| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] > | New Fluency CAT tool Thread poster: Pablo Bouvier
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Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 15:36
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
FarkasAndras wrote: Samuel Murray wrote:
I get the impression that this tool's main selling point is the fact that is comes bundled with a complete dictionary, and that the dictionary feature in Fluency is as powerful as the glossary features in other CAT tools. 1. Can they offer a really good dictionary in my mother tongue (Hungarian) or yours (Afrikaans)? Of course not. 2. Good translators don't have much use for a general dictionary anyway. 3. Built-in dictionaries have never been and will never become a selling point of CATs.
1. No, I doubt it, unless they purchase it from respectible dictionary makers. That said, the Hungarian and Afrikaans slice of the market is rather small.
2. I disagree. A general dictionary is a good translator's best friend.
3. I think built-in dictionaries can be a major selling point. If I could have a CAT tool that had a built-in dictionary, or that had the ability to look up text in a dictionary automatically (without any intervention), I'd be very happy to use buy it.
The fact that I get along just fine without looking up every word in the dictionary is simply the consequence of my inability to do so, and not because I have deliberately chosen to use the dictionary as litlte as possible.
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 15:36
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| About Fluency's terminology features | Jun 25, 2010 |
carl11 wrote:
Their site also clarifies the terminology import:
Fluency™ allows the translator to import their personal terminology, automatically discover terminology pre-translation, add terminology while translating, and enforce terminology rules.
Enforcing terminology rules is a nice thing to have, but many CAT tools have it (though it isn't what I would consider a standard feature in CAT tools). The issue is not whether there is terminology rule enforcement, but how good it is. How well does it deal with prefix and suffix inflected languages, and with multiword inflections, etc, for example.
Adding terminology while translating is also pretty standard in CAT tools, though some don't have it. On the other hand, if the terminology files aren't in a simple format, then it is really no selling point but merely a solution to a problem (-: The same goes for importing one's own terminology, although the question would be how many import formats it supports. How does adding terminology work in Fluency? Is it user-friendly? Can it be done quickly? Can the user edit the term entry directly, and/or is he forced to do so?
I don't know what "automatically discover terminology pre-translation" means. Can the Fluency guy here enlighten us?
Edited: forgot to credit carl11.
[Edited at 2010-06-25 06:59 GMT]
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 15:36
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| On disclosing sources of dictionaries | Jun 25, 2010 |
FarkasAndras wrote:
I'd strongly urge the people behind Fluency to disclose the sources of their dictionary data for each language combination. Just saying "We have a dictionary and we promise it's big" is saying nothing, or maybe a bit worse than saying nothing.
I agree. It can only do the image of Fluency good if they can say where they got their dictionary data from, and to also say a little more about the size and quality of their dictionary material.
| | | | | Is the price sustainable? | Jun 25, 2010 |
Richard Tregaskis wrote:
The $179 for MemoQ is only for a one-year subscription. Fluency is a perpetual license. Fluency is also highly database driven. It was originally developed such that it could not function at all without a central database server that housed all of the terminology, TMs, and project files.
Thinking about what Richard said about the perpetual license, I cannot help to wonder whether this price is sustainable in the long run. Let's suppose that Fluency reached 1,000 users, a user base many players still don't have in our market as far as I am aware. This would mean sales of a quarter of a million dollars. Yes, it might sound like an impressive figure, but if you start paying developers, sales people, IT expenses (you cannot keep 1,000 users happy with small servers), expenses at trade fairs, advertising, user gatherings, etc. etc., and a quarter of a million dollars feels like a dime in reality.
The permanent license model with further payment for new licenses is something that proved bad for us translators: SDL spent 5 years issuing just minor upgrades for Trados. On the other side of things, I own MemoQ since September and have already had some 10 upgrades and one new version, quite an achievement I think, and based on the 20%-a-year model: we pay 20% of the purchase price after the first year of use, and always have access to any upgrades. This keeps Kilgray developing new things to keep us happy.
Isn't there a risk that, with the perpetual license model, the makers of Fluency could run into the Trados troubles, thus making development painstakingly slow?
