Month: August 2010

What makes good translation editor?

We are in process of designing a brand new translation editor for Get Localization and would like to hear your opinion. In order to avoid broken keyboards, what is important for you when working with translation in feature wise?  We’ve identified some important use cases but definitely it would be great to hear feedback from you.

Translation memory

This is of course one of the most important features in translation editor nowadays. It’s a great help especially with longer texts. There’s lots of buzz and marketing around these solutions but do they meet your expectations? How they’ve worked for you? (We’ve currently our own TM in the works)

Related translations

This is feature we think is important. It’s quite close to translation memory but the idea is more like providing tips how to translate text based on previous translations in the project. This especially helps in case there’s multiple translators working on same project. Think it like automatically generated glossary.

Dictionary

Fast access to dictionary on translation page doesn’t harm, doesn’t it?

Glossary

It’s good to have access to project specific predefined glossary in translation editor.

Context information

Often programmers are lazy to add any valid context information. Mostly because it’s quite time consuming work. What kind of context information is most valuable?

Automatic spell checking and validation

How important this is for you?

Tag formatting in Editor

When working on software translation, you will always bump to tags like “%s”, “%d”, “{hello_word}” or similar. Changing these is not something translator should do as it will break the software. It should be possible to move these tags along the sentence but also prevent changing them. Do you prefer that these tags are “locked” so that editing is not even possible and moving happens with your mouse? Or do you prefer full editing and validating after translation is submitted?

Well I think there’s some of the features we like to incorporate to our new translation editor that will be part of our new professional (i.e. not crowdsourcing) offering. What do you think, is some important feature missing? Let us know in the comments!