| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | layout of translation window: horizontal vs vertical Thread poster: heikeb
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| time-consuming to learn.. | Sep 16, 2007 |
oh yes, it is! I also translate at times, and because I want to know what other tools do I also try to use different tools. How many times did I swear for not finding a function that is very evident for me... I especially hated it when I did not find the format copying intuitive because that is used most often.
Thanks, Heike, for your feedback. We learn a lot from user comments. (Just a bit of propaganda: you are also... See more oh yes, it is! I also translate at times, and because I want to know what other tools do I also try to use different tools. How many times did I swear for not finding a function that is very evident for me... I especially hated it when I did not find the format copying intuitive because that is used most often.
Thanks, Heike, for your feedback. We learn a lot from user comments. (Just a bit of propaganda: you are also very welcome to join the MemoQ2 Yahoo! group which is a group where people get involved in the development of MemoQ's concepts and ideas and can contribute with their ideas.) And file formats are not only the necessary evil for translators, they are also the necessary evil for tool designers. We so much enjoy the 'how-to-make-the-life-of-a-translator-easier', the 'how-to-exploit-the-text-more', the 'how-to-make-the-workflow-better' and similar issues, and we so much hate when Adobe or Microsoft or some other important giant comes up with a new file format that we ought to support and prevents us from working on the productivity boosters.
István ▲ Collapse
| | | | | 2-Column layout | Sep 16, 2007 |
In my opinion, the 2-column layout reduces our productivity and is totally "unergonomic".
It means waste of time rotating the neck and the eyes, with constant sight refocusing.
With the target below the source, like in TagEditor, there's far less strain on the neck and eyes. It is quite noticeable after a few hours of work.
I find the 2-column layout so bad that because of it I'm going to stop supplying one of my clients that is now requiring the use of Idiom's Desktop Workbenc... See more In my opinion, the 2-column layout reduces our productivity and is totally "unergonomic".
It means waste of time rotating the neck and the eyes, with constant sight refocusing.
With the target below the source, like in TagEditor, there's far less strain on the neck and eyes. It is quite noticeable after a few hours of work.
I find the 2-column layout so bad that because of it I'm going to stop supplying one of my clients that is now requiring the use of Idiom's Desktop Workbench, which uses the 2-column layout.
According to my calculations, the 2-column layout makes my productivity drop about 30%.
Pedro ▲ Collapse
| | | | heikeb 
English to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | productivity | Sep 17, 2007 |
Pedro Andrade wrote:
I find the 2-column layout so bad that because of it I'm going to stop supplying one of my clients that is now requiring the use of Idiom's Desktop Workbench, which uses the 2-column layout.
According to my calculations, the 2-column layout makes my productivity drop about 30%.
Since I haven't used this layout long enough I can't be sure about my productivity drop, but I'm pretty sure it would be considerable.
This probably depends to some extent also on the actual working method.
I usually start typing the translation while I'm still reading the source sentence and keep "looking ahead" in the source text while "catching up" with the translation. For this approach, it's a must to have not only a horizontal layout but also the alternation of Source and Target segments as in Trados. There's no interruption between reading the source, typing in the translation, opening the next segment and so on (ideally, there are of course instances where I need to look up something etc.)
It's hard for me to imagine any other layout - and any other method - that would offer a comparable work "flow" since to me, moving between different columns, windows etc. is always some kind of interruption of the thought process.
When discussing CAT tools, translators sometimes complain about that when using a CAT tool, the segmentation into translation units results in their not "seeing" the text as a whole, but only in fragments. I've never felt this way, but maybe this experience is related to the particular tool/layout/approach they use.
| | | | Heinrich Pesch
Finland
Local time: 02:29
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
+ ...
| I do not agree | Sep 18, 2007 |
Pedro Andrade wrote:
In my opinion, the 2-column layout reduces our productivity and is totally "unergonomic".
It means waste of time rotating the neck and the eyes, with constant sight refocusing.
With the target below the source, like in TagEditor, there's far less strain on the neck and eyes. It is quite noticeable after a few hours of work.
Pedro
In the SDLX editor you have initially both columns in the source language and just start to edit the right column = change it to the source language. All tags are already there, but in TE or the like most of the time you have to use Get next placeable -function or you copy the source into the target, which is quite annoying.
Most of the time you do not look at the left column at all.
At least my eyes are fixed on the cell im editing, and for comparison you move only your eyes from left to right and vice versa. No need to move your neck.
My current project seemed big at first. I had planned to use three days for it, but yesterday afternoon, still at the first day, I noticed I rather slow down a bit and leave something for today (SDLX).
But this discussion about tags and changing their order is very interesting.
By the way, when I had problems with TE on a big inx-file, I looked at the file in a text editor and noticed, that the actual text is all at the bottom of the file. It should be possible to translate this without any tool at all, in a plain text editor.
