On November 26th, the 25th JTF Translation Festival in Tokyo took place – and we were of course there to present our new services, get inspired and attend panel discussions and presentations revealing new perspectives in the translation industry.

This year, the flagship of idioma was our revamped online estimator Stream that became a part of our new complex platform, idioma WORLD, and most importantly our brand-new NextDoc service.

WHY DO YOU NEED NextDoc

Basically, if the DTP document you need to translate is an update of an old version, with NextDoc you do not need to translate and perform DTP work of everything all over again. The service differs from standard translation memory tools by only using final DTP documents instead of a Translation Memory (TM).

NextDoc simply merges newly translated text segments into reused DTP text, and delivers a marked-up DTP version to you together with translated new text to complete your new, translated DTP document.

This way, you keep full control over the translation resources, and you pay only for translation of the new text plus a modest fee for text reuse. Best of all, you have all the resources in your hands all the time for maximum control.

As an added benefit, after a project is finished all newly translated text and changes can be saved separately, so you can add it to your existing translation memory, such as TMX, Xliff, or Trados TM.

The NextDoc solution is available online 24/7 so you can request free estimates as often as you want (even anonymously).Simply upload your updated and old DTP documents and we’ll give you a free estimate of how much text from the old version can be reused and how much of the new text needs translation.

See for yourself at

nextdoc.idioma.com

Lately, we introduced a little provocative thought that translation memory, in fact, is not the best or the most accurate means to use if you are about to update an old translated documents with new additions (such as catalogs, manuals, or guidelines - basically materials with a good share of repetitive and already translated text you have invested in before).

Why you should not rely on TM only

There are in fact two serious reasons, why in some situations you should reconsider using translation memory, mainly with updates of multilingual DTP files (e.g. InDesign or FrameMaker):

1. With translation memory,there is a high risk of re-using outdated text."How come, when I regularly invest into translation maintenance" you ask? The answer is because we are people and our workflow sometimes ignores consistency. A lot of last-minute corrections in the pre-publishing, or pre-print process are done only on the final DTP documents, as those are the ones that actually get published. So naturally, the latest DTP data are always the latest version of the document. And these corrections and amendments are often not inserted in the translation memories.
2. With translation memory,you need to rely on expensive software productsand all the maintenance of the text memories that comes with it. You cannot rely 100% that the text in your memories is identical with that in the actual documents and files you have in your hands. And that means you don't really have full control over your own translation resources.
   WHAT SHOULD YOU DO? Reuse the DTP data only, as that ensures reusable text will stay untouched, thus saving you time and money on DTP adjustments and proofreading.

HOW SHOULD YOU DO IT? Use NextDoc !

Latin is the official language of the Vatican City. It derives from the Indo-European branch, from which Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian originate. Although it was spoken in the Mediterranean area, it also influenced the Germanic languages and is currently used in many abbreviations (“e.g.” was an example derived from the Latin “exempli gratia” and “i.e.” is short for “id est”). Latin terminology is widely used, amongst others, in philosophy, medicine, biology, law and for official purposes. Interestingly, Latin is spoken daily by only around 800 people.

Rise and fall of Latin

Originally, Latin was spoken in the area around the ancient city of Rome – Latium. In the course of the rise of Rome, Latin spread to other parts of the kingdom, later the Roman Republic, and subsequently became the "official" administrative language of the entire Roman Empire. This is also the reason why Latin strongly influenced vernacular languages in the Empire, such as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and even English. In fact, so-called Romance languages are the direct successor of Vulgar Latin, the unwritten and non-standardized proto-language.

During the era of the Roman Republic, a standardized Classic Latin was introduced to replace the Old Latin and most of the written works used the standardized version.

Latin language survived also the fall of the Roman Empire and lived on in the form of Late Latin, later developed into Medieval Latin and Renaissance Latin. Until the 18th century, Modern Latin was the lingua franca of international communication and mainly science. Nowadays, Latin is preserved principally by the Catholic Church (while many clerics are still fluent in it) and science, as a vast number of scientific terminology in e.g. biology and medicine originate from Latin. Quod erat demonstrandum. :)

Alphabet

Compared to the English alphabet, the Latin language has 23 letters and lacks the letters J, U, and W, and it does not have a cursive script.

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z

a b c d e f g h i k l m n o p q r s t v x y z

Now that we have your attention, don't worry – your translation memories are valuable investments that definitely make your translation projects cheaper, faster and more accurate. But there are situations when translation memory can actually mess up a translation instead of making it easier – such as minor updates of DTP files updates where most translated text can be reused and where last-minute changes only exist the DTP files and not in the TM. Translation Memory therefore, becomes outdated and you lose control over the process. How to deal with this issue?

Reuse your existing, translated DTP files

Imagine the situation. You have a new original of a document similar to an old one that was already translated in the past. The problem is you don’t know what has changed. And you need the changes inserted in many other different languages.

Old solution would be a manual comparison of your new and old originals, marking deletions, changed text and new translation, then manual marking of all the other languages. Messy.

Or you could load the project in TM, e.g. Trados, with the risk that the translation memory is not up to date, and the drawback that all documents must be reformatted on DTP and rechecked. Risky.

New solution: Automatic comparison by idioma. You receive an estimate of preparing your other languages together with the amount of text changes and updates. If you approve, send us your old translated DTP files and we will reuse the text only from there – not from an outdated translation memory – for your new document, including placing markers where new and changed translated text must be inserted or text deleted. Smart.

You will find more updates on our website soon!