Introduction

This Post Mortem is for the purpose of demonstrating the experience I have gained throughout the semester of attending the course, participating in instructional sessions, and completing the various projects assigned throughout the semester. This will be proven through providing access to materials of those assignments and projects with brief explanations of what was completed and learned through each of these assignments. This can be used to provide evidence that I have gain sufficient experience to continue on with my studies and use these skills in my future career in the industry of localization.

SMT Training Project Using Microsoft Custom Translator

For this project, we were given the task of creating and training a SMT engine that would machine translate in the specific field of our choosing. My team, names KOT Translations, decided to create an SMT engine that would be able to translate press releases posted by the US Embassy in Russia from their source language of en-US to ru-RU. We chose this subject field because the website of the US Embassy to Russia has all press releases already translated in both languages, so we knew we had the content necessary to train the engine. Our results were successful in training the engine, yet to our surprise, our initial BLEU score was our strongest.

Please see the attached links for access to our:

initial proposal

updated proposal

project files

presentation on Lessons Learned

Tips for Trados QA (using Regex)

The QA checker in Trados is used to find string patterns throughout the document needing to be translated. This is helpful in making sure the proper text is translated, especially in web-pages and other content filled with code. CAT tools cannot always differentiate between the text and the code, and thus regular expressions (Regex) are used to exclude or include texts from translation. Many times strings are translated when implementing machine translation, breaking the webpage when the target translation is uploaded back to the source. This is where Regex comes into use.

This link from SDL gives some explanation on how to use the QA checker in Trados to specify regular expressions:

SDL Product Help

One example for implementing Regex was our example of using the DD/MM/YYYY date format rather then MM/DD/YYYY. We focused on this because our group’s language pair of Russian uses this format. The expression example can be seen below.

DD/MM/YYYY

Utility Demo Video

One of our assignments was to find a utility tool on the internet and record a screen-capture demonstration video explaining and using that tool. I decided that the most useful tool for me to find would be an open-source clipboard manager.

Clipboard Master

This open-source clipboard manager tool is an all-in-one windows utility that not only stores up to 10,000 of your previous copies, but includes text templates, a screenshot tool, hotkeys, a password manager, and more. It also supports almost all Windows programs. See my demo video below.