Jost Zetzsche

Jost Zetsche's e-letter for translation professionals is an interesting insight into various recent developments.

Its 158th issue includes a note on translation quality: in the brave new world of machine translation and crowdsourcing (now "sharecropping"), quality has been replaced by the concept of usefulness.

Also mentioned is the latest batch of Google Input Method Editors (IME) for 14 languages (Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu). They can be downloaded for free.

"Once installed, they become one of the keyboard languages you have available in Windows (just like the different languages you can install via Windows that are accessible through the small language icon on your taskbar). The concept is that you have easy access to those languages by being able to use a Western-language keyboard, type the pronunciation of the word in the respective language, and the IME will give you a number of auto-complete suggestions of alike-sounding real words in that language with the language-specific characters you can choose from (very much like Windows IMEs for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean)."

And finally, some free alignment editors:
"The alignment tool YouAlign from the same company as the above-mentioned SynchroTerm has now been declared free for good (it was originally supposed to be for a limited time). It's a fantastic offer -- it uses the same engine as the commercial counterpart AlignFactory; it offers the same wide range of file formats, including PDF; and the only limitations are file size (1 MB) and that you can align only one file pair at a time (the latter limitation can easily be circumvented with file concatenators -- I use Twins File Merger)."

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