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Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 15:36
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Fluency crashes for me | Jun 25, 2010 |
I downloaded the "Dutch" version of Fluency and installed it on Windows XP SP3. The installation dialog said that it could take 20-40 minutes, but the install took less than 5 minutes (less than 1 minute, if I'm not mistaken). When I ran Fluency for the first time, it tried to access the internet once (I allowed it), and then it crashed. I tried again, but it crashes. I rebooted, and tried again. This time, Fluency no longer tries to access the internet, but still... it crashes. I get a sp... See more I downloaded the "Dutch" version of Fluency and installed it on Windows XP SP3. The installation dialog said that it could take 20-40 minutes, but the install took less than 5 minutes (less than 1 minute, if I'm not mistaken). When I ran Fluency for the first time, it tried to access the internet once (I allowed it), and then it crashed. I tried again, but it crashes. I rebooted, and tried again. This time, Fluency no longer tries to access the internet, but still... it crashes. I get a splash screen, and then... an error message from Windows asking if I want to submit an error report. Any ideas? ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Reply from Western Standard | Jun 25, 2010 |
Our dictionary data has been licensed from Transoft Intl. Their website is transoft.us if you want to look them up. We have also done some QA on their dictionaries ourselves.
The sizes of the dictionaries obviously various quite a bit. Our average dictionary size for the languages we support is about 130,000. Our QA on the dictionaries is on-going and when we release new dictionaries, they will be available to Fluency customers.
As our product is new, the price model ... See more Our dictionary data has been licensed from Transoft Intl. Their website is transoft.us if you want to look them up. We have also done some QA on their dictionaries ourselves.
The sizes of the dictionaries obviously various quite a bit. Our average dictionary size for the languages we support is about 130,000. Our QA on the dictionaries is on-going and when we release new dictionaries, they will be available to Fluency customers.
As our product is new, the price model is evolving, so I would recommend getting in early. The current price is NOT sustainable, thus is denoted on our site as an introductory sale. We do however plan on continuing our “Agile Development” as termed by Mr. Zetzsche and as can be seen by the fact that we have released over 20 updates in the last 2 months.
Other questions:
"How does adding terminology work in Fluency? "
There are many different ways to add terminology in Fluency. Terminology import currently supports csv and tab delimited documents and soon TBX. To add terminology during a translation you can highlight the term and right click and hit “Add Term to Database”, click on the “Plus” button in the toolbar, or go to the menu item “Track Term”.
"Is it user-friendly? "
We think so
"Can it be done quickly? "
Yes
"Can the user edit the term entry directly, and/or is he forced to do so?"
You can highlight the term in question and it populates in a dialog box that appears and your enter the translation and any other information. You can edit it but you do not have to. There is also a terminology management interface.
"I don't know what "automatically discover terminology pre-translation" means. Can the Fluency guy here enlighten us?"
Fluency will preprocess you document looking for terms and identify them for pre-translation. This feature is still in beta.
To Mr. Murray, we apologize for issues you are having with installation. Please contact us at [email protected] or call us at 801-224-7404 or Toll-Free 888-617-4448 so we can help you resolve your issues. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Ulf Samuelsson
Mexico
Local time: 07:36
Member (2007)
English to Swedish
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| A short trial run of Fluency | Jun 25, 2010 |
I downloaded the Swedish version of Fluency to give it a test run, but I couldn't manage to actually translate anything. I managed to import a memory, but kept getting a database connection error and another fatal error when I tried to translate.
I installed Fluency on Windows 7, but didn't get any error messages during the installation.
As for the included glossary, I found it seriously lacking in quality when I tried to look up a few words. Specifically "allowance" and "audi... See more I downloaded the Swedish version of Fluency to give it a test run, but I couldn't manage to actually translate anything. I managed to import a memory, but kept getting a database connection error and another fatal error when I tried to translate.
I installed Fluency on Windows 7, but didn't get any error messages during the installation.
As for the included glossary, I found it seriously lacking in quality when I tried to look up a few words. Specifically "allowance" and "audit" also included German, French and Spanish terms.
Also, I found it annoying that the terms listed are just a bunch of words, without any specific order. It would be useful to have each separate meaning of the original word have a separate set of suggested translations. Just a set of possible translations in random order isn't very helpful.
