comparison – Felix Blog

Stand-alone versus embedded CAT tools: trade-offs

Computer assisted translation (CAT) tools need to provide an editor in which to perform the actual translation. There are basically two ways to accomplish this:

Providing a stand-alone editor
Providing a plug-in (add-in) to an existing editor

Both approaches are used by various CAT tools. Felix actually has both: Felix itself comes with interfaces for MS Office, and Tag Assist is a stand-alone editor for HTML.

Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses.

Providing a stand-alone editor

Stand-alone editors have two main advantages. Firstly, they’re more stable because they don’t have to worry about maintaining compatibility with multiple versions of the editor they’re plugging into. Secondly, since they can design the editor environment specifically for translation, they can make a smoother workflow.

The main weakness of the stand-alone approach is that you’ve got to re-implement all that word/document-processing functionality. Things like spell checking, word counts, and rich formatting take a lot of time to implement, and you would basically them get for free by piggy-backing on an existing editor.

Another weakness of the stand-alone approach is support for document formats. With MS Office in particular (pre-2007), a closed, binary format was used, making perfect conversion between the MS Office format and the stand-alone editor quite difficult. Even the Macintosh and Windows versions of MS Word have notorious interoperability issues.

Providing a plug-in

Using a plug-in approach with an existing editor also has two major advantages. The biggie is that you can leverage all the non-trivial work that has gone into developing that editor. Office is Microsoft’s killer app, and several lifetimes worth of programmer hours have gone into developing it.

Secondly, this approach allows you to use the same file formats as your client. When using a stand-alone editor, there’s generally some sort of filter process going on, first to import the Office document into the editor environment, and then to put the translation back into the original format. When you’re dealing with very simple documents this isn’t usually a problem, but things soon break down. This may be alleviated somewhat in the future, as Microsoft Office moves to its new, open, XML-based format. Time will tell; but even so, expect a few years at least until most consumers of translation move away from the older Office formats.

Another benefit of the integrated approach is user familiarity: if your users are used to MS Word, then having your tool integrated into MS Word should have a shallower learning curve than making them learn a new editor.

The biggest weakness of the integrated approach is that you’ve got to support a foreign interface, usually across multiple versions. This greatly multiplies the failure points of the software. One example of this in the case of Felix is PowerPoint 2007. The first Felix interface from PowerPoint was developed for PowerPoint 2000, and it worked fine with PowerPoint XP and 2003. But when PowerPoint 2007 was released, a change in the code caused PowerPoint to melt down and crash hard (requiring a reinstall) if the Felix add-in was installed. I scrambled and patched the interface as quickly as possible, but due to problems with my then-distributor, it took several months for the new version to be released, and during that time I had to advise users to not use Felix with PowerPoint 2007.

With the stand-alone approach, you don’t have these compatibility issues.

Conclusion

Choosing a stand-alone versus an integrated interface is about making trade-offs. With the stand-alone approach you get greater stability and customization at the expense of feature richness, while with the integrated approach you get a rich feature set, document compatibility, and user familiarity at the expense of greater fragility.

How Felix scores with five complaints about Trados

About Translation has an illuminating post about issues he has with Trados.

I’d like to examine his complaints, and note how Felix scores.

MS Word interface: fix the formatting problems

Since Felix doesn’t embed any tags or hidden text into your document, it generally does a very good job at not messing up the document’s formatting. There are still a few issues, though. For example, it doesn’t preserve font size information: translations will be inserted with the same font size as the current selection.

Note that you can retrieve translations with no formatting at all if you simply want to use the current style (e.g. “Heading 1”) — simply hold down the shift key while retrieving the translation (i.e. “Shift + Alt + Down Arrow” or “Shift + Alt + G”).

Concordance search: a translator should be able to search not only on the source language, but also on the target.

Felix can search for concordance for both the source and target languages. You can do it directly in the Felix window by selecting a string and pressing “Alt + C” (source) or “Ctrl + Alt + C” (translation), or you can do it from Word/PowerPoint/TagAssist via menu/keyboard shortcuts. Unfortunately there’s no concordance command from Excel, because you can’t search below the cell/text box level (yet!), but you can still use the Felix window when working from Excel.

And of course, Felix supports powerful traditional TM and glossary searching, including full support for regular expressions.

TagEditor: recommending the use of TagEditor for the translation of MS Word documents would be more acceptable if TagEditor were a richer text editor.

This issue is largely solved in Felix because there are interfaces for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, so you don’t have to use external programs very often.

I do have an external editor, Tag Assist, for HTML files, which suffers from many of the faults he mentions. It’s not reasonable to expect a CAT tool to have an editor that rivals Word/Open Office/etc., but we can do a lot better in this area. (By the way, just between us here’s a secret development item: within the next version or two, I’ll be adding functionality to translate HTML files from MS Word — the actual HTML code, not the junk that MS passes off as HTML.)

MultiTerm: a more user-friendly and less counterintuitive interface and process would help.

Glossary functionality is fully integrated into Felix, and I believe that it’s user friendly. There have, however, been requests for more powerful searching, sorting, and editing, and I’m working on those features now.

Artificial limitations to the freelance edition of Trados. Two translators who acquire two different freelance licenses should be able to run them on the same home network, without the need to purchase a more expensive version of the program.

I think users balk at these types of limitations because it feels like they’re being squeezed for money. Felix allows any number of copies to run on the network. It also allows any number of users to share memories over the network using Memory Serves. Even Wordfast, which is usually more liberal than Trados, puts a cap at 20 users (although that might be a technical limitation).

In fact, Felix has only one “artificial” limitation: the trial version is limited to 500 translation units (TUs) (but has no time limit). Everything else is unlimited, including languages, number of TMs, number of glossaries, etc.

Conclusion

I think Felix scores fairly well against the Trados pain points noted by About Translation, although it still has room for improvement.

If you’re a discontented Trados user, I’d recommend trying out the free trial version of Felix. I also promise to be much more responsive to any issues you find than some of the big names in the industry.