TransBook
Many of the problems faced by translators today are not related to translation itself.
The purpose of this e-Book package is to provide some practical knowledge to help translators increase their productivity and meet the demands of direct customers.
Why buy this translation e-Book?
Should you buy this e-Book? Check out the relevant section.
+ Freelance translators...
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The mother lode of the translation business is to have your own direct customers. Better rates, more flexibility, more time to do the job and faster payments are a few of the advantages of dealing directly. Not a day goes by without someone asking the question:
How do you get direct customers?
Answers typically deal with the commercial side of things (mixing up in the right crowd, marketing…), but tend to overlook an important aspect of the problem: Once you have found these direct customers, can you do the job?
With direct customers, you have to provide a translation solution, not just a translation. Can you prepare your customer's documents? Do you know what to do if your customer wants to translate his database-driven website? Can you deal with XML files?
Usually an agency will take care of these “details” for you, providing files ready to be translated, and fixing them if things go haywire. When working with direct customers however, you have to be able to handle that aspect of translation, too.
Reading this book will provide you with basic (and not so basic) skills to handle various formats and show you how to increase your productivity through a better understanding of translation tools and file formats.
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+ Translation Agencies...
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As a translation agency, you constantly face the challenge of dealing with direct customers who seldom know much about the translation process. Your translators naturally expect you to handle all the technical issues, and you often have to fix whatever got messed-up in the course of the translation.
While you may have professional localization engineers to take care of that, how much time and money would you save if your project managers and in-house translators could handle basic file processing tasks instead of constantly calling on the "tech guys", or wasting hours of production time doing things manually?
This e-Book package offers practical knowledge with lots of examples and drills, allowing your staff to improve their productivity and understanding of basic localization procedures. Purchasing a few licenses could prove the best training investment you have ever made.
Note: Each person using the e-Book requires a license. I have not protected the files in any way to ensure you will get as much as possible out of the e-Books (you can print, copy, highlight, perform search operations, do the drills, etc.), so technically, there's nothing stopping you from distributing the e-Book to all of your staff. Ethically however, writing these e-Books took hundreds of hours and I think 1 copy per person is about fair.
If you are considering a large order (more than 20 licenses), contact me for a volume discount.
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If you are not a translator or an agency owner, you might still find this e-Book interesting. You can have a look at the contents below. However this e-Book was definitely written for the translation industry.
The current price is €15/license. Click here to make a purchase.
What's in the package?
This e-Book package contains the following:
+ Translation, from D to J
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You can download the Table of Contents here.
This e-Book package covers the basics of file management and key time-saving techniques. It discusses extensively Ms Word functions usually left aside in regular manuals (even the largest ones), with practical examples and ready-made code samples.
As you can see in the Table of Contents, a large section of "Translation, from D to J" is designed to present in simple terms key Web technologies such as HTML, XHTML, XML, PHP, JavaScript, AJAXs, Database driven Websites and the methods to deal with each.
The world is going global and nothing short of atomic warfare can stop that. As you well know, Internet is already an integral part of our everyday life, email is everywhere… and this is just the beginning.
As translators/agencies, we are an integral part of this evolution and I believe it is now imperative to have a good understanding of the basic technologies we use every day, knowingly or not.
By Sylvain Galibert
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+ Guide to Ms Word - advanced functions
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You can download the Table of Contents here.
This e-Book was originally written in French and used as a training guide for translators. I translated it in English (be nice, I am French) to make it available to a larger audience.
As most translators use Ms Word every day, a good command of Ms Word's advanced functions can significantly increase productivity.
Yves Champollion, a world-renowned Ms Word expert and translation consultant, explains key Ms Word functions and features of particular interest to translators, with real-life examples and drills.
Learn how to properly handle fields, bookmarks, footnotes, recover damaged Ms Word documents and perform advanced Find & Replace operations.
By Yves Champollion
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+ TagExtractor
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I know I ain't supposed to say that, but that part of the package is mostly a gimmick.
TagExtractor is a small software designed to extract automatically XML-like tags from one or several documents and create a list of all the tags used (without duplicates).
This is particularly useful to prepare XML files. (Explained in the e-Book). I plan to replace that part of the package with an online service in the next few months, but TagExtractor will still be available for those interested.
By Sylvain Galibert
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The current price is €15/license. Click here to make a purchase.
License and updates
Each license grants the right to download and read this e-Book to a single person. That person may create back-up copies or print this e-Book for his personal use only, but may not distribute it or make it accessible to others in any way. Free updates can be downloaded for a period of one year from the purchase date.
As you will quickly realize, both e-Books are in Ms Word format and therefore easy to copy and/or print. I could easily have turned them into protected (no-print/no-copy) e-Books using one of the usual e-Book formats, but decided not to because, well, it's nice to be able to copy or print the interesting bits, or to be able do drills directly in Ms Word.
However please bear in mind that writing 150 odd pages takes a fair bit of work (how much would you charge to translate it?) and while it's nice to share things with friends, most of them can afford to invest €15 to improve their productivity.
Why an e-Book?
Why not a traditional book? I too like good ol' paper books, but decided not to go that way for the following reasons:
Obviously, there is a matter of finances. Few editors (if any) specialize in translation books. The costs of printing, combined with a limited audience would drive the price up threefold, not to mention shipping costs, which could easily end up higher than the current cost of the book.
However, beyond the mere financial issue, an e-Book in Word format has several advantages over a hard copy:
- Updates
An e-Book can be updated at any time and downloaded over and over again. Can't be done with a hard copy.
- Storage / access
The whole e-Book package fits in less than 2 megs. You can easily store it on your hard drive and consult it in Word with a simple shortcut.
- Search functions
Can't remember where you read that trick about bookmarks? Ms Word can easily find it for you.
- Live drills
You can do the drills right in there and check the answers with a single click.
- Copy and paste
Find a bit of code you would like to reuse? Copy and paste.
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And of course, if you want to print a section for your personal use, you are free to do so.
The current price is €15/license. Click here to make a purchase.