The concept of Fluency is good, but I found it to still be in beta stage as there are problems after a standard installation (meaning that I didn't make any changes to the standard installation path or any other changes during the setup of the program).
I'll try to install it in XP mode and see if that is working any better ... ▲ Collapse
| | | | | worked for me | Jun 26, 2010 |
I downloaded and installed and didn't have any issues. I'm on a Windows 7 machine. Ironically, I have had more issues with MemoQ and Trados crashing so far then Fluency.
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| installation problems | Jun 26, 2010 |
We are aware that a few users have experienced installation/startup problems with Fluency. We are investigating these as quickly as possible, but have not yet been able to replicate these issues. This is our top priority. As this is a new product, we are experiencing some growing pains and appreciate your patience. For those of you experiencing issues, if you are still interested in evaluating Fluency and potentially purchasing, we would certainly be willing to provide further discounts if you c... See more We are aware that a few users have experienced installation/startup problems with Fluency. We are investigating these as quickly as possible, but have not yet been able to replicate these issues. This is our top priority. As this is a new product, we are experiencing some growing pains and appreciate your patience. For those of you experiencing issues, if you are still interested in evaluating Fluency and potentially purchasing, we would certainly be willing to provide further discounts if you can send us specific information about your issues (operating system, .Net version, etc.) and help us resolve them for you. Once again, our email is [email protected]
As for the quality of the dictionaries, as mentioned previously, we are involved in ongoing QA and as the dictionaries improve, they will be available to Fluency customers. Thank you for the interest and the feedback. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 15:36
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| On terminology pre-translation | Jun 26, 2010 |
wstranslation wrote:
Fluency will preprocess you document looking for terms and identify them for pre-translation. This feature is still in beta.
Aah. So, in other words, what other CAT tools call term extraction.
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Hi, all!
I downloaded a demo version of the software. The installation of the program on Windows 7 went with no problems and the main window appeared. After a quick overview of the functions and menus, I decided to take if for a spin and tried to translate a doc file with an average formatting difficulty. The import of the file went well, but then the first glitches started to appear. At first, my impression was that it is not a finished product, that is still a work in progress and it is ... See more Hi, all!
I downloaded a demo version of the software. The installation of the program on Windows 7 went with no problems and the main window appeared. After a quick overview of the functions and menus, I decided to take if for a spin and tried to translate a doc file with an average formatting difficulty. The import of the file went well, but then the first glitches started to appear. At first, my impression was that it is not a finished product, that is still a work in progress and it is only a half-baked product. The first impression was confirmed after a while, when the software tried to update, but instead did not respond for at least half an hour. After restarting the application, it maybe started a loop, because I was not able anymore the pass by the first windows after the update, so I could not use the program anymore. I tried to reinstall it, used the repair function of the installer, but to no avail, so I decided to uninstall it.
The short period of time I was able to use the program was enough to get an overall impression of the program. The author / authors praises the integration of terminology dictionaries in the software. While the initiative is certainly to be praised, in my case, for Romanian, the dictionary was of poor quality. In fact, many words lacked diacritics, some were wrongly spelled, some had illegible characters and I think the company (whose site was actually down the last time I checked) selling the dictionary takes some freely available dictionaries from the net without editing and just puts them on display. So what should have been a strong point proved in the end to be a frustrating experience. Here I would like to see a feature implemented as in Transit XV: when right clicking a word, one should have a context menu with the possibility to choose from words from the dictionary, let's say by entering a number. This could be a competitive advantage over other programs, so the programmers could take into account this proposal.
I like to use shortcuts a lot, so I missed the fact that the menus had no underlined letters to navigate easily within the menus with the keyboard.
The segmentation seemed to be ok for the file I imported, also there seems to be no support for SRX segmentation rules. I had no luck editing the initial automatic segmentation. I entered some words in the manual segmentation rules, for instance it should not end the segment for "nr.", but I could not test the results after reimporting the files because, as I mentioned before, the program crashed and I could not use it anymore.
