With CSOFT’s Annual World Summit fast approaching (it’s only a month away now, folks!) there’s a noticeable buzz around the office as everyone prepares. Over here at T for Translation, we’re excited to have the opportunity to hang out with so many of our global team members, including Hiroshi Matsumoto, our Lead Japanese Linguist, and this week’s CSOFT Story.

This week’s CSOFT Story comes to us from Sam Huang, CSOFT’s Chief Architect and Director of Technology Development. In this post, we find out about Sam’s passions as well as just how exactly he’s able to maintain the serene calm and positive attitude he’s known for. Read below to learn more!

With the sun shining out here as Beijing springs into warmer weather, we thought it appropriate to feature our lovely Chiara for this week’s CSOFT Story. With her ebullient personality and beaming smile brightening up the CSOFT office, Italian native Chiara Conte has much to say regarding the future of translation, personal growth, and keeping a sunny disposition as the pressure begins to mount. Read on for more!

Beginning next Monday, CSOFT will be attending the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America conference in Providence, Rhode Island. We’re excited to be attending this event and you should be too. Here’s why:

CMS/DITA is a gathering of some of the biggest names in content management, including Adobe and CIDM. For those unfamiliar with the term ‘content management,’ according to TermWiki, it is the “process of managing, organizing, storing, tracking ownership of, and distributing information.” Given today’s technological advances, when people refer to content management they generally mean online and digital content. CSOFT will be there to promote our multilingual content and terminology management services, as well as our localization and globalization capabilities.

Last week we introduced the first part of a two-part series on automatic terminology extraction, where translation tools expert and terminologist, Uwe Muegge, broke down terminology extraction and its role in the careful management of terminology. In this post, you’ll find suggestions regarding methods and tools for automating terminology extraction. Read on to see what tips Uwe has to give.

Welcome to Part One of a two-part series on automatic terminology extraction! Written by Uwe Muegge, CSOFT’s very own terminology management wizard, the five points in this post will supply readers with practical observations about and aspects of automatic terminology extraction. Don’t forget to stay tuned for next week’s Part Two, which will suggest different tools and methods to better manage terminology extraction.

It is probably safe to say that many, if not most, commercial translation and localization projects today are carried out without a comprehensive, project-specific, up-to-date glossary in place. I suspect that one of the primary reasons for this inefficient state of affairs is the fact that many participants involved in these projects are not familiar with the tools and processes that enable linguists to create monolingual and multilingual glossaries quickly and efficiently. Below are five valuable insights for linguists who wish to give automatic terminology extraction a/nother try.

Last month, CSOFT International launched TermWiki Widget, an innovative new tool that allows anyone who runs a blog or website to give their readers access to domain-specific terms and definitions by displaying relevant entries from TermWiki’s vast, multilingual database. Best of all: To implement this powerful and completely free glossary solution only takes six easy steps.

The TermWiki bee has been busily buzzing around this summer, working hard to provide users with new and improved additions to the world’s fastest growing social learning network. Below is a recap of what’s new at TermWiki:

1. TermWiki speaks with the pronunciation feature available in 20 languages

As a social learning network, one TermWiki’s long-terms goals is to provide users with access to a variety of learning tools. We understand that everyone has different approaches to learning and work hard to demonstrate our understanding of this. The pronunciation feature offers additional support to learners by allowing users to hear how a term is pronounce in twenty different languages, including major world languages, such as English, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, and Japanese.

2. The Wall is a one-stop shop that makes it easy for users to see all of the latest updates on TermWiki.

Recent visitors to TermWiki may have noticed the website’s welcome page was recently restructured to include the TermWiki Wall. The Wall allows visitors to see the latest updates to the site via a real-time feed, including term and translation contributions, new questions or answers to AnswerBea, the latest forum post, announcements, new additions to the community, etc.

Among translators, CAT (computer-assisted/aided translation) tools are a topic of interesting discussion and diverse perspectives—some swear by them while others find them to be more of a hassle than anything else. Regardless of personal opinion, CAT tools are an integral part of the translation industry as a whole. For localization buyers, it is important to understand how your translations are generated and what tools might be involved in this process. For localization providers, in order to maintain clear and open communication across functional groups, we need to be sure to be well-versed in all steps of the localization process, translation included.

The Basics of CAT Tools

Generally, CAT tools come with three basic functions: segmentation, translation memory, and a terminology database. By breaking text up into segments, CAT tools present text in a simple and easy-to-read manner. The phrase to be translated is usually sectioned off in a special box or highlighted, and the translator is able to insert the translated text into another identified box. Each source and target segment are paired together (identified as a translation unit) and saved in a database for future reuse (translation memory).

TermWiki’s extended functionality and intuitive user interface have been designed from the ground up to facilitate quick integration into a variety of different workflows (including casual browsing). That said, we would like to take this opportunity to make sure that you understand how you can personally make the most of TermWiki.

For this entry, we’ll focus on three different types of users (you can click on the links below to skip to each individual section):

• General Users

• Translators

• Corporations

And if you have any specific questions about how TermWiki.com might appeal to other types of users, please feel free and ask in the comments section below!