Many extensions you have installed in the last year or so leave a footprint in the context menu (highlight any word on this page and right-click it, voilà). Maybe you don’t actually need all these addons. Feel free to disable or remove some (CTRL + SHIFT + A gets you to the list).

If you want to keep an addon but not its entries in the context menu, check the options of the particular addon in the same list. Most of the time, you can uncheck a box somewhere to make those entries disappear. I am down to six in my context menu.

The fewer entries, the faster you work. When we translate, be it video games or UN resolutions, we mostly need a quick way to search for a term on different websites. The addon context search simplifies the configuration of your particular needs and works with the search engine box in the upper right corner of your browser.

You can get the pictured drop-down menu by clicking on the icon to the very left (in my case the Google icon). You add new sites by clicking on the same icon while being on the site you wish to add (this all works independently from the addon “context search”). You will then see the option “add site” in this drop-down menu.

With context search installed (and Firefox restarted), you can now right-click on any highlighted word to see this in your context menu:

As you can see, my menu really is down to six entries and I added five search engines so far.

By the by, the keyboard shortcut to the search bar is CTRL + K.

]]> http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2011/03/firefox-4-time-for-a-spring-cleaning/feed/ 1 http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2010/02/noscript-for-opera-pretty-please/ http://www.germanservices.ca/index.php/2010/02/noscript-for-opera-pretty-please/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:16:36 +0000 Patrick http://www.germanservices.ca/?p=357 Sometimes, proprietary is good.

I have been using Firefox now as my primary browser since September of last year, and I was quite happy with it. It crashes more often than Opera and doesn’t come with everything I need (a few addons will rectify this) but overall it is a good tool for my work in video game localization. We localizers need to research a lot, be it in our target language (German here) or in English. We need a reliable, fast and very, very secure browser. Why so secure? As a translator of sometimes obscure expressions, acronyms and just plain weird stuff (I worked on Silent Hill, just to give you an example) we need to click on the links our parents warned us about. Well, they should have.

Those links might lead us to sites running malicious, evil, sneaky and really mean scripts which could make your computer go boom. Or steal your passwords. So every translator who needs more than Leo and is even a little bit concerned about his and his clients security uses Firefox with an addon called NoScript running. NoScript lets the user browse the web without having to fear those scripts. NoScript also allows the user to choose which of the scripts he wants to execute. For the uninitiated: Many popular web sites run a lot of scripts while you are browsing them. A couple of Google scripts, one from Facebook, one from Twitter… The Toronto Star web site runs scripts from eight different sources. It also runs a lot of faster if you use NoScript.

Now, you can disable Javascript in all of the big browsers. However, only with NoScript can you see and select those scripts. This was the reason why I switched to Firefox last September (Opera has nothing like NoScript). Which means, I switched from a proprietary application to a free one. Totally stuck it to the man, yeah!

So I installed all these addons to make Firefox look and work like Opera and never looked back. Well, I do check from time to time if Opera finally has something like NoScript in the newest release so I can dump this bloated and crashing piece of digital garbage called Firefox and return to the man, hug him, nibble gently on his corporate ear lobe and tell him that I will never, ever leave again.

Why all the ear nibbling all of a sudden? Because the addons are not being updated! I rely on one in particular: Hyperwords. Makes it very easy to search specific terms on various web sites, is configurable and in my right-click menu. Just like in Opera. Those lazy bastards who don’t get a penny to write and update Hyperwords haven’t updated it yet for the newest Firefox release. So my work flow is interrupted. I am inconvenienced and won’t stand for it!

Sometimes, proprietary is good.

I use a variety of add-ons to customize Firefox and improve my work flow, some of which I have described below. I also created a collection of these add-ons on the Firefox website.

At the time of writing, seven add-ons are in the list. You can install all of them by clicking on the green “Add to Firefox” buttons. Then restart Firefox.

No Script
Lets you decide with the click of a button which scripts you will allow to execute.

Tab Mix Plus
I really missed a feature to duplicate a tab like in Opera.

Paste and Go 3
Why press a button when you don’t need to?

Speed Dial
Also an Opera feature I missed.

Converter
To go the whole nine meters.

Hyperwords
Highly customizable search tool. Like in Opera, you can create searches by right-clicking in any search box.

Wired Marker
Highlight on web sites. Come back. Still highlighted!

