wordfast and OpenOffice Thread poster: Simos Tamoglou
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I would like to ask something : does Wordfast (any edition of it) works with OpenOffice or is ONLY for Ms Office??
Thank you!
Simos
| | | | Sonja Tomaskovic (X) 
Germany
Local time: 19:16
English to German
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Wordfast works only on MS Word.
Regards,
Sonja
| | | | Heinrich Pesch
Finland
Local time: 20:16
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
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| There's OmegaT | Oct 9, 2005 |
...but its segmentation rules are not compatable with other CATs. Myself I didn't manage to get OT work on Windows 2000, but perhaps they have fixed some bugs by now.
Wordfast will not work, because it uses Visual Basic code.
Regards
Heinrich
| | | | Marc P (X)
Local time: 19:16
German to English
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| wordfast and OpenOffice | Oct 9, 2005 |
Heinrich Pesch wrote:
...but its segmentation rules are not compatable with other CATs. Myself I didn't manage to get OT work on Windows 2000, but perhaps they have fixed some bugs by now.
Wordfast will not work, because it uses Visual Basic code.
The possibility of porting WF to OpenOffice.org's (OOo's) Star Basic code has been considered by the WF developers. If I'm not mistaken, the main obstacle is that the Star Basic code would be much slower.
There is an inline CAT tool for OOo: OOXlate. Installing OOXlate is not a job for technophobes, though, and development has been hampered by differences in the pace of development of the various third-party utilities which it relies on.
The combination of OmegaT and OOo is not directly comparable with Wordfast and Word. OmegaT is simply a standalone application which supports the OOo format, among others. Wordfast uses Word as its user interface and can only be used in conjunction with Word; by contrast, OmegaT has its own user interface, and OOo is not required for its use. OmegaT is no different to Deja Vu or Heartsome in this respect, two other CAT tools which also support the OOo format but do not use it. OmegaT is not therefore a "CAT tool for OOo" any more than Deja Vu is.
Many standalone CAT tools require MS Word files to be converted to some other format, usually RTF, for processing. Heartsome offers a choice of RTF or OOo for this purpose, and it has been interesting to see on the Heartsome support list that some users prefer to use the OOo format over RTF purely for conversion purposes.
As far as the segmenting rules are concerned, most CAT tools use unique segmenting rules. An emerging standard for segmenting rules, SRX, does exist but as far as I know is not yet supported by any CAT tool, and certainly not by the majority of them. In any case, the ideal segmenting rules differ according to language and also according to the personal choice of the user, so some "incompatibility" is almost inevitable. In fact, the very idea that source and target languages must have the same number of sentences is indicative of ignorance about translation. OmegaT offers both sentence-level and paragraph-level segmentation, and also has a user configuration feature, by which the user can for example define the punctuation marks at which OmegaT is to segment and to allow for recognition of abbreviations followed by a period.
If OmegaT fails to run on a Windows 2000 installation, the most likely reason is that no suitable version of Java has been installed. OmegaT has witnessed considerable development over recent months, and the developers have taken advantage of the features offered by more up-to-date versions of Java, which should also run on Windows 2000 without any problems.
Marc
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 19:16
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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| No, but why do you ask? | Oct 9, 2005 |
Simos Tamoglou wrote:
I would like to ask something: does Wordfast work with OpenOffice or is ONLY for MS Office?
Wordfast work only on MS Office. Why do you ask? Is it because you have OOo files and you want to use Wordfast to translate them? Or is it because you want to use Wordfast but you don't want to use MS Office?
I can think of at least two ways of translating OOo files with Wordfast. The first is to convert the OOo file to an MS Office file, but this is not a preferred method because there is bound to be some information loss between the two conversions.
The second way is to extract the text of the OOo file to a text file, and then translate that file in MS Word + Wordfast, and then recreate the OOo file using the translated text file. You can either extract the content.xml file from the OOo file (which is zipped), tag it using PlusTools or Tortoise Tagger (you must write your own filter, though), and translate the tagged file, and then rezip the OOo file together, or you can extract the text as a unilingual TMX memory using OmegaT 1.3.5 (doesn't work as well with the latest version), translate the resultant TMX file as a tagged file in MS Word, and rerun OmegaT on the original OOo file using the "translated" TMX memory. This second way is lossless but quite a hassle to implement if you're doing it for the first time.
| | | | Simos Tamoglou
Greece
Local time: 20:16
Italian to Greek
TOPIC STARTER
[quote]Samuel Murray wrote:
Simos Tamoglou wrote:
I would like to ask something: does Wordfast work with OpenOffice or is ONLY for MS Office?
Wordfast work only on MS Office. Why do you ask? Is it because you have OOo files and you want to use Wordfast to translate them? Or is it because you want to use Wordfast but you don't want to use MS Office?
Dear Samuel,
I'm only asking because I'm making some tests to see if I can work with a full linux system (or at least with a system based on windows xp but without MsOffice!)
I do not want to depend for the rest of my life from Msoft and the related expensive products (s/w based on windows)
Best Regards
Simos
ps: many- many thanks to all for their answers!
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 19:16
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Translators without MS Office | Oct 11, 2005 |
Simos Tamoglou wrote:
I'm only asking because I'm making some tests to see if I can work with a full Linux system, or at least with a system based on Windows XP but without MS Office.
Why would you want to break away from MS Office? Why not simply use an old version of MS Office for many years until you realise that it's time to to upgrade for the sake of compatibility? I'm using Windows 95 with Word 97 at the office, with Wordfast 5x, and it works just fine for me. It's getting to the point where we'll have to upgrade to at least Windows 2000 (with Word 2000 at least), because the most recent versions of OpenOffice no longer work with Windows 95, and Microsoft has promised WordML patches for Word 2000+ only. Even so, we'd be using software that's almost ten years old, without too many hitches.
