Around a year ago, I wrote a post about my “personal app wishlist”. I still haven’t managed to find technical solutions to the first two items on my list, better email auto-reply management and automatic email attachment/folder word counts (though I now think the former would be possible with programs like Outlook, and I’ve realised a simple workaround for the latter is simply to ask clients to state the character count of attached files in their emails). But I’ve tried and tested quite a few different solutions to the third item on my list: advanced quality control and search tools. Below are brief reviews and thoughts on some of the things I’ve tried.
1. PerfectIt
PerfectIt is a very swish piece of proofreading software from Intelligent Editing. Retailing at around £80, it has been a dream to work with. It runs a series of consistency checks in MS Word against customisable style guides, checking things like capitalisation, hyphenation, spacing and complete punctuation. It reliably automates some of the more tedious and error-prone aspects of proofreading, and is also handy for checking my own translations (especially in one recent job where I had to make some fiddly terminology changes across 20 different documents after they’d already been exported from the CAT tool). It’s generally very easy and efficient to use, and it can be straightforwardly programmed to do all sorts of different checks.
I only have two minor gripes. One is that there are some surprising omissions or anomalies in the basic checks. A few I’ve noticed: it doesn’t automatically check consistent use of ise/ize endings, hyphenation of suffixes, telephone number formats or use of unspaced en dash for number ranges. Sometimes, it can even lull you into a false sense of security, because you assume PerfectIt would have already picked up certain types of error: I noticed recently, for instance, that it didn’t detect the inconsistent capitalisation of mother nature and Mother Nature in a text. There are also a few options missing that would be particularly handy for translators or people who regularly edit texts written by non-native speakers: for instance, you can run a check to remove contractions in formal texts, but you can’t run one to add them to texts that are meant to be informal (a common omission for translators/non-natives). And there’s no check for the use of the wrong symbols for quotation marks and apostrophes.
Of course, PerfectIt can be programmed to do more or less all these things, but some are fairly standard proofreading checks and style conventions so it would be preferable not to have to program them in myself. The other minor gripe is that it could be a little easier to automatically add your preferred spellings of terms: ideally, it would be nice to select a term in Word and just be able to click a button on a menu to automatically open a window where you could mark it as your preferred version of the term or as a term to flag up. It’s still relatively easy to do this, it just takes rather more than two clicks, so there’s still some scope for streamlining.
These are ultimately relatively minor gripes; they amount to wishing that it did what it already does well even better.
2. TransTools suite
I bought the TransTools suite before PerfectIt on the recommendation of a colleague. For just $25, you get lots of nifty tools specially tailored to translators that work across Word, Excel and PowerPoint (follow the link for a full summary). Some of the quality assurance checks in Word overlap with PerfectIt, and the TransTools suite can in principle be customised to run many of the same checks, but it’s rougher round the edges than PerfectIt and slightly less reliable. The interface is also less user-friendly (for instance, when it flags up QA errors, it’s harder to view and amend the individual errors). However, I’ve continued to use several of the tests alongside PerfectIt: my favourites are Quotation Magic, which checks the formatting of quotation marks and apostrophes, and the “Find highlight” and “Remove highlight” functions, which are a godsend given translation clients’ love of highlighting text. There are also automatic checks for common UK/US differences and ise/ize spellings, both surprising gaps in PerfectIt. Plus tag cleaners for importing documents into CAT tools, a tool for removing unwanted line breaks on text copied from PDFs, an alternative spellchecker that generates a correction list, and plenty more functions besides. At the price, well worth a look for any translator.
3. Text to speech
This is a completely free function available in MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint (well, completely free apart from the cost of MS Office), and it has been incredibly helpful both for translating and proofreading. It’s not very intuitive to set up, but once you have it’s very simple to use: you just select the text and click on a “Play” icon in the menu bar, and then Word will read it aloud (with different voices for UK English, US English, German and other languages). The reading is far from perfect, but it’s much better than you would expect for a free tool, and the speed can be adapted depending on your requirements (most obviously, I need it much slower when reading in German). When proofreading, it allows you to hear mistakes that are much less obvious on the page (particularly when a small word is missing or has been inserted in the wrong place). And for translating, it’s helpful both for reading sections of the source text (again, it can allow you to notice words in the source text that you’d misread – recently, for example, it revealed that a word I’d read over and over again as “interdisziplinärisch” was in fact “innerdisziplinärisch”) and for reading aloud the target text that you’ve produced (which makes certain stylistic mistakes or clunky turns of phrase much more obvious). It’s preferable to reading it aloud yourself, because it reads what’s actually on the page, not what you think is there.
It does need to be used with a certain amount of care to ensure that you are actively listening: I find it helps to select a single sentence at a time to read aloud, so that I remain engaged with the text and my concentration doesn’t wander. On the whole, it works best in Word; in Excel, it is more fiddly to switch languages and it can only read whole cells, while in PowerPoint, the text to read aloud has to all be set to the same language. I recently discovered that Adobe Acrobat also has the same function, but was disappointed to find that it is much less easy to use properly (though perhaps I need to experiment some more). In particular, it is hard to get it to read only selected parts of the text.
4. Wildcards
Another free function in MS Word. I hadn’t previously realised that it was possible to check for things like combinations of letters at the end or beginning of a word, characters within a certain range, etc. In theory, a lot of these functions would be handy for some of the more advanced search functions I mentioned that I was looking for in my last post. However, after the initial excitement of discovering them, I’ve not actually made much use of wildcards. What I really need for some of the advanced searches I’d like to be able to do are Boolean operators like AND and NOT: for instance, I want to be able to find a particular word except where it’s preceded by the word “the”. Since it’s possible to program PerfectIt to perform wildcard searches, perhaps in future it will be possible to use PerfectIt for that purpose.
