “.docx”/”.pptx”/”xlsx” file extensions in MS Office 2007/2010 by default. I will be adding these definitions in the next release of Analyze Assist, but in the meantime, you can configure Analyze Assist to recognize these file formats.

Analyze Assist uses something called “segmenters,” and you can add the “-x” extensions to the various segmenters to make Analyze Assist recognize them.

To do this, from the Tools menu, select Options. The following dialog appears.

As shown in the screenshot above, add “;*.docx”, “;*.pptx”, and “;*.xlsx” to the respective fields, and click OK.

Analyze Assist will now recognize the “-x” formats.

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.

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.

If one of your MS Office programs (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) crashes, the Felix menu and toolbar might not appear the next time you start that program. This could be because Office has disabled the Felix add-in.

To enable the add-in, do the following.

On Office 2000/XP/2003

1. From the Help menu, select About Microsoft Office XXX (where XXX is Word, Excel, or PowerPoint).
2. At the bottom of the dialog box, click Disabled Items.
3. If Felix is on the list, enable it, and restart the program.

On Office 2007

1. Click on the Office button (the round button in the upper left of the window).
   
2. Click on Word/Excel/PowerPoint Options.
3. In the left panel, click Add-ins.

4. If Felix is in the list of disabled add-ins, then set the “Manage” list at the bottom of the window to “COM Add-ins”, and click Go. Select the “Felix Addin” checkbox, and click OK.

   If Felix isn’t on the list of disabled items, set the “Manage” list at the bottom to “Disabled Items”, and click Go. Enable “Felix Addin”, and click OK.

5. Close the Options dialog, and restart Word/Excel/PowerPoint.

If the problem persists

If the problem persists, please consider sending me your Felix log files. To do this:

1. From the Start menu, select All Programs >> Assistant Suite >> Felix >> Show Logs.
2. Click the Send button.
3. If you use Microsoft Outlook for email, it will ask you if you want to give permission for an external program to use email. Allow access, and then send the email with the log files attached.

Often after you’ve translated a Word document using Felix, you’ll need to make changes to your translation. You might have noticed a mistake as you reviewed your translation, or your client may have sent back edits. Ideally, any changes you make to your translation should be reflected in your Felix TM.

That’s what Review mode is for. Review mode is just like ordinary translation mode, except that you look up translations instead of source segments; and when you register a segment, instead of adding a new translation unit (TU), the existing one is modified with your corrections.

To get to Review mode, click the “Switch mode” button on the toolbar.

You can also select Switch to Review Mode from the menu.

When you’re in review mode, the colors of the buttons are reversed, and an asterisk in brackets ([*]) is shown next to the Felix menu.

You look up sentences just like in translation mode (see the quick-start tutorial for a brief overview), but instead of source segments, you’re looking up translations already in your TM.

Make any corrections to the translation, then correct your translation just like registering a translation in Translation mode. Any edits will be reflected in your TM.

Review mode is also a handy way to check your translation, because you can see the source and translation side by side in the Felix window as you go.

To switch back to translation mode, click the “Switch” button again.

A concordance search in TM lingo is a kind of context search: it finds occurrences of words or phrases in translation units (TUs) in your TM, so you can see how you’ve translated the word/phrase in the past, in varying contexts.

You can do a concordance search right from the Felix memory or glossary window. Here’s an example: I’ve made some changes to the text on the English Felix website, and now it’s time to reflect those changes on the Japanese site. Looking up the sentence “The Felix automatic glossary search feature is another way to boost your productivity and consistency” in the memory, I find a partial match.

The original sentence in the TM didn’t have the “and consistency” phrase. For consistency (nyuk nyuk), the translator would like to see how the term “consistency” has been translated in the past. To do this, simply select the word “consistency” in the memory window, and press Alt + C. A list of all translations in the TM with the word “consistency” will then appear:

I’ve made the window a little bigger so you can see the results better. Here I see that the translator has translated the word “consistency” as 訳語の一貫性, 訳文の整合性, and 文中の訳語を統一して (for “ensure consistency”). Not very consistent. Then again, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds — and the Felix J2E translator obviously has a big mind.

Incidentally, you can also do a search for translation concordance from the memory or glossary window: simply select some text, and press Ctrl + Alt + C (instead of Alt + C).

You can also get concordance from the various Felix interfaces. From Word, you would select the text in question, and either press Alt + M, C (Alt + M, then C), or from the Felix menu, select “Find Concordance.”

In Review mode, this command automatically switches to translation concordance.

There are also concordance commands from the PowerPoint and Tag Assist interfaces. There’s no concordance command in the Excel interface (yet!), because you can only select a cell or text box at a time, but you can still use concordance from the Felix memory/glossary window.

The Search Feature

Of course, the concordance feature is really just a shortcut to performing a search on the memory.

The search dialog gives you a lot more power, including regular expressions, as well as searching for the source and translation simultaneously. For example, you could use the search dialog to find all the times you translated “consistency” as 訳語の一貫性.

Nevertheless, the concordance feature is a handy way to quickly check how you’ve translated a given word/phrase in the past.

Felix has a concordance feature that allows you to see how you’ve translated a word or phrase in the past. It can be used from the Felix window, from the MS Word interface, from the MS PowerPoint interface, and from TagAssist (select Felix >> Concordance from the menu).

The results of concordance are then displayed in the memory window, which will look something like this:

(The matching word or phrase is highlighted.)

If you already had a memory lookup displayed in the memory window, you might want to show it again. To do so, select View >> Current View >> Match View from the menu (or press Alt + V, V, M).

You’ll then be back at the match view:

(You can go back to concordance view by selecting View >> Current View >> Search View.)

Note that the same functionality is available from the Glossary window as well.

Clicking the right arrow button (or pressing Alt + Right Arrow) will select the next segment for Felix to look up. In MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and TagAssist, this means the next sentence or line of text. For MS Excel, this means the next cell in the worksheet.

Sometimes you may want more fine-grained control of how segements are selected. This is quite simple: just select the text you want to look up, and click the “L” button (or press Alt + L). That will be the segment that Felix looks up. This works in MS Word, MS PowerPoint, and TagAssist.

It’s also fairly easy to extend your lookup segment. This is useful if you want to translate two or more segments/sentences as a single unit. From Word or PowerPoint, press Ctrl + Right Arrow to extend the lookup to the next segment. In TagAssist, the keyboard shortcut is Alt + X. (I plan on making the keyboard shortcuts more consistent in a future version.) Since the Excel interface is cell-based, it’s not possible to extend the lookup from Excel.

In Microsoft Word, you can also control several aspects of segmentation from the preferences. From the Felix menu, select Felix Preferences, then the Segmentation tab.

Here you can select the “stop” characters (which characters mark the end of a segment), whether to skip segments containing only numbers (useful when translating tables of figures), and whether to skip segments unless they contain Asian characters, or unless they don’t contain Asian characters. (The label says Japanese, but it works for Japanese/Chinese/Korean. This is a UI bug that will be fixed in the next minor release.)

The Felix manual has more information about segmentation for the MS Word and MS PowerPoint interfaces.