The sentence “Kill ten boars with your bare hands then come back to me and I give you a shiny sword” is no problem for an MMO  displayed on a computer monitor.  But with 85 characters, it might simply be too long for an iPod.

Very often, translators will receive Excel files which were formatted by the client in a way that they will not allow any more characters than acceptable. I personally do not like this method, as I prefer to translate first and then to edit and/or truncate.

With Excel’s LEN function, displaying the character count per cell is very easy, even for people who never created a formula and have the formula bar disabled by default (if this is the case for you, go to VIEW and check Formula Bar).

Let’s say you have an Excel file with three columns. In column A, the client wrote notes and mentions also the character limit for this particular row. Column B contains the original, column C is where you put in your translation.

Something like this:

We know the character limit is 90, but how long is the translation in column 3? Let’s ask Excel. Click the cell to the right of the translation, in our example the adress of this cell is D3. See that little fx button to the left of the formula bar? Click it.  See that field where Excel asks you for a brief descriptionof what you want to do? Let’s write “character count” in here. In the list below, LEN is our top result, it “Returns the number of characters in a text string”. Exactly what we wanted! We select it and click OK.

Brr, now we are supposed to enter “Function Arguments”, looks all very complicated. But Excel only wants to know in which of the cells we want this function applied to. Well, cell C3 of course, our translation. We can type C3 in the field “Text” or simply click cell C3 in our work book. And voilà, the number 93 appears in cell D3, our text is three chars too long! We can edit cell C3 now, as soon as we leave the cell, the character count is updated in D4. That’s it.

But wait, there is more. When you select our function cell D3, you will see a little black square in its bottom right corner. You can click and drag this all the way down your rows and Excel will automatically duplicate the function until you release.

Translating the above sentence is simple enough. Let’s assume for a moment that it belongs to in-game text for a new Star Trek game with many, many “star dates.” In German and other languages, a comma is used instead of a period: 4135,5. It is easy to miss those and even easier to let Word to (most of the) work.

• Open the find and replace window (Ctrl-H)
• Insert ([0-9]).([0-9]) in the Find what text box
• Insert \1,\2 in the Replace with text box
• Click More
• Check Use Wildcards

With this search, Word will only look for periods in between two numbers, so don’t worry about all the punctuation marks in the text. You can replace every period with a comma individually (recommended) or click Replace All.

No, you do not need a CAT tool. Yes, it will make everything faster. Way faster. No, it does not translate for you. Yes, I believe Trados (SDL Trados) is the best out there. No, you don’t need to spend so much money right now.

Why don’t you try one of the free CAT tools out there, just to get an impression? Here is a list of CAT tools, the free ones are on the very top. Try OmegaT, if even works with OpenOffice, which is also free!

Many of the proprietary solutions offer trial/demo versions, I recommend trying Wordfast, with a price of 250 Euro it is affordable and works in tagged documents.

1. Open the document (obviously) and make sure the Trados macros are activated.
2. Press Alt+F8 to bring up the Macros dialog and select “sAddTagStyles” from the list.
3. Run that macro.
4. Press Ctrl+H to display the Find&Replace dialog.
5. In the “Find what” field, enter [*] (that’s Backslash-Opening Bracket-Asterisk-Backslash-Closing Bracket)
6. Click on the “Replace with” field and enter ^& (Circumflex-Ampersand). Alternatively, you can select, ah, heck, dunno how it’s called in English Word versions (“Contents of the Find what box”?), but you’re prolly using a German one anyway – it’s labeled “Suchen nach Text” or “Suchtext” – from the “Special” menu in that dialog.
7. Check the “Pattern Matching”/”Wildcards” (Platzhalterzeichen verwenden) option.
8. Click on “Format”->”Style…” (Formatvorlage…)
9. Select “tw4WinExternal” from the list and click “OK”.
10. If you now click “Replace all”, every occurrence of brackets with text in between will be in gray color and Trados should skip them. Be careful though, if you have square brackets in the text flow itself that you do need to edit/translate, you will not be able to access these anymore using Trados.

While translating, all I need to do is highlight a word, press a short key (this works in all Windows applications, not only MS Word) and XBench will compare this term with glossaries. Adding glossaries to XBench is a matter of seconds. The work flow with XBench is very clean and efficient.

XBench is momentarily in beta but works just fine for my needs. And it also searches user-defined web sites.

Worth a try, free to download: XBench.