PerfectIt is a very swish piece of proofreading software from Intelligent Editing. Retailing at around £80, it has been a dream to work with. It runs a series of consistency checks in MS Word against customisable style guides, checking things like capitalisation, hyphenation, spacing and complete punctuation. It reliably automates some of the more tedious and error-prone aspects of proofreading, and is also handy for checking my own translations (especially in one recent job where I had to make some fiddly terminology changes across 20 different documents after they’d already been exported from the CAT tool). It’s generally very easy and efficient to use, and it can be straightforwardly programmed to do all sorts of different checks.
I only have two minor gripes. One is that there are some surprising omissions or anomalies in the basic checks. A few I’ve noticed: it doesn’t automatically check consistent use of ise/ize endings, hyphenation of suffixes, telephone number formats or use of unspaced en dash for number ranges. Sometimes, it can even lull you into a false sense of security, because you assume PerfectIt would have already picked up certain types of error: I noticed recently, for instance, that it didn’t detect the inconsistent capitalisation of mother nature and Mother Nature in a text. There are also a few options missing that would be particularly handy for translators or people who regularly edit texts written by non-native speakers: for instance, you can run a check to remove contractions in formal texts, but you can’t run one to add them to texts that are meant to be informal (a common omission for translators/non-natives). And there’s no check for the use of the wrong symbols for quotation marks and apostrophes.
Of course, PerfectIt can be programmed to do more or less all these things, but some are fairly standard proofreading checks and style conventions so it would be preferable not to have to program them in myself. The other minor gripe is that it could be a little easier to automatically add your preferred spellings of terms: ideally, it would be nice to select a term in Word and just be able to click a button on a menu to automatically open a window where you could mark it as your preferred version of the term or as a term to flag up. It’s still relatively easy to do this, it just takes rather more than two clicks, so there’s still some scope for streamlining.
These are ultimately relatively minor gripes; they amount to wishing that it did what it already does well even better.
2. TransTools suite
I bought the TransTools suite before PerfectIt on the recommendation of a colleague. For just $25, you get lots of nifty tools specially tailored to translators that work across Word, Excel and PowerPoint (follow the link for a full summary). Some of the quality assurance checks in Word overlap with PerfectIt, and the TransTools suite can in principle be customised to run many of the same checks, but it’s rougher round the edges than PerfectIt and slightly less reliable. The interface is also less user-friendly (for instance, when it flags up QA errors, it’s harder to view and amend the individual errors). However, I’ve continued to use several of the tests alongside PerfectIt: my favourites are Quotation Magic, which checks the formatting of quotation marks and apostrophes, and the “Find highlight” and “Remove highlight” functions, which are a godsend given translation clients’ love of highlighting text. There are also automatic checks for common UK/US differences and ise/ize spellings, both surprising gaps in PerfectIt. Plus tag cleaners for importing documents into CAT tools, a tool for removing unwanted line breaks on text copied from PDFs, an alternative spellchecker that generates a correction list, and plenty more functions besides. At the price, well worth a look for any translator.
3. Text to speech
This is a completely free function available in MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint (well, completely free apart from the cost of MS Office), and it has been incredibly helpful both for translating and proofreading. It’s not very intuitive to set up, but once you have it’s very simple to use: you just select the text and click on a “Play” icon in the menu bar, and then Word will read it aloud (with different voices for UK English, US English, German and other languages). The reading is far from perfect, but it’s much better than you would expect for a free tool, and the speed can be adapted depending on your requirements (most obviously, I need it much slower when reading in German). When proofreading, it allows you to hear mistakes that are much less obvious on the page (particularly when a small word is missing or has been inserted in the wrong place). And for translating, it’s helpful both for reading sections of the source text (again, it can allow you to notice words in the source text that you’d misread – recently, for example, it revealed that a word I’d read over and over again as “interdisziplinärisch” was in fact “innerdisziplinärisch”) and for reading aloud the target text that you’ve produced (which makes certain stylistic mistakes or clunky turns of phrase much more obvious). It’s preferable to reading it aloud yourself, because it reads what’s actually on the page, not what you think is there.
It does need to be used with a certain amount of care to ensure that you are actively listening: I find it helps to select a single sentence at a time to read aloud, so that I remain engaged with the text and my concentration doesn’t wander. On the whole, it works best in Word; in Excel, it is more fiddly to switch languages and it can only read whole cells, while in PowerPoint, the text to read aloud has to all be set to the same language. I recently discovered that Adobe Acrobat also has the same function, but was disappointed to find that it is much less easy to use properly (though perhaps I need to experiment some more). In particular, it is hard to get it to read only selected parts of the text.
4. Wildcards
Another free function in MS Word. I hadn’t previously realised that it was possible to check for things like combinations of letters at the end or beginning of a word, characters within a certain range, etc. In theory, a lot of these functions would be handy for some of the more advanced search functions I mentioned that I was looking for in my last post. However, after the initial excitement of discovering them, I’ve not actually made much use of wildcards. What I really need for some of the advanced searches I’d like to be able to do are Boolean operators like AND and NOT: for instance, I want to be able to find a particular word except where it’s preceded by the word “the”. Since it’s possible to program PerfectIt to perform wildcard searches, perhaps in future it will be possible to use PerfectIt for that purpose.
RSS Feed
