That whole MT project

OK, so the post-editing project I foolishly agreed to help with consisted of:

• OCR with Able2Extract
• MT with a mixture of (I think) Google Translate and Systran
• First-pass proofreading
• Second-pass post-editing

So let's talk about that. A far, far better workflow would have been:

• OCR with whatever
• Source-language spell checking and correction
• Identification of key phrases and terminology as cues for MT
• TRADOS or similar to avoid rework of existing sentences
• MT with whatever
• Target-language spell checking, feeding results back through MT until at least everything is English
• First-pass post-editing
• Second-pass proofreading

This workflow uses (or at least could use) the exact same tools as above, but without the introduction of errors at each step that make later steps impossible to manage. First-pass post-editing should be done by a bilingual translator, using specialized post-editing tools (not yet written) plus a normal translation memory (and of course the TM should also be used before passing text off to the MT stage). Systematic errors should be documented and recycled through the MT process.

One key insight: terminology research really starts to get a lot more important in this workflow than in normal CAT.

Another workflow with PDFs

I have a set of documents that consist of PDFs that have been highlighted and scanned. That is, each PDF consists of a set of documents. The text to be translated has been highlighted - with a physical marker, I mean - and the documents scanned. The PDFs were unfortunately not encoded as allowing comments (this is unfortunately a flag of the digital signature, not a flag in the PDF standard, and Adobe has not provided the key for digital signature from what I'm reading - thus there is no tool in the world that can flag a PDF to allow comments from Adobe Reader except for the full paid version of Adobe Acrobat.)

So my workflow is to go through the documents and use the snapshot tool to copy the highlighted bits. I put each bit into one column of a Word file, and the translation in the other column. It's nearly as good as comments in the PDF.

It seems to me that this would be a simple tool to implement: create the Word file, create the table, then every time I select something that's graphical, put it into the Word file for me and bring Word to the top. It's not a huge help, but it's the principle of the thing.