English to French IT Translator Blog

Getting Ready for LocJam, the Game Localization Contest!

LocJamWhile there are a few contests for translators on the web every now and then, these tend to be centered around literary translations, which are exciting and challenging projects, but outside the scope of my specialization.

Thus, it was with real pleasure that I first heard of the LocJam. The first edition was held last year, and I rue myself for having missed it.

It’s nice to see a competition around game localization, as it involves both technical knowledge and creativity. It will be a good opportunity to test my skills against other linguists, and I am really looking forward to the challenge.

Having worked in a game localization agency in the past and living abroad, the prize (a game translation agency studio tour and recording) are of limited interest to me, but the experience acquired translating a tricky game is priceless.

I guess a tight schedule is the thing that could stand on my way to LocJam… While I’m always happy to have a busy schedule, let’s hope I can find room for the contest! The competition will be held during the last week of February, which is normally a relatively calm period… fingers crossed. For now I will do what I can to get myself ready – getting familiar with the file formats and tools involved sounds like a good start. I will also review last year’s winning translations.

If you’re planning to give it a try as well, feel free to get in touch! I am always happy to hear from fellow game translators.

By Anthony Teixeira | February 5, 2015 | LocJAM |

On Holidays Until February 2nd (included)

Here is a quick note to let you know that I won’t be available for new translation projects until February 2nd included.

I will indeed take a break for a couple of days, as I have planned holidays in Tottori prefecture, in the cities of Yonago and Sakaiminato. While it may not be the most famous destination for tourists in Japan, the Tottori prefecture offers some beautiful sea sights, and is famous for its sand dunes.

I will be staying at a traditional onsen, which offers a direct view on the sea. After a busy start of the year, it will probably be a refreshing experience – especially if snowfalls expected materialize!

By Anthony Teixeira | January 30, 2015 | Personal |

TMX Editor for Updating/Cleaning Translation Memories

Translation memories grow quickly with time and can get quite messy. If you want to do a bit of cleaning in your TM files, your options are limited. Some CAT tools, such as Trados Studio, allow you to work directly on Translation Memory files, but these interfaces tend to be heavy and not as user-friendly as you would like them to be.

Which software shall I use to edit TMX files, then?

My personal recommendation goes to Olifant, which is pretty easy to use: source on the left, target on the right. Editing is simple and you have access to powerful options to import/export files, search specific strings using advanced filters, etc. You can also easily split or join strings, modify the language codes for your TM and modify attributes.

In short, it lets you to pretty much anything with your TMX files, which you can them easily import back in your CAT tool.

olifant

The interface itself is quite light and reactive, which is a big advantage over Trados Studio’s TM Editor windows.

To top it all, Olifant is absolutely free! You have no excuse for not giving it a try.

Any alternatives?

If the interface of Olifant scares you a bit, you may give a try to another TMX editor that is now free: Heartsome TMX Editor 8. You can see a short introduction video, and you will find a lot of practical articles on the download link. Besides TMX editing features, Heartsome TXM Editor 8 offers a number of QA checking options (Target identical to source, numerical mismatch, etc.)

While I don’t have much experience using it, it should get the work done for your TM editing tasks, and may even serve as a free QA tool for your projects.

Closing lines

So which TMX editor should you be using? I think both software are pretty complementary. Olifant gives you some really powerful options to search strings, but regular expressions and the like can be tricky to apply well. Heartsome TXM Editor 8 is a bit more straightforward, and should do just what you want it to in most cases.

Since they’re both free, my best advice is to give them both a try, and then decide on which of them fits your needs best.

 

By Anthony Teixeira | January 22, 2015 | Tips, Translation memory (TM) |

Fix: (40007): Error reading TTX file: Expected end of tag ‘Raw’

This is one of the really annoying issues that happen every once in a while, when you’re working on .ttx files in SDL Trados Studio 2011 or 2014: everything goes well in Studio, until you generate the target .ttx and realize it doesn’t open in TagEditor, with the following error message: “(40007): Error reading TTX file: Expected end of tag ‘Raw’“.

According to SDL Support, the typical causes are the following:

– the TTX was opened using smart tag pairing in Studio

– the TTX was unsegmented and Studio finished it off with Studio segmentation and tagging

Possible solutions

Here, I will assume you don’t have access to the source file used to create the .ttx – why would one translate a .ttx in Studio rather than the source file itself otherwise?

1. In the first case, you can try to reopen and, using your TM, retranslate the original .ttx after deactivating the smart tag pairing option of Trados Studio. To do that: Go to Options –  File Types – TRADOStag – Compatibility, and check the first option, which is “Treat all inline tags as placeholders (disable smart tag pairing)” in English.

2. If that doesn’t do the trick, it is possible that the .ttx file you worked on wasn’t segmented. If you have Tag Editor, open the original .ttx with any TM for your language pair and save it – as simple as that, you don’t need to touch anything there. Then you can recreate your project with the newly saved file, translate it using your Trados Studio TM and generate the target .ttx correctly.

If you don’t have Tag Editor, you can ask the person who created the .ttx file to perform this step for you. In case that’s not an option either and there are no confidentiality issues involved, feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help 🙂

Conclusion

Hopefully one of these will work. My opinion is that Trados should have an option to segment files the same way Tag Editor used to. When I asked SDL about the issue, their reply was that my “lazy” (that’s the very word they used) clients should do the segmenting themselves and just move on. Typical SDL kindness…

By Anthony Teixeira | January 15, 2015 | Trados |

Why Does Game Localization Take So Long?

