| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | Mobile app for translators Thread poster: Håvard Olerud Eriksen
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Hi all,
After having worked as a translator for some time I have again returned to my roots as a software developer, but I have not yet forgotten my previous career. Last night I was thinking whether there are any software tools on the mobile platform you guys are missing? Have any of you ever thought "gee, I wish I had some app on my mobile that would let me do such and such". If so, what would this tool do? If you can come up with good ideas I would be happy to try and implement t... See more Hi all,
After having worked as a translator for some time I have again returned to my roots as a software developer, but I have not yet forgotten my previous career. Last night I was thinking whether there are any software tools on the mobile platform you guys are missing? Have any of you ever thought "gee, I wish I had some app on my mobile that would let me do such and such". If so, what would this tool do? If you can come up with good ideas I would be happy to try and implement them and if they turn out to be useful I would be happy to let you be beta testers and of course get licences for this wondertool
All suggestions are welcome!
Kind regards,
Håvard ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Mobile wordcounting app | Apr 6, 2011 |
Dear Håvard,
I would absolutely love a mobile application that could count words in documents attached to emails. I often receive requests from clients by email when I happen to be out, and I have often thought that it would be useful with an application that would let me quickly count the words in a word, excel or powerpoint document on the go.
Kind regards,
Johanna
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Johanna Liljenzin wrote:
Dear Håvard,
I would absolutely love a mobile application that could count words in documents attached to emails. I often receive requests from clients by email when I happen to be out, and I have often thought that it would be useful with an application that would let me quickly count the words in a word, excel or powerpoint document on the go.
Kind regards,
Johanna
Fantastic, thanks a bunch! Keep them coming
| | | | Jaroslaw Michalak 
Poland
Local time: 08:53
Member (2004)
English to Polish
SITE LOCALIZER
I would go for a quick and small viewer for most document formats (including typical CAT formats, such as TTX and xliff). This would be essential for viewing projects that my clients send me.
For now I use Documents To Go for Android (non-paid), but it is much too big for my purposes.
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Ana Malovrh
Slovenia
Local time: 08:53
German to Slovenian
+ ...
| Java, Android, Symbian, Windows mobile ...? | Apr 6, 2011 |
First of all I think it's crucial to know which platforms are we talking about. I don't have Android or something like that, but I do have Java, as many mobiles do nowadays.
So is it possible to make something like a Java based app to make small translations up to, let's say ... 50 words ?
Sometimes it happens that you have to make a few small changes, because the client changed his/her mind and modified a few words in the original.
Or one gets an email to... See more First of all I think it's crucial to know which platforms are we talking about. I don't have Android or something like that, but I do have Java, as many mobiles do nowadays.
So is it possible to make something like a Java based app to make small translations up to, let's say ... 50 words ?
Sometimes it happens that you have to make a few small changes, because the client changed his/her mind and modified a few words in the original.
Or one gets an email to translate 3 words, and then you have to write down the words on a paper cloth in the cafe for example and type them back to the e-mail on the phone.
I agree with Jabberwock
A ttx and xliff viewer would be a blast as well. ▲ Collapse
| | | | S E (X)
Italy
Local time: 08:53
Italian to English
| Docs To Go for BlackBerry - Wordcount function, file creation too | Apr 6, 2011 |
Hello everyone!
I think a mobile app for translators would be great for shorter projects, something that would display one segment at a time and have a glossary function. I translate a lot of corporate blog posts of less than 300 words, and although I will always prefer my computer for translation, for certain situations I have often thought it would be useful to have a mobile app. that would allow for the creation and delivery of small projects.
There is another forum ... See more Hello everyone!
I think a mobile app for translators would be great for shorter projects, something that would display one segment at a time and have a glossary function. I translate a lot of corporate blog posts of less than 300 words, and although I will always prefer my computer for translation, for certain situations I have often thought it would be useful to have a mobile app. that would allow for the creation and delivery of small projects.
There is another forum thread about this topic, from several months ago.
I already use Docs To Go for BlackBerry (paid) to view projects that arrive while I am away from home, and also to get wordcounts. (I am available to my clients after normal business hours and I prefer to respond to all queries right away, even while in the passenger seat of the car or at the grocery store, but that's just me.)
Docs To Go for BlackBerry allows me to view these file formats: .doc, .xls, .pdf, and .ppt and I use all four functions frequently. There is also a file creation function, but I have not used it.
Sarah ▲ Collapse
| | | | | OCR for Windows Mobile, please. | Apr 6, 2011 |
Johanna Liljenzin wrote:
Dear Håvard,
I would absolutely love a mobile application that could count words in documents attached to emails. I often receive requests from clients by email when I happen to be out, and I have often thought that it would be useful with an application that would let me quickly count the words in a word, excel or powerpoint document on the go.
Kind regards,
Johanna
Dear Håvard,
I totally agree with what Johanna contributed to the wish list and I would extend the counting tool by an OCR function for PDF files and other bitmaps. This is essentially what I miss most in my HTC Touch Pro2 with Windows Mobile 6.5. I searched regularly for OCR for Windows Mobile, but it doesn't seem to exist yet for any Smartphone or Pocket PC.
