Checking terminology

The Terminology accessory lets you find the glossary terms in the source text, and tells you possible mistranslation in the target text. Basically this accessory is used with a glossary corpus. You may use it with other corpora, for example, for quickly checking alternative translation of the whole or a part of the source text.

When you check the Auto Verification option, the accessory will automatically check the terms in the record as it is loaded. Or you can check the terms anytime by clicking Verify button. The Terminology accessory helps you maintain the quality of your translation. It is also a good tool when you review the translation for a client who offers a glossary different from others.

As you see in the clip, you can easily generate a glossary corpus from a list of terms created by a spreadsheet program. The original term list may have more than two language columns. Just like other major CAT tools, the imported glossary can be used with any combination of the languages.

Need accessories?

The corpus accessories extend capabilities of your corpus in various ways. In the next few posts, we are going to cover the basics of the corpus accessories.

To open an accessory view, click a numbered icon at the bottom of the corpus window. You may use F1-F8 key instead. You can install maximum 8 accessories at a time.

The following clip shows the EPWING Viewer accessory, which turns a corpus to EPWING/EB dictionary viewer. See how the accessory changes the corpus behavior.

Compatibility with Word documents

Recently, one of the AppleTrans fellows reported problem reading Microsoft Word documents with its proprietary attributes. As a matter of fact, AppleTrans depends on the AppKit framework for rendering RTF files. Unfortunately, the current RTF reader (along with the text layout system in the framework) does not support some of the features expressible in RTF, including header and footer.

There is a pair of methods in the NSAttributedString class that support reading/writing Microsoft Word documents (.doc files):

- (id)initWithDocFormat:(NSData *)data documentAttributes:(NSDictionary **)dict;
- (NSData *)docFormatFromRange:(NSRange)range documentAttributes:(NSDictionary *)dict;

According to the AppKit release note, however, "Cocoa's feature support for doc format reading and writing is very nearly equivalent to its support for RTF reading and writing." So, the above methods would only mean reading/writing the document directly from/to the Word file. Yet it might be a little time-saver though. Does anyone like to help writing a filter?