What’s New in MultiTrans Prism
Prism represents MultiCorpora's fully integrated Translation Management System product space. MultiCorpora's innovative solution components, used worldwide by project managers, translators, and terminologists to efficiently accomplish their daily tasks, are now housed under one intuitive user interface and unified by a common, more browser-like look and feel.
Prism is built on a redesigned, state-of-the-art code base to enhance security, performance, and usability. Previous versions MultiTrans were noted for being highly-scalable, but scalability has been further extended by implementation of full 64-bit server support. Interaction with 3rd party systems is now carried out via Web Services which, for example, simplifies building of connectors to CMS systems.
Keen attention has been paid to customer wishes learned about through interaction with users during regular surveys and customer reviews, through feedback coming through technical support, and from feature requests derived from proposal opportunities.
Following is a list of just some of the benefits provided by MultiCorpora Prism and its three core modules: Prism TextBase TM, Prism TermBase, and Prism Flow.
Comprehensive Metadata Support including Metadata Editor
Implementation of comprehensive metadata support has greatly increased the range of capabilities provided by the MultiTrans Prism TextBase TM. Metadata is supported at multiple levels of granularity: TextBase TMs, documents, translation units, and segments. This support enables users to choose any standard segment matching options, to apply a wide range of custom penalties and bonuses, and to leverage metadata field state information to create useful custom results with prioritization filters.
A metadata editor enriches the flexibility of the new metadata support. Metadata in the form of system, pick-list, and text fields can be defined when creating translation memories. This also expands import and export functionality and therefore compatibility with other translation memory systems.
Leveraging the new metadata support allows users much greater flexibility to assign penalties and bonuses to segments. Typical penalties or bonuses include:
- Unconfirmed Alignments – allows user to assign a penalty for any TextBase TM match made from a non-confirmed alignment.
- Formatting differences – allows user to assign a penalty to a TextBase TM match if the content matches the source segment but the formatting is not identical.
- Segments containing placeables – allows user to assign a penalty to a TextBase TM match that contains either a number that may have been automatically replaced or formatted, or a replacement that contains a user-defined placeable.
- Reverse translations – allows user to penalize any reverse translation (a segment where the current target language was the original source language).
- Indirect translations – will allow user to penalize any indirect translation (a segment where neither the current source nor target language was the original source language).
- In-context matches – will allow user to assign a bonus to any TextBase TM matches where the surrounding context is also identical to the document being translated.
- User-defined penalties and bonuses – Manage Metadata filters allows the user to assign more specific penalties or bonuses based on any metadata value of their choosing.
Inline Formatting Recording, Display, Matching, and Replacement
In-line formatting such as bold, italic and underlined text found in documents or TMX imports into TextBases are now retained and displayed in the TextBase, Translation Agent, and XLIFF Editor. Formatting tag proxies may be easily located and moved into the desired place in the target language using the XLIFF Editor, while the underlying tags are protected from corruption. Formatting found in exact match segments within TextBases will also be automatically applied to target language segments.
Enhanced XLIFF Editor
MultiTrans Prism includes an XLIFF Editor that has been redesigned for ease-of-use. The XLIFF Editor is now available as an alternative translation and editing environment for more formats. When used in conjunction with the Prism's Translation Agent, it provides an uncomplicated but highly powerful work area for translators and revisors alike. The XLIFF Editor may also be used as a standalone editing environment for in-country reviews, or by external translators who can work completely offline or can interact with the MultiTrans Prism server over the Internet using MultiCorpora's Fetch-from-Web functionality.
The XLIFF Editor's preview function has been expanded to support: doc, docX, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx, and xml files in conjunction with an associated xsl style sheet. In addition to the aforementioned preview formats, the XLIFF Editor supports a number of industry-standard, XML-based file formats such as INX, MIF, ODF, and customized XML using the built-in XML Mapping Editor.
Also new to the XLIFF Editor is a Quality Assurance Framework that supports a collection of QA modules to which further modules will be added on an ongoing basis. Current QA modules expose untranslated segments, missing tags, and placeables. Translation units produced by exact matches fuzzy matches, or machine translation may also be isolated for greater scrutiny. Terminology may be validated against TermBases, and documents created with mark up languages such as HTML and XML may be verified as well-formed. QA checks may be performed "live" during translation or generated in the format of a linked report at any time, for example as a validation of conformity upon either import into the XLIFF Editor or export from the XLIFF Editor to the original file format.
