i-sako.com

If you use computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools in your work—particularly if you translate between English and Japanese—you owe it to yourself to take a look at Felix, a new application released last month by Okinawa-based Ginstrom IT Solutions (GITS). Although Felix is technically not new in the sense that it is the reincarnation of TransAssist, the developer’s vision for Felix and ambitious development roadmap leave me feeling comfortable thinking of Felix as a new development in the CAT market, even if the application itself has already been under continuous development for a number of years.

Because the friendly folks at GITS have already made a demo showing how Felix works in Microsoft Word, and because there is a trial version that you can download and try on your own for translations of up to 500 units, I will not attempt to show how it works here, but will instead focus on some of the things that I think make Felix unique.

Overwriting the Source Text

As far as I know, Felix is the only CAT tool that works by overwriting the source text as you translate. Although this approach is perhaps not as cautious as the ones used by tools like OmegaT and Deja Vu X (both of which import the source text into an external editor and then export your finished translation as a separate file, leaving the original document unchanged) or Wordfast and SDL Trados (both of which create what are commonly called “bilingual” or “uncleaned” files that include both the source and target text until the translation is finished and the document is “cleaned up"), it does have the advantage of being both very easy to work with and very fast. Once you have finished working through all of the source material, you’re done. There is no export step or cleanup process at the end of the job—which, as any translator who has used other tools can tell you, can be the most panic-inducing part of any CAT-based process if it does not work as expected. Felix cleverly sidesteps potential problems in this area by eliminating these steps entirely.

The only real caveat here is that you will want to work on a copy of the document you are translating, rather than the original document, just to make sure that you have a backup of the original text in the unlikely event that something goes wrong while you are working. This is a common sense rule that should be observed when using any CAT tool, however, so it does not stand out as something that you would need to pay special attention to when using Felix.

Unobtrusive Control Over Formatting

Many clients may express a strong preference for translations to reflect the same formatting as the original document, but actually formatting is every bit as translatable as the rest of the document. In technical documentation, for example, it is common for the commands in the menus of software applications to be enclosed in brackets in Japanese, but those same commands are typically written without the brackets in bold text when translated into English. Formatting changes like this are important to ensure that the translation reads naturally in the target language. Some CAT tools make the mistake of assuming that formatting present in the original must also be present in the translation (this is particularly true of the ones that import the source text into an external editor), but Felix avoids making any assumptions in this area and instead allows the translator to control the way the text is formatted as an integral part of its translation workflow.

Works in the Application in Question

SDL Trados and Wordfast both work directly in Microsoft Word, but when it comes to Excel or PowerPoint documents, the translator is required to either switch to a different application (Trados) or attempt to bring text from those types of documents into Word for translation and then export the finished product back to the original files (Wordfast). Neither of these approaches are as convenient or as intuitive as Felix’s approach of opening the file in question and doing the translation right in the application that created it.

In the case of HTML files, Felix also requires the use of a different application (the WYSIWYG TagAssist editor), but even in this case the translator is still working in an environment that makes it possible to edit the content of the document while translating, which is an important thing to be able to do in many cases.

Unlimited TMs/glossaries

The ability to draw from an unlimited number of translation memories and glossaries is not unique to Felix (OmegaT and Deja Vu X offer this as well), but as far as I know Felix is the only CAT tool that works directly in the application in question that offers this capability. Wordfast, although it comes close, is limited to three glossaries, one active TM, one background TM, and one “very large translation memory,” which is a kind of Web-based shared repository for translations that Wordfast users are able to draw from. Felix’s approach to managing TMs and glossaries is flexible, powerful, and best of all uncomplicated.

Felix is Scriptable

If you know what you are doing, most CAT tools can be scripted to some degree, but aside from OmegaT (the source code for which is available to anyone who is interested), Felix is probably the most amenable to user-provided extensions of its native capabilities. As far as I know, Felix is the only CAT tool that provides property and method specifications along with examples in VBA/Visual Basic and C++ that show you how to build on Felix’s functionality. Although many translators might never need to do this, it is nice that Felix is designed to help you do so if you choose to (it is also a refreshing acknowledgement that the translator’s skills may extend beyond simply the linguistic ones required for translation work). 

Complementary Tools from GITS

In addition to Felix and TagAssist, GITS has been busy producing a collection of complementary tools, including Count Anything, a word-counting utility that supports a variety of file types; Analyze Assist, a program that analyzes the documents you want to translate and compares their contents with the translations already stored in your memory files, making it possible to estimate how long the translation will take; and most recently Jamming2Felix, a utility for converting glossaries from the popular Jamming format into the Felix format. All of these things, when used together, make it easy to get started using Felix right away.

Conclusion

For a single translator working primarily on translations of Microsoft Office documents or HTML files in a Windows environment, Felix is an attractively priced, compellingly robust offering. The 1.0 version does not yet support sharing TMs and glossaries over a network, so it is not yet suitable for use by translation teams of the sort you might find in an agency or corporate environment, but the development roadmap suggests that this kind of capability is coming soon. Once this is in place, I would recommend Felix for anyone who needs a translation tool that is simple yet powerful, easy to learn and easy to use, and lets you work the way you want to, without getting in the way.