Forum: Fluency support
Topic: Translation Software - Fluency by Western Standard
Poster: Tapsa
Post title: About Fluency
Having used only the demo version, I can't say very much, but anyway...
There are some nice and some not so nice features in Fluency.
One of the best features for me is the preview pane that manages to display even a pseudo realtime preview of Indesign files. Although it shows Indesign files only formatted as separate paragraphs (indentation in first row) and nothing more, it is of great help when translating books - at least for me - as one can easily see how fluent the translation is. Being able to distinguish different paragraphs by eye is very important for fluent reading and translation. I was surprised to see how this small feature helped me to better my translation on the fly.
In e.g. Studio, MemoQ and Deja Vu there is no such a feature (I mean realtime pseudo preview of Indesign - or whatever files - not reatime preview of Word documents). Lack of this simple, yet very helpful feature in mainstream programs is very, very strange. I give Fluency a very big plus for this.
I'm seriously considering to buy Fluency for this feature, as a side by side tool for my other cat tools.
I also find the lookup/concordance search implementation very nice, as it reminds me very much of the old Trados (which was my first cat tool). Also on the plus side are the integrated web searches and to someone (not to me) automatic translation.
There are quirks, also.
Although Fluency "speaks" of different translation memories, there is only one. It is a single file from which you can select different translation units grouped by a filter. It may grow (eg. if you import all those free memories) to a very big file. Seriously? One file! The memory problems in computers/operating systems... to start with.
And the "hailed" termbase system (user and bult-in). Nice thought, but in my main langueage pair "en-fi", mostly stupid nonsense. In real life, if you really want to buld a term base with all the different meanigs of terms etc., Fluency does not add up.
It provides just one user termbase which is basically just a list of terms with a few additonal fields.
This is not of concern for some translators, but for me, I seem to be a different case.
For example, in en-fi, I might have a term "light" in English. Well, it can be at least a verb and a noun, and adverb, and it has different spellings (eg. for a verb: light, lighted, lighting and lights).
Add to this those tens of different meanings in my language (Finnish), and you'll end up in maybe ab a hundred of source-target pairs. Just for one term. Every one of these must be entered (if you truly want real matches), one by one in Fluency (even Deja Vu is better in this).
In Studio and MemoQ, this is of not much of concern, Studio being the most versatile cat tool I know, in this respect.
Fluency seems to think (also) with translation memory, that one source language sentence may have only one possible translation. Very stupid assumption (you can add different meaning by editing the translation memory, but beware of doing the remove duplicates function).
There are other aspects, but I guess my one cent was here for now.
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:42 GMT]
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:45 GMT]
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:49 GMT]
Topic: Translation Software - Fluency by Western Standard
Poster: Tapsa
Post title: About Fluency
Having used only the demo version, I can't say very much, but anyway...
There are some nice and some not so nice features in Fluency.
One of the best features for me is the preview pane that manages to display even a pseudo realtime preview of Indesign files. Although it shows Indesign files only formatted as separate paragraphs (indentation in first row) and nothing more, it is of great help when translating books - at least for me - as one can easily see how fluent the translation is. Being able to distinguish different paragraphs by eye is very important for fluent reading and translation. I was surprised to see how this small feature helped me to better my translation on the fly.
In e.g. Studio, MemoQ and Deja Vu there is no such a feature (I mean realtime pseudo preview of Indesign - or whatever files - not reatime preview of Word documents). Lack of this simple, yet very helpful feature in mainstream programs is very, very strange. I give Fluency a very big plus for this.
I'm seriously considering to buy Fluency for this feature, as a side by side tool for my other cat tools.
I also find the lookup/concordance search implementation very nice, as it reminds me very much of the old Trados (which was my first cat tool). Also on the plus side are the integrated web searches and to someone (not to me) automatic translation.
There are quirks, also.
Although Fluency "speaks" of different translation memories, there is only one. It is a single file from which you can select different translation units grouped by a filter. It may grow (eg. if you import all those free memories) to a very big file. Seriously? One file! The memory problems in computers/operating systems... to start with.
And the "hailed" termbase system (user and bult-in). Nice thought, but in my main langueage pair "en-fi", mostly stupid nonsense. In real life, if you really want to buld a term base with all the different meanigs of terms etc., Fluency does not add up.
It provides just one user termbase which is basically just a list of terms with a few additonal fields.
This is not of concern for some translators, but for me, I seem to be a different case.
For example, in en-fi, I might have a term "light" in English. Well, it can be at least a verb and a noun, and adverb, and it has different spellings (eg. for a verb: light, lighted, lighting and lights).
Add to this those tens of different meanings in my language (Finnish), and you'll end up in maybe ab a hundred of source-target pairs. Just for one term. Every one of these must be entered (if you truly want real matches), one by one in Fluency (even Deja Vu is better in this).
In Studio and MemoQ, this is of not much of concern, Studio being the most versatile cat tool I know, in this respect.
Fluency seems to think (also) with translation memory, that one source language sentence may have only one possible translation. Very stupid assumption (you can add different meaning by editing the translation memory, but beware of doing the remove duplicates function).
There are other aspects, but I guess my one cent was here for now.
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:42 GMT]
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:45 GMT]
[Edited at 2012-07-27 02:49 GMT]