TransBook

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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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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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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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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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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