Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0 - Advanced TM for Documentation

The Alchemy Translation Memory platform helps global organizations reduce localization costs and improve the quality and consistency of translated materials. It stores translations centrally so that professional translators can access this while they work. This helps improve the consistency of their translation while improving project turn-around and reducing overall project costs.

A growing need to reduce costs, to shorten time-to-market, and to meet the language requirements of a diverse customer-base adds to the complexity of being a successful player in today's global marketplace.

Alchemy PUBLISHER meets these challenges head-on! With a highly intuitive and easy-to-use project environment - coupled with an advanced Translation Memory technology - international organizations can deliver higher quality translations while dramatically reducing costs and project-cycle times.

Advanced Translation Memory Solution

The power of Alchemy PUBLISHER lies in its unique ability to use an advanced Translation Memory technology to store previously translated content. Because digital content such as web sites, help systems and technical publications are often repetitive the use of Alchemy PUBLISHER ensures that no sentence needs to be translated twice. In fact, use of this TM technology can reduce translation costs by as much as 70%!

Alchemy PUBLISHER uses object-oriented Translation Memory technology. This differs substantially from text-based TM products. Alchemy PUBLISHER's powerful Translation Memory not only stores text segments for re-use but also a document's layout, formatting, graphics and contextual information. This guarantees not only near-perfect translations re-use, but significant savings in the post-translation Desktop Publishing (DTP) and Quality Assurance (QA) testing.

Integrated Project Environment

Alchemy PUBLISHER supports over 100 of the most widely used file and document types, ensuring that the end-user has a single, easy-to-use solution for all translation requirements. Furthermore, Alchemy PUBLISHER supports translation re-use from virtually all industry Translation Memories, thus providing a vendor-agnostic solution to all translation needs.

Features

Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0 helps translators achieve higher levels of quality and productivity than any other TM solution. With a highly intuitive project environment, powerful features such as predictive type, machine translation and language quality checking are all integrated in a single solution that handles hundreds of file and documents types.

Customer Benefits

Today's global economy places unique demands on international business. Companies must deliver their products and services in multiple languages to reach the widest possible market. Global product and service launches involve precise coordination of internal and external resources, simultaneous deployments around the globe, and require flawless translation quality.

Alchemy PUBLISHER delivers these and more to successful global organizations:

• Translate Quicker: Beat your competitor to that vital window of sales opportunity. Get your product launched on a global scale, quicker, cheaper and to the highest quality standard.
  
  
• Translate Easier: Professional Translators can focus on the precision and accuracy of their translations using Alchemy PUBLISHER's unique and easy-to-use project environment. With support for over 100 file formats, it's a single solution for all of their translation requirements.
  
  
• Translate Better: Reduce the risk of bad quality translations. Use Alchemy PUBLISHER's integrated quality assurance features such as spell checkers, the Validation Expert and Glossary Consistency checker to ensure that the translations are done right first time, in real-time, every time!
  
  
• Translate Smarter: The advanced Translation Memory of Alchemy PUBLISHER allows you to not only re-use translations, but also a document's layout and graphical content. That's double the benefit of limited, text-based TMs!

What's New in Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0?

Alchemy PUBLISHER is enhanced in all areas to provide improvements in languages supported, performance, productivity, usability, standards support and greater functionality with Microsoft Office Products (MS Word, MS EXCEL and MS PowerPoint), Adobe formats (InDesign, FrameMaker) and online help technologies.

Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0, an advanced TM for documentation provides:

NEW Centre of Productivity for Professional Translators: Alchemy PUBLISHER includes a highly interactive Translator Toolbar that helps professional translators work faster, with higher accuracy and improved project turnarounds. The Translator Toolbar defines a standard for translator environments and also includes web-based connections to Machine Translation engines such as Goggle and PROMT.

Alchemy PUBLISHER now incorporates advanced TAG management and detection ensuring that tags are positioned correctly during a TM re-use and Translate operation.

The Translator Toolbar also includes Auto-Validation. This checks the translation as it's typed ensuring that it's consistent with your glossary and does not contain any other translation errors.