Through its extensive TMX support, the new XLIFF Editor's usefulness can be extended into maintenance of translation memories. Its ability to open, modify, and save TMX files enables the XLIFF Editor to perform QA checks on existing memories, including global search and replace tasks, identification of nontranslated segments, validation of terminology and numbers, and spell-checking in additional languages.
Enhanced Capability for Pretranslation and Translation Package Creation
MultiTrans Prism is now capable of pretranslating many files simultaneously. If the XLIFF Editor is designated as the pretranslation editor, pretranslation of all file formats supported by the XLIFF Editor is possible. If pretranslation of an MS-Word document is carried out using the XLIFF Editor, users will receive a package containing a copy of the source document, a pretranslated XLIFF file, and a pretranslated target language Word file. TM content can be exported in TMX format directly from the Analysis Agent, easily creating transferable project memories.
Prism TextBase TM and TermBase Web
TermBase Web has evolved to include features including full management capabilities in the form of a browser-based web application that offers functionality comparable to that of the MultiTrans Prism desktop client. These include filtering, imports/exports, and fields management accessible to the users with proper security rights. The TextBase Web has now also been upgraded to have the same look and feel as the TermBase Web.
Automated Task Integration in Prism Flow: Analysis, Pretranslation and TextBase TM Update
Analysis, Pretranslation, and TextBase Building & Updating are now built right into MultiTrans Prism Flow. Workflow sequences that can range from manual to fully automated tasks may be created. Results from analysis as well as pretranslated documents are available right within the Prism Flow workflow, directly interact with customer and vendor price lists, and are automatically routed to the users who require them.
More Flexible Licensing
Licensing has been made more flexible to facilitate outsourcing models that use MultiTrans Prism Flow as a project management hub together with the Prism TextBase and TermBase servers as the central repository for linguistic assets. These include, for example, floating licenses for TextBase and TermBase Web access.
Over and above access to TextBase and TermBase Web, and in contrast to many competitive technologies, external translators no longer require their own licenses in order to work with MultiTrans Prism Server TextBases and TermBases. Service providers operating the Prism Server may purchase floating connector licenses that allow external subcontractors to access TextBases and TermBases via the Translation Agent. The subcontractors may use MS Word or the MultiTrans Prism XLIFF Editor at no cost to themselves.
Usability Enhancements
Seasoned users of previous versions of MultiCorpora products will enjoy the multiple usability enhancements included in Prism. In addition to the easy-to-use and flexible XLIFF Editor, which has been a real hit with early Prism evaluators, some of the added usability features are:
- Updated, context-sensitive online help.
- TextBase TM creation and import has been consolidated into one convenient new dialog with drag-and-drop support, reducing the number of required clicks to create or update a TextBase.
- Opening of TextBases and TermBases has been redesigned into one convenient screen, reducing the number of clicks required to start working.
- Terminology extraction is now separated from the TextBase TM build process, and can be scheduled during evenings.
- Scheduled operations are automatically displayed for both local and server operations.
- Building and appending of local TextBases now runs under a separate thread, so users are not prevented from continuing to use MultiTrans while these processes run.
Greater Interoperability through SRX, TBX and TMX Level 2 Standards Compliance
In order to facilitate interoperability and data exchange, MultiTrans Prism supports SRX. SRX files from other TM systems may be used, ensuring proper and identical segmentation for the highest possible match rate when using TMs imported from those systems. Furthermore, SRX enables the flexibility to customise segmentation rules for custom cases and adds more intelligent abbreviations matching capabilities to enhance out-of-the-box segmentation.
Prism's support for the industry standard TBX (TermBase eXchange) file format ensures portability of complex terminological data and metadata between MultiTrans Prism TermBases and other terminology management systems that support TBX.
TMX import and export are TMX level 2 compliant. This facilitates interoperability with other TM systems, preserving metadata and formatting during import and export.
