Fluency

RantWoman is excited. She spent an an entire webinar listening to info about the new Fluency terminology management / computer-aided translation system and got to hear and make lots of important points without actually saying "but how will the thing work with my screen reader?"

Given where the CAT tool industry leader rest of the market is about this topic, RantWoman decided this is probably a pointless question. Plus, RantWoman would just as soon be able to meet her own accessibility needs like any business person without obliging potential clients to weigh in with possible prejudices.

This does NOT mean RantWoman is going to hurry out and order the product. Nah! RantWoman means to play around with the demo and assess her needs and compare tools and.... In short, assuming ANYTHING proves viable with the screen reader as opposed to screen enlargement, the purchase window might be six months or so, probably disappointing for eager marketers.

Points RantWoman would like any CAT / TM vendor to take into account or at least do more market research to see whether RantWoman is the only person on the planet who thinks about:

--Despite internet efforts in this direction, it is not reasonable to assume segments in a source language will make sense in the same order in a target language. RantWoman is unclear how Fluency options in this area stack up against competitor's but the point keeps coming out whenever RantWoman interacts with the topic of computer-aided translation and terminology management.

--LOTS of people like keyboard shortcuts. Moving hands from keyboard to rodent wastes time and increases people's ability to generate many kinds of errors. The more shortcuts the better, but translators can also be flakey and persnickety: leave us plenty of key combinations so we can make our own custom functions.

--Lots of translators seem to use speech recognition. RantWoman would like a front-end that works with SAPI and with the available tools.

--RantWoman knows translators who check their work by having it read aloud to them. RantWoman thinks it is at least worth investigating whether others would also be to have some kind of text-to-speech engine option built in. RantWoman realizes that the average CAT tool especially in a large organization probably has to deal with many languages and that the availability of TTS engines for all needed languages cannot be assumed, but since when is RantWoman known for reasonable requests. Of course TTS engines for translated content still leaves open the problem of interacting with menus which RantWoman would prefer to do with keyboard shortcuts.

In other words, RantWoman is definitely interested in CAT tools and CAT tools issues. RantWoman thinks the world is still not to what she wants but is willing to consider whether there is enough to add value to RantWoman's life anyway. Sighhhhh.


As far as participating in an online webinar, RantWoman would have been just as happy calling in without bothering to sign in online. The visuals just did not add a lot for RantWoman and RantWoman and RantWoman would just repeat her point about keyboard shortcuts.