NEW Keywords: Keywords are a phrase or single word that are to be locked within a segment and excluded from the translation process. Since they are not translated, they are not included in any Project word count analysis, helping reducing the overall costs of translation.

Keywords can be product, brand, feature names or numerical data such as currency, weight or measurement values. In many cases these do not require translation and once defined, will not be included in any Project Analysis or word count operations.

Keywords can be defined using simple strings or for more advanced users, using Regular Expressions. They are displayed as placeholders(blue underline) in the translator toolbar and can be manipulated using the PowerTranslate toolbar.

• NEW Keyword Expert: Keywords can be applied to individual or groups of files using the Keyword Expert.
  
  
• NEW Defining Keywords: Keywords are defined using simple strings or for the more advanced user, using Regular Expressions. For example, [0-9]+ defines every number in your project as a keyword and ensures that numerical data is not counted as part of project word count reports.
  
  
• NEW Validate Expert: The Validate Expert has been extended to provide automatic detection of Keyword deletion or modification. This makes these errors easy to detect and fix for the localization engineer.
  
  
• NEW ezType: ezType can be used to make entry of keywords quick and easy for the professional translator. ezType monitors the translator as they work and presents suggested word/phrase completiong as they translate.
  
  

NEW Language Consistency Checker: Alchemy PUBLISHER can automatically detect inconsistent translations and help professional translators resolve these quickly and easily. Designed as a new type of Project filter it can detect situations where source segments are translated differently or when target translations are identical but source segments are different. This is an essential tool for organizations that need to achieve the highest possible level of translations consistency in their projects.

Successful translators produce high quality translations fast and efficiently. They know that a quick, high quality project turnaround can make the difference in the next pay check, project assignment and help win repeating business. The challenge for these language professionals is how to achieve higher levels of translation speeds without jeopardizing quality and consistency standards?

NEW Continuous Quality Monitoring: Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0 can help them with this challenge! It continuously monitors translations and can detect both linguistic and cosmetic errors while the translator is working. These errors are instantly displayed in the Translator Toolbar so that immediate action can be taken to address and overcome them.

This continuous monitoring and error detection will helps professional translators work faster, improving project turn-around times, while guaranteeing the highest possible levels of quality and consistency.

NEW Conditional and Multi-lingual XML Support: Alchemy ezParse technology has been extensively redesigned to support multi-lingual and conditional-based XML documents. This makes is easier to work with content coming from CRM systems and to identify only that content that needs to be translated. As with all ezParse solutions, you create these new parsers in a highly visual development environment so you avoid writing the code yourself, Alchemy PUBLISHER does all the hard work for you!

Many of our clients are increasingly using XML as a way of getting diverse content/data streams into their translation pipeline as a single, highly structured file/document format. XML is versatile, portable, easily understood and Unicode enabled, so it offers an ideal 'container' to our clients for such purposes.

Many CMS (Content Management Systems) are XML based (i.e. they store their content in XML documents) and an increasing number of these XML documents also provide a mechanism to support 'conditional' content ie content that is only to be translated based on the value(s) of attribute(s).

NEW Thumbnail Navigation: Navigate large projects using an intuitive and easy-to-use visual project navigator. This presents the contents of a Project PPF as thumbnail images that can be viewed quickly and easily. Simply click on the thumbnail of the web page, PowerPoint slide or winform and Alchemy PUBLISHER will locate it automatically.

Microsoft VISTA has enhanced the File Explorer by making it a highly graphical and visual desktop tool. For example, rather than seeing generic icons for folders and say bitmaps, you now see thumbnails of what's in the folders and a scalable thumbnail of the actual bitmap. This graphical display of data works its way down to almost all data objects on your desktop and it makes finding data quick and easy.

Alchemy PUBLISHER has implemented the same enhancement to the navigation and management of Projects. You can now use the Thumbnail Navigator to visually inspect the contents of a project. Simply clicking on a thumbnail is all that is required to start translating, engineering or testing.

