Another good reason for TM tools...
Mar. 8th, 2010 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpA client sent me a small Excel file for translation, and I almost decided to just work inside of Excel instead of opening Word to use Wordfast. That very likely would have been a mistake.
Wordfast comes with an add-in that cleverly dives into Excel and PowerPoint files, extracts segments, lets you work on them in Word, and then puts 'em back. It's not perfect - going back to change something is a pain - but it's better than working in the native Excel or PowerPoint environments.
It also finds stuff that is easily overlooked.
There were several fields in the spreadsheet that displayed, unsurprisingly, a single line of text, both within the spreadsheet area and in the editing field at the top of the screen. What I would have almost certainly failed to notice is an up-and-down arrow device that appears at the right-hand side of the editing field if the cell has more than one line of text.
Considering the way it works, Wordfast just dove in, got out all 6 lines of text, and put them in front of my face. I translated them and it put them back.
Technically, I might've lucked out if I had sent back the file as-is at that point, but end clients find it way too easy to blame the translator for sins committed before the translator entered the picture, so during the despeckling process, I reformatted all the cells to display all the text they could.
It's Monday, and I am very nearly bereft of ideas for this week's LJ Idol essay. There is also the runoff in which to vote.
Did I mention it snowed last night?
Cheers...
Wordfast comes with an add-in that cleverly dives into Excel and PowerPoint files, extracts segments, lets you work on them in Word, and then puts 'em back. It's not perfect - going back to change something is a pain - but it's better than working in the native Excel or PowerPoint environments.
It also finds stuff that is easily overlooked.
There were several fields in the spreadsheet that displayed, unsurprisingly, a single line of text, both within the spreadsheet area and in the editing field at the top of the screen. What I would have almost certainly failed to notice is an up-and-down arrow device that appears at the right-hand side of the editing field if the cell has more than one line of text.
Considering the way it works, Wordfast just dove in, got out all 6 lines of text, and put them in front of my face. I translated them and it put them back.
Technically, I might've lucked out if I had sent back the file as-is at that point, but end clients find it way too easy to blame the translator for sins committed before the translator entered the picture, so during the despeckling process, I reformatted all the cells to display all the text they could.
It's Monday, and I am very nearly bereft of ideas for this week's LJ Idol essay. There is also the runoff in which to vote.
Did I mention it snowed last night?
Cheers...
