Following Up on Some Promises

In some previous blogs I noted that I would later post on some issue that I only mentioned in passing in the original post. Some of these I haven't seemed to get around to. So here are brief updates on the items I promised:

April 8, 2010 - "Language Swapping Site"

I signed up with lingomatch on the day of that post, but I haven't yet received a single e-mail in response to my listing at that site. It appears that the site's user base is still too limited to find someone to swap my German/English knowledge for their Spanish knowledge.

February 12, 2010 - "Wordfast Professional Training"

I installed and have used the new release of Wordfast Pro, but I can't detect much difference from the old version. One improvement I did notice, though: a setting now lets you determine which part of a word's glossary entry is displayed in the target language area when you pre-fill that segment (e.g., by using "copy source"). In the old version, both the source and target term for the word would display in the target language area, requiring rather annoying clean-up. I configured the new version to display only the target term, although for some reason that's still not the default.

December 23, 2009 - "ProZ Conference Vienna - Part II"

I signed up with Xing, but I have had few useful contacts so far besides connecting with translators I already knew from other venues. There is a job watch feature, though, where I set up the type of job, industry, etc., I'm interested in. I have received a few e-mails as a result. None have worked out so far, but at least they were specific enough to fit within my relatively narrow industry and specialization -- not bad for a non-translation-specific site.

I also downloaded a trial version of Anycount, which seems to work quite nicely, especially with PDFs. In addition to supporting a variety of file formats, it lets me add an entire list of files, so I don't have to open each of a set of Word files separately to get the count.

And I installed a trial version of Trados Studio, but haven't really had time to actually work with it. Since others have meanwhile written about both Trados and Wordfast, I won't bother with my two cents on this topic.

International Technical Translation Conference

Speaking of conferences: I will be heading to Lisbon, Portugal for the International Technical Translation Conference next week and will report back on it in early June.