Testimonials

Read what early adopters of Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0 are saying about their experiences.

"[PUBLISHER 3.0] is incredible easy to use and very intuitive.......It is great to be able to have all different file formats in one project and be able easily add or exclude files and connection to multiple TMs of different formats"Fernando Novae - ArchiText, Alchemy Partner

"We have been a power user of Alchemy CATALYST since the time the product was created and also welcomed the Alchemy PUBLISHER product which focuses on print formats with great enthusiasm. We are using [these] products on a daily basis in order to be in a position to offer our clients the highest efficiency possible."Bernd Löffler - iSP - a division of Translations.com

First Impressions

Alchemy Publisher 3.0 is a fantastic tool to work with!

The [Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0] interface is attractive and responsive and the [panel] auto-hide feature allows me to lay out my desktop pretty much however I please. This makes for an uncluttered workspace on the one hand, but also allows me to have other features to hand (for example on the toolbar), which I can then access simply by moving the mouse over the relevant icon. Simplicity itself!

Perhaps the most noticeable change with respect to Alchemy PUBLISHER 2.0 is the number of file formats that have been added. It is now possible to work with all the usual Microsoft Office formats, all Adobe file formats(even PDF), whilst retaining the functionality for a vast number of web and software formats.

Alchemy PUBLISHER 3.0 uses Alchemy's own translation memory format which I find both fast and accurate. I am very impressed with the quality of matches it returns and the response time is the fastest I have seen so far.

The new translator toolbar is very handy. The ezType feature allows you to auto-complete words from your glossaries and TMs as you type, whilst the auto-validation tool validates your translation units as you complete them, displaying a warning icon in the workspace for every unit requiring attention.

In short, the list of benefits is too long to list here, but some other features which deserve much more than a passing glance are listed below:

• Quickfind search function - search in source and/or target languages without having to call up the search box
• Alchemy Machine Translation Connectors - use Google Translate or PROMT in your translations (there is an option to disable this for your projects if you prefer)
• ezParse - allows you to use XPath to build your own custom XML filters (including an option to specify conditional parsing for multilingual file formats)
• Support for multiple TM formats - use Trados TMs, TMX and other translation memory formats directly without having to import them first
• Keywords function - allows the protection ("locking") of certain user-defined keywords [within segments]
• Multiple Files - a PPF project can now include a number of files or folders in a single project file

Alchemy Publisher 3.0 sets the standard for translation memory software in 2010.

Publisher a Good Tool? (No, Silly, Not Microsoft Publisher!)

By Jost Zetzsche of International Writers Group (Abridge version)

Pretty much exactly a year and a half after Alchemy Software released the first version of Publisher it has now released version 3. I had a chance to look at the new incarnation and talk to the folks in charge.

[Alchemy] Publisher is surprisingly translator-oriented. As in many other tools, translation files are stored in projects, in this case the proprietary PPF format. What's new in this version is that you can mix and match any number of supported file formats in one project file. Not surprisingly, there are a number of new file formats that are supported. Aside from more esoteric ones, there are now [Microsoft Office] PowerPoint files and [Adobe] PDF files.

Here are some other cool new features:

• The keyword feature allows you to lock untranslatables and exclude them from both translation and word counts (you will have to know how to compose regular expressions to add those).
• The Desktop TM are now stored in XLIFF format rather than the simple text format they used to be in. I think this is very interesting and quite forward-looking: XLIFF was originally not intended as a TM exchange format, but all indications point to XLIFF becoming just that.
• ezType is an auto-suggest feature that gives you suggestions on the basis of previous translations and the translation memory(s).
• TBX is now the preferred termbase exchange standard in Publisher.
• And of course: We now have integrated machine translation ability, first by Google Translate but also through an integration with PROMT.

I'm intrigued with this tool. In a way it's quite easy to use and get started with it, but in other parts you can recognize that the developers are very technical at heart.

Still, overall it's a tool that in this latest release is trying to emphasize some translation-related productivity, and it's also a tool whose makers are eager to please and are quick to respond.