In conclusion, there are some technical glitches which prevented me from using the software at its full potential and I honestly think the program still needs a lot of work. As stated before, the program seems to be still in a prolonged beta stage and, at least for me, not ready for productive work.
[Edited at 2011-06-04 05:03 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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I'm one of the programmers of Fluency and I wanted to take a chance to respond to Leon's complaints. Fluency has been released and has been used by translators all over the world for over 8 months now. The words "half-baked" and "not ready for productive work" would seem like quite a stretch to the many people who are currently using Fluency for production work. We do understand that as with all software, there will be "technical glitches," but Fluency is far removed from the beta stage. We are ... See more I'm one of the programmers of Fluency and I wanted to take a chance to respond to Leon's complaints. Fluency has been released and has been used by translators all over the world for over 8 months now. The words "half-baked" and "not ready for productive work" would seem like quite a stretch to the many people who are currently using Fluency for production work. We do understand that as with all software, there will be "technical glitches," but Fluency is far removed from the beta stage. We are more than happy to work through any installation specific issues when we are contacted directly and go to any length to make sure Fluency is working correctly.
As far as our site is concerned, we released a marketing email from ProZ last week and had an overwhelming response, with over 500 people downloading the software at the same time which caused issues with our servers. These were fixed within 8 hours.
As far as terminology is concerned, we did not just take free dictionaries and make them available. The terminology is licensed from a third party provider who gathered the terminology over decades from LSPs and translators. We have not personally verified the millions of terms in every language and apologize for any errors. We have ongoing QA efforts in that area and welcome any specific feedback.
As far as the segmentation is concerned, we have considered adding SRX support, but our users have not requested such support. We do have regular expression based segmentation rules and exceptions that can be added to or edited. If SRX is a priority to any of our users, it will be a priority to us.
Despite some letters in the menus not being underlined (some are), you can still use the keyboard to navigate the menus. Although we have strived to make Fluency relatively simple, there is still a great deal of complexity to deal with, and one of the main things that we are trying to roll out in a conscientious way is keyboard shortcuts which may conflict with menu shortcuts. Once we have enough feedback and have determined the best way to move forward, we will make more of these features available.
We are happy to have constructive feedback from our users and offer 1st rate technical support. Leon, thank you for your feedback and please feel free to contact us at [email protected] if you'd like us to work through your installation issues with you.
[Edited at 2011-06-07 15:49 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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| It's slows me down | Jun 25, 2013 |
I own Fluency, and I was trying to master it for several months... Then I quit. You wonder why?
My language pair is English - Russian. Russian words and phrases are changing depending on a multiple of circumstances (time, gender, case, etc.). Fluency can not learn all these forms, and therefore "translating over and over again" still necessary. Working with Fluency slows me down by two times at least.
| | | | Pablo Bouvier
Local time: 15:36
German to Spanish
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Fluency CAT tool | Jun 25, 2013 |
Alexander Teplitsky wrote:
I own Fluency, and I was trying to master it for several months... Then I quit. You wonder why?
My language pair is English - Russian. Russian words and phrases are changing depending on a multiple of circumstances (time, gender, case, etc.). Fluency can not learn all these forms, and therefore "translating over and over again" still necessary. Working with Fluency slows me down by two times at least.
I will not criticize nor defend Fluency or any other CAT. In German, as in Russian, there is also a large number of flexible words, but this does not preclude the use of translation tools. The CAT are made for what they are made for: very repetitive or similar texts with the same or similar jargon.
| | | | Tony M
France
Local time: 15:36
Member
French to English
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SITE LOCALIZER | Glossary tip | Jun 25, 2013 |
Alexander Teplitsky wrote:
Russian words and phrases are changing depending on a multiple of circumstances (time, gender, case, etc.). Fluency can not learn all these forms, and therefore "translating over and over again" still necessary.
I know nothing about the specific tool (I use Wordfast), but what I do to handle inflected forms is to enter into the glossary the root form in the source language and the uninflected root in the target language; that way, all I have to do each time is type the inflected ending.
Of course, I realize that doesn't help with things like the root vowel changing (as in German) --- but I still find it helps reduce the number of extra keystrokes required.
Personally, I find my CAT tool's glossary function a lot more useful than the actual translation memory. 
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