I do not want to depend for the rest of my life from Microsoft and the related expensive products (software based on Windows).
As translators we'll always be dependent on the currently used "industry standard" formats. If those formats are only supported by expensive products, then we'll simply have to buy them. We are business people, and businesses use tools that cost money.
If you limit yourself to the type of client who doesn't expect you to deliver a complex document in a 99% compliant fancy format, you can get away with using any text editor and a combination of several tools (including CAT tools like OmegaT). Not all clients expect translators to deliver publish-ready documents, you know.
| | | | Marc P (X)
Local time: 19:16
German to English
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| wordfast and OpenOffice | Oct 11, 2005 |
Simos Tamoglou wrote:
I'm making some tests to see if I can work with a full linux system (or at least with a system based on windows xp but without MsOffice!)
There is no simple yes/no answer to this question.
Also, dispensing with Windows and dispensing with MS Office are two quite different things. You can keep Windows but dump MS Office, and you can keep MS Office but dump Windows. Arguably, it's harder for a translator to do without MS Office than without Windows.
You (or at least, a typical translator) can happily dispense with Windows provided you don't need:
- certain commercial DTP packages
- speech recognition
- Trados, SDLX, Transit, or certain other commercial CAT tools.
Note: CAT tools do exist for Linux, including tools which make it possible to work with a Trados-oriented workflow, such as Wordfast and Heartsome. Whether this is an acceptable solution is therefore analogous to the question of whether it's possible to use Wordfast for "Trados jobs" on Windows.
You can happily dispense with MS Office provided you don't need:
- 110% compatibility with your customer's MS Office installation.
No, 110% wasn't a typo. 100% compatibility (on Windows) is arguably a red herring, since it requires you to have not only MS Office, but the same version of it, configured in the same way, with the same fonts installed, and where appropriate, with the target text formatted as abysmally as the source text. It also rules out the use of many commercial CAT tools (on Windows), since they involve conversion to RTF, which itself results in a compatibility penalty. Dismissing OpenOffice.org as a solution on the grounds of its minor formatting incompatibilities is therefore disingenuous.
I do not want to depend for the rest of my life from Msoft and the related expensive products (s/w based on windows)
Well, there is light at the end of the tunnel, thanks not least to the rapid advances that XML-based formats have been making; MS Office's proprietary formats may continue to be in use for some time yet, but my prediction is that MS' own support for XML will soon render them superfluous.
Marc
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Marc P (X)
Local time: 19:16
German to English
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| wordfast and OpenOffice | Oct 11, 2005 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
Why would you want to break away from MS Office?
Speaking purely for myself, it is not a question of breaking away from MS Office. It is a question of not being forced to buy a particular product, and also of having my data in a vendor-neutral form. Considered purely as a product, I would be quite happy to use MS Office. (I recently bought Office XP, for instance, after using '97 for a long time, like you.) I question its value for money compared with Star Office, for example, and would not be particularly happy about certain aspects of the user licence, although I can quite happily live with closed-source code (as distinct from data) commercial software. My real objection, though, is that the proprietary format prevents me from having full control of my own data.
Marc
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 19:16
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| OmT runs on my W2000 machine | Oct 11, 2005 |
Heinrich Pesch wrote:
Myself I didn't manage to get OmegaT work on Windows 2000, but perhaps they have fixed some bugs by now.
MarcPrior wrote:
If OmegaT fails to run on a Windows 2000 installation, the most likely reason is that no suitable version of Java has been installed.
As for me, OmegaT 1.4.5+ runs just fine on my Windows 2000 box (with SP4 and Java 1.4.2). Which version of Java are you running, Heinrich?
| | | | Simos Tamoglou
Greece
Local time: 20:16
Italian to Greek
TOPIC STARTER | free choice or 100% compatibility | Oct 11, 2005 |
MarcPrior wrote:
Speaking purely for myself, it is not a question of breaking away from MS Office. It is a question of not being forced to buy a particular product, and also of having my data in a vendor-neutral form. Considered purely as a product, I would be quite happy to use MS Office. (I recently bought Office XP, for instance, after using '97 for a long time, like you.)
Marc
Dear friends,
This is what I'm talking about : "not being forced to buy a particular product" ! For that reason I'm making tests. For the time, I'm using Windows XP (and MsOffice 2003) to my "first" and Windows 98SE (and OpenOffice for Win) to my "second" pc.And everything is going OK, 100% compatibility with my clients' documents !!!
Lately I'm also trying to learn some things on SUSE 9,3.
So is not a question of using a certain product/ products - is only a question of free choice that we do not have!
Simos
| | | | | SRX is supported by 3 CAT tools | Oct 21, 2005 |
MarcPrior wrote:
As far as the segmenting rules are concerned, most CAT tools use unique segmenting rules. An emerging standard for segmenting rules, SRX, does exist but as far as I know is not yet supported by any CAT tool, and certainly not by the majority of them.
Hi Marc,
SDLX supports SRX since last year. Heartsome now supports SRX and Trados 7 does support SRX (hidden deeply).
SRX files from SDLX and Heartsome are 100% compatible. Trados default segmentation rules are a joke, but they are also supported by SDLX and Heartsome's tools.
If you take a look at the list of tools certified as TMX compliant, you will see a list of tools that should also support SRX (it used to be required to achieve level 2 certification).
GMX-V, the proposed new standard from LISA for word counts will probably also require support for SRX.
SRX support is becoming more and more important every day.
Regards,
Rodolfo
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There is a WF-like macro for OpenOffice, I have just found it
sourceforge.net/projects/openwordfast/
The problem is it does not support unicode So if you work with Polish and Chinese like me it's uselss for the time being.
Maybe someday~~~~
Jarek
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