Regards
Heinrich
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| It's a question of what you're used to | Sep 18, 2007 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
Tools that use side-by-side method with no option to change to above-below, are Heartsome's XLIFF tool, Sun's XLIFF tool, Idiom, Cafetran, EvilTrans, Isometry, spreadsheet-like tools like Taipan and LocStudio, DVX, PoEdit, Pootling, etc. Kindly correct me if I'm wrong.
In an ideal world I would charge three or five times as much if I'm forced to use such a tool. As it happens, I usually just hack it so that I can use Wordfast instead.
Déjà Vu DVX can be configured so that the source and target of the current segment are above and below similar to Wordfast and Trados. The other segments are displayed in the pane above, on the left and right. One of advantages with DVX is that you can view several files at once, sort segments alphabetically or filter on a term or expression.
I guess most people would initially take much longer to translate using an unfamiliar tool and having made the effort to learn one, are unwilling to change (or even look elsewhere) and above all hate to be forced. I think it would be fair to say, however, that you would be hard put to beat a DVX user in a race if you had a Wordfast project containing several Powerpoint and Excel files.
BR,
David
| | | | | 2-column layout | Sep 18, 2007 |
Pedro Andrade wrote:
In my opinion, the 2-column layout reduces our productivity and is totally "unergonomic".
It means waste of time rotating the neck and the eyes, with constant sight refocusing.
I would say that's going a bit far. I don't think too much neck rotating is required to read a 2-column format (unless your screen is a meter wide!).
And don't forget that, according to the statistics, the majority of translators still translate without using any CAT tool at all, often with a printout of the source propped up by the side of the screen. In that case, you will have a far degree of neck swivelling and eye refocusing. The up/down layout is fairly recent and only came in with Trados. Generations of translators have worked on side by side documents so it seems strange to argue that this is an "unnatural" layout.
With the target below the source, like in TagEditor, there's far less strain on the neck and eyes. It is quite noticeable after a few hours of work.
I find TagEditor's total lack of any productivity features and poor design put a strain on my nerves after a couple of minutes.
According to my calculations, the 2-column layout makes my productivity drop about 30%.
You probably haven't seen the productivity gains to be had by being able to view, sort and filter several files in different files as if they were one big file.
David
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I want to/must be able to see all internal and external tags as they often can provide info as to context and formatting. Eg. if I translate an Excel file, it can be very useful to be able to see which TUs belong to the same cell, or whether a TU is a bulleted item or a new heading in Word.
It's true that you do lose some context but it's easy enough to keep the Excel file open and toggle backwards and forwards when you need such cues. The two views are complementary. One provides a narrow view of the way the sentence looks in relation to the sentences immediately around it while the other provides a wider view of the text as a whole. MemoQ shortly plans to add alphabetic sorting and filtering so you'll be able to view several parts of one or more files simultaneously or home in on a particular term or expression to see how it is used throughout the project.
MemoQ displays all remaining internal tags ("uninterpreted tags") as sequential numbers. Therefore, I have no idea what these tags are actually doing. For example, bookmark tags are reprented as {1}. Text that is presented in a different color is shown in black with {1} {2} around it. How am I supposed to know whether I need those tags and where they are supposed to go in the target? Is there a way to make them visible?
In general, MemoQ has very few tags so for all practice purposes, such problems will not really arise. All usual internal formatting like bold, underline and italic are shown in Wysiwyg. Colour or size changes in the middle of a sentence must surely be fairly rare. If whole sentences are in different colours, you won't be confronted with any tags. Bookmarks often relate to the whole sentence so the tag can be placed anywhere.
I also couldn't export this only paritally translated project since it gave me a large number of errors: Uninterpreted formatting tags do not match.
You can populate all empty rows automatically and so export a partially finished translation.
Also, while translating, I actually missed partial matches displayed in the right-most area. For each segment, I would have to make the conscious effort to check at the right to see whether there's a match or not. There is no indication in the actual source/target area.
It might be best for the partial match with the best fit to be inserted automatically. It's true you may miss them if you're not used to the product. I already suggested that to the architects.
BR,
David
[Edited at 2007-09-18 16:11]
| | | | | Same in my case | Jun 15, 2009 |
Heike Behl, Ph.D. wrote:
Pedro Andrade wrote:
I find the 2-column layout so bad that because of it I'm going to stop supplying one of my clients that is now requiring the use of Idiom's Desktop Workbench, which uses the 2-column layout.
According to my calculations, the 2-column layout makes my productivity drop about 30%.
Since I haven't used this layout long enough I can't be sure about my productivity drop, but I'm pretty sure it would be considerable.
Same in my case. Any change of window and grabbing the mouse for anything would be a dramatic drop in my productivity. I also feel that, for the kinds of files I handle (all with tons of tags, non-Office documents) the top-bottom, segment-by-segment layout tradicional in Trados is far more clearer than the left-right layout.
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