Okapi Rainbow (PC, Mac, Linux): Great Term Extractor, Future Alternative to XBench?

I already wrote about how Okapi Olifant was a fantastic TMX editor. Today, from the very same people, let me introduce Okapi Rainbow.

Rainbow is part of a large framework, mostly composed of command-line tools. Fortunately, this one offers a proper graphical user interface. Just download, extract and run it – no installation required. Better still, it works on PC, Mac and Linux out of the box, so no body is left out for once.

The software offers a lot of features, but I first found about it when I was looking for a good and free term extractor. These are surprisingly rare to come by. In general, you would either need to pay a rather expensive price or use online tools with limited features.

The great thing about Okapi Rainbow’s term extraction feature is that it does accept various input formats (.xliff, .doc, .xls, etc.) and offers all the basic features you would expect from such a tool: min/max number of occurrences, stop words and so on. If you use a good list of stop words – you can find them easily for any language with a search engine -, you will be able to quickly build glossaries for your large or collaborative projects.

The output format is a plain tab-delimited text file. You can very easily copy or open it in Excel and organize data from there. Simple, fast, efficient.

But the term extraction feature is just a small part of the software. I previously mentioned the software accepts various input formats, it can also output them as .tmx files, just as XBench.

Speaking of which, Rainbow also offers a QA module. Some of its options are still experimental, which is why I still rely on XBench, but it looks very promising. Since images can speak more than words, just see for yourself, these are the options available for just one tab of the QA module:

Currently, Okapi Rainbow can also perform mass search/replace tasks for different file formats, create translation kits, compare translations, pre-translate files, etc. It is worth spending a bit of time to explore the different features and single out the ones that can help you.

Okapi Rainbow is free, multi-platform, open source and still being developed. Give it a little extra time, and it may well become XBench’s successor for all your file conversion and QA tasks!