There where some simple applications to OCR photographs of business cards and to add the resulting data to ones address book, but this obviously is not what a translator would need in the first place. For serious OCR purposes those applications are not usable.
It seems Abbyy is already working on something like this: http://www.abbyy.com/Default.aspx?DN=f80b1c3c-ce43-4b7c-8d6b-5ddc2afab5d3. Or it provided the engine to make such developments possible. But until now I didn't hear of a result.
I doubt that a single software developer can manage this task, but I can't keep this wish for myself.
In the counting part of the tool I would appreciate, if it would be able to count not only words, but also characters with spaces and without spaces the same way as Word 2010 does it (but not only for Word files, of course).
Best regards,
René Stranz-Nikitin
www.uersn.de
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As far as platforms go, it's pretty obvious that there are two platforms worth developing for at the moment: iOS and Android. I'm firmly in the Android camp myself, so that's where I would like to see new apps showing up... but, to be fair, iOS is just as important. You can think about other OSes once you have both of the big guys covered.
OCR is too processor intensive to be much use for most people IMO. It would take ages to OCR a 100-page document on a mobile phone. For that reas... See more As far as platforms go, it's pretty obvious that there are two platforms worth developing for at the moment: iOS and Android. I'm firmly in the Android camp myself, so that's where I would like to see new apps showing up... but, to be fair, iOS is just as important. You can think about other OSes once you have both of the big guys covered.
OCR is too processor intensive to be much use for most people IMO. It would take ages to OCR a 100-page document on a mobile phone. For that reason, mobile OCR is probably best done server-side. And then... you'd have a 100-page document on your phone. What next? Realistically, there isn't much you could do with it apart from a wordcount if the application has provisions for that. Wordcounts on a mobile are useful, but not necessarily worth the development time required.
What I'd like to see is pretty simple: a dictionary/glossary app that can take simple input files like tab delimited txt, xls, tbx or MultiTerm XML and allow you to browse/query the terms in them. Preferably handling multiple languages and multiple files/databases in an integrated interface.
Perhaps such a thing exists for Android, I haven't looked. I remember I used to have a pretty decent free java app that did this. Performance was mostly acceptable even with 100,000+ terms on mediocre hardware via java... Modern hardware and more native code would even allow fast fuzzy matching. ▲ Collapse
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| | | Simplest OCR only with plain text output is what I would expect. | Apr 6, 2011 |
FarkasAndras wrote:
OCR is too processor intensive to be much use for most people IMO. It would take ages to OCR a 100-page document on a mobile phone. For that reason, mobile OCR is probably best done server-side. And then... you'd have a 100-page document on your phone. What next? Realistically, there isn't much you could do with it apart from a wordcount if the application has provisions for that. Wordcounts on a mobile are useful, but not necessarily worth the development time required.
Dear Farkas,
I don't expect to manage to OCR a 100 pages document with such an application, such huge ones I do not get so often (and still I spend most of my time in reach of my workstation). What I am expecting is OCR in its simplest kind with plain text output only (no tables, no text boxes, nothing superfluous). Maybe the application should have a time limit for the work of the OCR routine to prevent the battery from being totally discharged. I imagine that the OCR of 10 page documents would be entirely realistic.
I would not be so sceptical about the processor power of pocket PCs. The processor of mine runs at 528 MHz and the machine has 288 MB of RAM. The newest HTC Pocket PCs run at 1 GHz. My first desktop had a 700 MHz processor and it did OCR tasks for me all the time. So my impression is, that simple OCR applications with clear code and without bugs could run in today's Pocket PCs without a problem.
And yes, I would not use the OCR result to do the translation. I always deceived those dreamers, who expected me to translate in a phone. I would use it only to write my bid. These tasks are quite vital for our business and I am pretty sure it is worth the development time.
And Farkas, please don't say that Windows Mobile is obsolete already. I bought my machine only 1 1/2 year ago!
Have a nice evening.
René Stranz-Nikitin
| | | | | WinMo & other issues | Apr 6, 2011 |
René Stranz-Nikitin wrote:
I would not be so sceptical about the processor power of pocket PCs. The processor of mine runs at 528 MHz and the machine has 288 MB of RAM. The newest HTC Pocket PCs run at 1 GHz.
I know, I have one (a 1GHz HTC, that is). I still wouldn't want to do OCR on it if I can help it. Again, being able to do a wordcount on a scanned pdf would be sort of nice, but it's hardly worth the developer hours and processor cycles. You can probably upload your pdf to Wordfast's free online environment that just got OCR capabilities (it's called WF Anywhere, I think) and get a wordcount that way. Something like that makes a lot more sense than doing it on the actual phone.
René Stranz-Nikitin wrote:
And Farkas, please don't say that Windows Mobile is obsolete already. I bought my machine only 1 1/2 year ago!