Why Does Game Localization Take So LongIt’s common to see gamers complaining about the time difference between game releases in different territories – sometimes up to several months. Even if game localization takes much less time than it used to, there are still cases of long delays between local releases.

It is important to understand the game localization process as a whole. Even in this era of dematerialized content (which means less time spent on packaging, manufacturing, etc.), there is not much you can do to speed up the translation/QA testing stages.

Does game translation really take that long?

I have worked on RPGs containing several million source words. However, even an experienced translator won’t be able to handle much more than 3,000 words a day. In some cases, a single translator would need a few years to translate a large RPG on adventure game!

Of course, splitting the work between translators is an obvious solution to reduce that time, but it also creates issues that are time-consuming in themselves: translators have different writing styles, so consistency issues may arise, making the proofreading and linguistic testing process longer.

In all cases, testing takes an awful lot of time: to see the translated strings in context, even with an automated script, you will need to sit in front of a screen for hours and hours. When mistakes are found, developers have to implement the fixes and send the game back to testing, and there is no shortcut here – you can’t have unlimited developers doing this work.

With a well-optimized localization process, developers can get their games ready for new markets in a reasonable time. But for text-rich games, there aren’t too many workarounds, especially if you decide to localize the game after its initial release.

Isn’t there anything we can do about it?

In order to release a game worldwide at the same time, organization is key: you would need to prepare the game texts during the design stage and get the localization team on board as early as possible: ideally translation should start before programming does! Linguistic testing should then be undergone at the same time as functional testing.

The problem, currently, is that localization is overlooked by most developers: in general, texts are prepared in the late stages of developments, when it’s already too late. The best way to go about this is to educate developers about game localization and have them plan localization as early as possible.

By Anthony Teixeira | January 9, 2015 | Game localization |

Japanese to French Translation Services Page Up

I am currently working on a complete overhaul of my service pages, and I am proud to announce that a newcomer is here: check out my new page for Japanese to French translation services.

I have now been in Japan for over 6 years. While I have sufficient knowledge of Japanese, being fluent in a language doesn’t necessarily mean you can translate it well. This is why I have been working extremely hard over the past couple of years to be comfortable enough to switch freely between Japanese and French.

I can now over this service with the same level of quality as for English to French, and of course my specialization fields remain strictly the same: IT, software, hardware, video games, applications and the like.

By Anthony Teixeira | January 7, 2015 | Uncategorized |

Dear SDL, make Trados Studio 2014 work with .ttx files

I guess it’s a little late for Christmas wishlists, but here’s one big request I have for the programmers of SDL: please make .ttx files work with Trados Studio 2014 correctly.

I know that, officially, Trados supports ttx files. It can open pretty much any of them and let you work as you normally would. The big problem is that, when you generate target .ttx files (why would you work with them in the first place otherwise?), they will often be corrupted and just won’t open in TagEditor.

Having looked at the source code of such files, it seems the problem is related to XML tags not being closed correctly. If you try to import this files back in a Studio TM, you will get a more accurate error message.

Some say you could just export your TM from Studio and translate the .ttx file directly with it, but it won’t work either, as Studio and TagEditor segment these files and treat their tags differently.

While I understand these two versions of Trados work differently, I find it a bit ridiculous that Studio 2014 can’t generate files in a format it previously perfectly managed! It doesn’t work like Word when you are editing .docx files, nor does it work like Illustrator when you are editing .ai files – yet it can produce target files without any issue for these two formats. So why couldn’t it produce openable files for its OWN format? That goes beyond me.

So please, my developer friends of SDL, if you could take just a moment to fix this issues, you will make me the happiest translator for 2015. I swear, you can even put back Java for Multiterm, I will forgive you.

 

By Anthony Teixeira | January 4, 2015 | Trados |

Happy New Year and Front Page Update!

In Japan, it is a custom to clean our homes inside out to welcome the New Year. This year I decided to extend this to my website and renew its front page! The information is now more clear and better organized, which I hope will help you understand my translation services and why I am the partner of choice for IT and software localization projects.

This is the first update in a long time, but there are many waiting in the pipelines: reviews, practical articles and pieces of opinion are already in the writing.

I am very motivated for the year ahead and I hope you too. Let’s make it a good one!

By Anthony Teixeira | January 4, 2015 | Uncategorized |

Spring News

I haven’t been posting in a while – but I’m still here! I hope you are enjoying the early days of spring, cherry trees are already blooming here.

I’ve been – again – quite busy in this early spring period. I worked on various projects this month again: user manuals for projectors, video surveillance systems, printers, CAD software, medical devices… I also entered the local driving school, and learning traffic rules in a language that you’re also learning is quite an exciting challenge.

I also had, once again, my share of troubles with Trados. I guess it will a be good inspiration for a new series of Trados troubleshooting articles!

By Anthony Teixeira | March 31, 2014 | Uncategorized |

Game Localization and Device Manual Translation Projects Completed

February is usually a rather slow and calm month for my translation business, but this year I was actually kept busy with very interesting projects.

One of them was the localization of a game/app for iPhone and Android devices, a very famous franchise. I also worked on a vast employees’ manual related to IT security, which was actually kind of entertaining: well written source and a text that was pleasant to read. Finally, I translated the manual of a measurement device for a very large Japanese manufacturer. Japanese to French projects have been rare and few between lately, so it was a pleasure to get a project in that language pair.

 

By Anthony Teixeira | February 28, 2014 | Uncategorized |