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One of
these things is not like the others (it's OK to hum the Sesame Street tune
as you read this): swordfish, stingray, and anchovy.
Correct.
It's "swordfish," which can be both plural and singular, just
like "fish," whereas "stingray" and "anchovy"
are among the few kinds of fish (or: are among the fishes -- that's certainly
the way that Gollum would prefer it) that have distinct plural forms (and
you thought you weren't going to learn anything new in this newsletter!).
There is
something that all three do have in common, however: they are all names of
products of Maxprograms, the Uruguayan company that has developed a TEnT and
other tools for translators.
Swordfish is the translation environment tool, Stingray
is an alignment tool, and the newly released Anchovy is "a
cross-platform glossary editor, based on the open GlossML (Glossary Markup
Language) format."
No, you
say, not yet another acronym and/or terminology exchange format!
You may be
right, but at least take a look at where this is coming from. The guy behind
Maxprograms, Rodolfo Raya, was closely associated with the development of
TBX, the termbase exchange standard developed under the auspices of LISA,
until he felt that the complexity of the standard got out of hand. So he
started his own standard proposal, called GlossML, a very simple XML-based
format that can be used to exchange simple glossaries -- which are, as he
rightly says, the more typical kinds of terminology repositories that
translators use -- between different tools. So far this is not possible,
since, to my knowledge, no other tool supports this format (and, unless an
association like LISA adopts this format, it will not be possible in the
foreseeable future), but still, here it is and you can read all about it in
this article.
Aside from
allowing you to edit your glossaries in the GlossML format, Anchovy
also supports the import and export of TBX and CSV and does a term
extraction from source documents that can be used as the basis of
glossaries (a feature that is very similar to Déjà Vu's Lexicon
feature).
Anchovy is part of the deliverables of Swordfish II,
which has just been released in a preview version. As you might have
guessed, it is the next incarnation of Swordfish, which in itself
stems from an earlier version of Heartsome, the company for which
Rodolfo used to work.
In my book
and this newsletter I have commented previously on the similarities between
Heartsome and Swordfish, and these are still there, but there
is a clear move toward a more distinctive look and feel between the tools,
and the feature set also increasingly separates them.
As far as
the new look and feel, Swordfish's interface is more integrated now
(gone are the days of trying to juggle four independent panes within a
larger window -- they are part of a single window now) and the icons and
the presentation of the translatables have received some overhaul.
Regarding the more important new and distinctive functional features (aside
from the inclusion of Anchovy), the internal database for TMs has
been changed (and is presumably faster) and good support for the Trados
XLIFF format has now joined Swordfish's unique support of TXML, Wordfast
Pro's and Globalsight's internal translation format (see the ad
in this newsletter for Wordfast Classic and the announcement of its
upcoming support for TXML)
Now may be
a good time to start talking about Swordfish without always feeling
the need to have to mention Heartsome and vice versa, and to start
viewing them as truly separate applications that both look and function
differently.
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