Making TM-Town Accessible for All Translators

Analyze your work offline, get discovered online

In a previous blog post back in September we promised to take steps to make TM-Town better even for those translators who do not have work to load.

Since that post we have worked hard to make that a reality by:

• Updating profiles to give all translators a beautiful home on the web.
• Continuing to improve our sample source text library to make it easy to submit a sample translation in one's field of expertise.

However, these changes were not enough. There still remained a large gap between those that had work to load and those who could only load a sample translation on TM-Town.

We put on our thinking caps and imagined -

"What if there were a way by which translators could reap the benefits of Nakōdo without ever having to load a translation memory file to the Internet?"

Impossible you might say. Well, today we are here to announce exactly that - with our new desktop application a translator can now get discovered through Nakōdo based on their prior work without that work ever leaving their computer.

How it works

Deshi, our new offline desktop TM analyzer, allows translators to get discovered through our Nakōdo search engine without having to actually load any aligned translation units or any full segments. The system works as follows:

1. Download the desktop application.
2. Load a translation memory (TM) file into the desktop application and your TM file will be analyzed offline.
3. The desktop application creates a synopsis file which is just a plain text file with the file extension “.town”.
4. Load the synopsis file into your TM-Town account. This allows you to get credit in your profile for your work and the potential to be discovered in TM-Town’s Nakōdo search engine based on the content of your work. No aligned translation units or full segments are sent to TM-Town.

What exactly is included in the synopsis file that you will be loading into your TM-Town account? This plain text file contains the following information:

• A count of the number of translation units in your TM file
• A count of the number of segments in your TM file
• A word count
• The language pair of your TM file
• The top terms from your file
• An encrypted checksum of the file (to ensure one can't 'cheat' and change data in the file)

Further Motivation

While our primary motivation for creating this desktop application was to help translators who may not have work to load to TM-Town, we also had a secondary motivation. There has been some criticism levied at us around the inter-webs implying that our intentions and future plans are quite nefarious.

What the critics are saying:

Do you want to give thousands or millions of your translation units for free [of charge] to men behind it? [1]

I am personally very suspicious about your site's long-term objectives, Kevin, but maybe that's just because I'm a cynical old woman - I'm suspicious of Google and Facebook, etc. even though most people don't seem to be. [2]

I think it’s obvious the whole point of TM Town is gathering TM content. That’s it. This interface is just a decoy (and a very unprofessional one, at that). [3]

No guarantee... that my TMs wouldn't be exploited in any way. I'm not calling this a "scam", but just people telling me "we won't do it" is not enough for me. There's just too much at stake. [4]

What is the use then of uploading your TMs to the site? Perhaps a client or two in exchange for the website owner getting full access to all your language pairs, all your work nicely aligned, all your terminology, for free, and doing whatever they want with that? Perhaps the TMs are not shared with anyone, but how about the owners of the website, do they access and mine the TMs? There are usually years of hard work behind translation memories and I am only willing to share mine with a selected group of colleagues when needed. Perhaps I am old-school and suspicious, but clouds - I still prefer those in the sky. [5]

In my opinion the above skepticism is not only natural but warranted. TM-Town is still rather new and with Nakōdo we are doing something that has never been done before in the industry. Having said that though, I also think we have continually taken steps to improve TM-Town and address these points. The new desktop application goes even further to address the above critics. Now, a translator can 100% benefit from Nakōdo and our traditional directory search without ever uploading a single segment or translation unit.

Hopefully this is further proof that we are squarely in the corner of the translator.

Job Messaging System

How does loading work help you on TM-Town (either loading work the traditional way or through the new desktop application system)? Simply, it improves your chances of getting discovered. Loading work helps you get discovered through Nakōdo, our first-of-its-kind translator search which returns specialists based on their prior work. Loading work also helps improve your standing in our traditional directory search which ranks translators based on the work they have loaded.

On TM-Town visitors searching for translators are free to message translators and engage with them as they wish. TM-Town takes no cut of any translation jobs or clients found through our site (our business model is explained here). To date, the following is an analysis of the types of messages flowing through TM-Town's job messaging system:

• Agency: 44.4% (~25% specific orject | ~75% long term collaboration)
• End client: 28.8%
• Peer-to-peer: 26.6%

More good news is on the way as well. Nate is hard at work on a complete redesign of TM-Town's job messaging system and it is going to be great! It will be more transparent and much easier to use.

A Final Note

Make no mistake - for those who do entrust their work with us, TM-Town offers many great features that allow you to safely and securely leverage your prior work...and we have many more features in the pipeline.

Benefits of loading work:

• You have a (backup) copy of your TMs in the cloud
• You can search one/more than one/all your TMs simultaneously
• You can search TMs you have loaded to TM-Town from within your CAT tool (currently supports CafeTran and a Trados Studio 2015 plugin is in beta)
• You can align documents
• You can create terminology glossaries from terms extracted from your TMs
• You can collaborate with other translators
• You can sell your terminology glossaries on the TM-Town Terminology Marketplace
• and more...

You can download the new desktop application here. If you do not yet have a TM-Town account be sure to sign up and give it a try.

Kevin Dias
TM-Town Developer

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