I'm afraid it was obsolete already when you bought it. I can say that because I had a WinMo phone for a while myself (Xperia X1), and experienced the pain of using Windows Mobile first-hand. The range of functionality was impressive, but the speed/stability/usability/UI design was dismal. I'm sure you know Microsoft eventually worked up the courage to kill WinMo and start over with Windows Phone, so WinMo is now officially dead.
| | | | | It seems the producers are not really trying to satisfy our needs. | Apr 7, 2011 |
FarkasAndras wrote:
I know, I have one (a 1GHz HTC, that is). I still wouldn't want to do OCR on it if I can help it. Again, being able to do a wordcount on a scanned pdf would be sort of nice, but it's hardly worth the developer hours and processor cycles. You can probably upload your pdf to Wordfast's free online environment that just got OCR capabilities (it's called WF Anywhere, I think) and get a wordcount that way. Something like that makes a lot more sense than doing it on the actual phone.
Why wouldn't you do the OCR on it, if you are a freelance translator like me? Don't you like to spend the unused time out of office, especially in this lovely spring time?
And no, I would not upload my client's documents to a server (WF anywhere), where I don't have any control over what it is doing with them.
FarkasAndras wrote:
I'm afraid it was obsolete already when you bought it. I can say that because I had a WinMo phone for a while myself (Xperia X1), and experienced the pain of using Windows Mobile first-hand. The range of functionality was impressive, but the speed/stability/usability/UI design was dismal. I'm sure you know Microsoft eventually worked up the courage to kill WinMo and start over with Windows Phone, so WinMo is now officially dead.
I must admit, this is some kind of bad news for me, if you are saying that MS discontinued Windows Mobile entirely. I didn't have this information until now. On the other hand Windows Mobile 6.5 works pretty bug free on the HTC Touch Pro2. I had to do some small changes in the registry to eliminate some shortcomings, but now this is done and running. The backup solution also works well (offline, of course), but until now I didn't have to use any of my backups. There were no serious system crashes in 1 1/2 year. Half a version before the discontinuation it seems to be developed well. I compared it with Xperia, when I was choosing my new machine, but Xperia is just a small toy with an unusable HW keyboard. In fact I wanted something much bigger and more powerful, but still able be used as a phone as well, where I could install whatever Windows applications I want (older from the times of Windows 98, this way I could have FineReader and older Trados Versions on it to check the analysis), but this is all so very restricted by the producers that my conclusion today is the one I wrote in the header of this posting.
It seems the only solution is a healthy hack to make an old version of FineReader run in a Windows Mobile Pocket PC. Am I right?
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René Stranz-Nikitin wrote:
I must admit, this is some kind of bad news for me, if you are saying that MS discontinued Windows Mobile entirely. I didn't have this information until now.
They did, probably around last December. 6.5 was the last version. With Windows Phone 7, they went the Apple route: much tighter control over both hardware and software. You won't see such a bewildering array of phone specs and UI skins and feature sets in WP7. All WP7 devices will look and work pretty much the same - but at least they will work OK out of the box without you messing around in the registry.
You're probably among the few people who can really enjoy a WinMo device. You bought the best version, 6.5 with HTC's improvements. You actually need the flexibility to run all sorts of weird and wonderful apps and have the skills/stones to hack the registry. Most other people aren't like that and will be much better off with WP7.
Moral of the story: When you eventually start looking for a new phone, you should probably be looking at Android, which now carries the torch as the most customizable, hackable, powerful mobile OS. There are no new phones that can run your WinMo apps, so you'll have to switch to a new ecosystem anyway.
| | | | Sawal
Senegal
Local time: 06:53
English to French
| very interesting topic | May 28, 2011 |
Very interesting topic indeed.
I stumbled upon it when I was looking for translator mobile apps for my android phone.
For me I'm more interested in existing applications. I'd like to know what is already available, and may be from that an improvement can be made to create a very good app...
| | | | Pauline Ratzé
Switzerland
Local time: 08:53
Member (2023)
English to French
+ ...
| Vocabulary List / Terminology | Jul 19, 2011 |
Hello,
Very interesting topic. Just found it while looking for useful apps for my smartphone.
One application that I would love to find is one that could allow me to manage small vocabulary lists. I'm not thinking about huge terminology database. But in everyday life, outside the office, I read terms that I want to remember, like in the newspaper at the café. For now, I still use notebooks, but as I carry one per language I work with, I would love to be able to do it... See more Hello,
Very interesting topic. Just found it while looking for useful apps for my smartphone.
One application that I would love to find is one that could allow me to manage small vocabulary lists. I'm not thinking about huge terminology database. But in everyday life, outside the office, I read terms that I want to remember, like in the newspaper at the café. For now, I still use notebooks, but as I carry one per language I work with, I would love to be able to do it with my phone. Then a nice feature would be to be able to export the term or list for reimporting them in a terminology management system.
Hope to find something alike soon !
Regards,
Pauline ▲ Collapse
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