Thursday, March 20, 2008

Evolution in the Open Source world

OmegaT is a great open source CAT tool. It is written in Java, it has a growing group of users and Sabine Cretella, who is my weather cock for what is happening in this space, has been a long time champion of the software. As OmegaT makes sense to me for several of the things I am involved in, I have invested and I have been looking for funding to expand its functionality.

Yesterday I was astounded by Sabine. "Anaphraseus", she says, "is a CAT tool that does the things that are critical to me. It allows me to translate into Neapolitian properly; it allows me to enter nap, the ISO-639-3 code and consequently I am able to build my translation memory without having to remember what code I used in stead. They do not have a proper TMX yet, but they are working on it. Now given that I can finally work properly in my language, who cares that I do not have it yet?"

Anaphraseus used to be called "Open Wordfast" and makes use of the Open Office macro tool. It uses the same translation memory format like Wordfast, it supports text segmentation and it is great for proof reading.

Sabine has been investigating Anaphraseus's functionality and so far she is quite pleased. When I asked her why the change, she said that she had been asking for the ISO 639-3 support for almost two years, it was not forthcomming and Anaphaseus is as good for the job.
Thanks,
Gerard

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