Thursday, August 28, 2008

Missing piece

Oh well... It's been a quite while since I posted last time.

I happened to remember that there was a piece of information missing in the AppleTrans manual. I don't know how many people use Corpus Sharing, but there is an interesting feature in it.

In the Corpus Sharing view, when you click Publish button, AppleTrans will randomly select a port through which others connect to your corpora. And here is the trick. When you option click Publish button, AppleTrans always assign a fixed port number. And this port number is defined in the AppleTrans plist with "PrefsCorpusSharingNetServicePort" key.


So what's the deal? You now have an IP address and a fixed port for your host AppleTrans. If ever there is a way to make a connection to the host using this information, you may share your corpora over internet, out of the range that Bonjour covers. All right, let's discuss the rest next time.

posted by hiruneko at 11:04 PM 7 comments

Friday, June 15, 2007

Getting on the road

WWDC is wrapping up, and people are relaxing by now, well, for a while. For the hiruneko family, it is about time to pack up for a vacation to Europe. Sorry folks, I am not updating the blog for another couple of weeks. Zie u spoedig!

posted by hiruneko at 3:30 PM 3 comments

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Organizing windows

Many CAT tools offer almost de facto "all views fixed in one window" interface. Good or bad, AppleTrans is not the case. You can arrange separate tool windows anywhere in your screen.

Some people don't like this because they want all views to get aligned side by side, siting in the same place all the time. All right folks, here is another tip for you.

By hitting Control-Shift-F12 key, you can let AppleTrans remember the current positions of the key document and preview windows, and the frontmost two corpus windows. You can then arrange the windows to that positions any time by hitting Control-F12 key. Pretty handy, isn't it?

posted by hiruneko at 1:22 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Wordfast TM+X?

Recently I came across an interesting thread on a yahoo group, discussing alternative ways to convert Wordfast TM to TMX format. Needless to say, Wordfast should do the job better than anything else. Or does it not?

Of course, my preference is to use AppleTrans if you ask me (thanks to Steven for summarizing the alignment tool.) If you're really running out of time, here's a one-liner for you to make it quick in Terminal:

% (iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 | tr '\r' '\n' | sed "s/&/\&amp;/g;s/&amp;'/\&#x/g" | awk -Ft 'BEGIN{print"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<tmx version=\"1.4\">\n<header creationtool=\"unknown\" creationtoolversion=\"1\" datatype=\"unknown\" segtype=\"sentence\" adminlang=\"en\" srclang=\"en\" o-tmf=\"unknown\">\n</header>\n<body>"}{if(1<NR)print"<tu>\n<tuv xml:lang=\""$4"\"><seg>"$5"</seg></tuv>\n<tuv xml:lang=\""$6"\"><seg>"$7"</seg></tuv>\n</tu>"}END{print "</body>\n</tmx>"}') < YOURSOURCE.TXT > YOURTARGET.TMX

Actually if you have a little knowledge about Unix basic commands plus TMX specification, this is not really hard to come out. There's no need to hire the power of perl or other fancy scripting languages.

This one-liner doesn't preserve the attributes such as user id or creation date. That's not a big deal for AppleTrans user. I will leave those missing pieces for you to challenge.

For those who want it sugarcoated, I will post a droplet to the SIG, maybe on a good sunny weekend. Stay tuned.

posted by hiruneko at 1:04 AM 1 comments

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Let it watch your typo

By default, AppleTrans turns off continuous spell checking (i.e. "Check Spelling as You Type" option under Spelling menu) for all editor views. Although you can enable the function from the menu any time, it is apparently not pleasant for some people. If you are the one, here is how you can work it around.

In the Terminal, type the following command:

% defaults write com.apple.AppleTrans PrefsSetCheckSpellingAsYouType 1

This command is required only once for a new user. When you launch the application next time, the editor views always enable continuous spell checking when they open.

posted by hiruneko at 11:44 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tell me what you get

Have you noticed that AppleTrans corpus signals you by its arrow button when it finds two or more exact matches? It's so subtle that you can easily miss this tiny feature.


If you prefer more noisy indication, you may want to try the corpus accessory called "Voice Message". This extra plugin does nothing significant for translation, but just send you a message according to what search result you get:

• Only one exact match is found
• Good matches (better than or equal to "minimum score") are found
• Not-so-good matches (under "minimum score") are found
• More than one exact matches (conflicts) are found

Oh, by the way, the above clip makes noise. Don't disturb your neighbors.

posted by hiruneko at 12:38 AM 0 comments

Monday, February 19, 2007

Little touch of localization

No doubt many translators deal with software user interface on daily basis or just for fun. Here I'm going to show you the nib filter plugin, specifically for those who love to do some weekend localization of Cocoa applications.

Once you install this plugin to AppleTrans, you can directly open a nib file and get the strings out of it. Well that's about it. This plugin does not just make it simple, it demonstrates some potential of AppleTrans. Let's take a look at it.


I'd remind you that this is not something for professional localizers, who are encouraged to set up a localization environment with AppleGlot or alternative tools from 3rd parties.

posted by hiruneko at 1:33 AM 3 comments