In our sixth episode of Speaking of Translation, we discuss how translators can benefit from free and open source software. We discuss why you should care about free and open source software, how it can help you as a translator and specific FOSS programs you may be interested in using in your practice.
Click on the subscribe page to get this episode of the podcast on your iPod or MP3 player, or click below to listen to it now or later.
Listen online:
[Note: We had a request from a listener to make it so that each file can be directly downloaded (right click/download as file); however, I can't seem to get this to work through our MP3 host (libsyn.com) - if any of you have ideas how to fix this, please let us know! Thanks! Eve]
Duration: 25:03
Links mentioned in this episode:
The Free Software Foundation
OpenOffice.org: free and open source office suite
Linux for Translators discussion list
Linux for Translators website
OmegaT: free and open source translation memory tool
OmegaT users group
Sage plugin: a feed reader for Firefox
We are always interested in what our listeners have to say, so please feel free to add a comment, email us or call us (see information at right).
Well, checking the source code for this page, I can see that the link to the MP3 file is:
http://cdn4.libsyn.com/smcpodcasting/Episode_6_-_Free_and_Open_Source_Software_for_Translators.mp3?nvb=20100205110527&nva=20100206111527&t=0d355ffaf807c7e014f29
Type this into the address bar and a download option should appear. Maybe you could just put this link at the end of your post.
Thanks, Roberto. I actually tried that previously. It does not work for me that on either my Mac or my PC when the link is live. It just takes me directly to the QuickTime icon and begins playing it. However, I read somewhere that this is a function of the browser. In any case, I will keep working on it. Thanks for your suggestion.
FYI, Roberto’s file link works just fine for me (PC/IE). Can’t wait to listen to this discussion of my fave topic: free stuff!
I just noticed that the RSS feed is available; this is quite sufficient I think for downloading purposes.
Anyway, loved the show. Entertaining, informative… What more can we ask for?!
I downloaded OmegaT and am evaluating it.
Looking forward to next podcast. (BTW do you think you could maybe look at Proz and especially totally free ALTERNATIVES to Proz in some future podcast?)
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for your comments on the show and the RSS feed - good point! Regarding your suggestion, we will look into that. You mean free alternatives to which services? I am not a paying member of Proz, so want to make sure we get to the point you are interested in, if we do decide to cover it. It would be interesting to do some interviews on that….thanks for the idea.
Thanks for the comments on the show and the RSS feed - you are right, that seems fine, actually. Regarding Proz, what services are you paying for in particular? If we do decide to cover that in a future show, we’d want to be sure to address what you were interested in (and other sub-topics too, I am sure). I am not a paying member of Proz, and don’t think Corinne is either, but it would be interesting to interview different people who are knowledgeable about this topic for a podcast. Thanks for the idea!
I was anxiously waiting for this episode, ’cause I’m all for-open source (and maybe free!) software to help improve our productivity. I’m downloading it right away, so I can listen to it tomorrow during my running routine
Great job as usual. You BOTH are the Melissa Blocks of the translation world! Love the Flash animation blocker — thanks for the tip. Must download now, as I really dislike Flash most of the time. Will also check GNU Cash to see if it can do something that my Translation Office 3000 (fee-based, yikes) can’t do. Keep up the wonderful work!
I look forward to download this episode, since I’m already a opensource translator. Maybe you will cover something I didn’t know
Very interesting information! It’s been a while since I heard about OmegaT for the first time and I never gave it a try. I think I will now.
BTW, I downloaded your podcast from your RSS feed (I use Google Reader) and it worked perfect!
Hi, some apps you mentioned that weren’t linked to in the post:
http://www.gnucash.org/ GNU Cash
http://www.gimp.org/ GIMP
Also, you might be interested in Virtaal, not as extensive as OmegaT, but has some cool features: http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/virtaal/index
Oh, and on OCR software, first of all, there’s an OCR engine called Tesseract, which is free & open source software . The program itself is command-line based, but there are several graphical user interfaces that try to make it more friendly (search for gImageReader, gscan2pdf or VietORC).
There is also an OCR platform called OCRopus which is quite modular, it can use Tesseract as its OCR engine, or its own engine (or even handwriting recognition engines); it also does layout analysis (separating two-column text, images, figures, etc.)
Actually, reading up on this, I’m finding lots of free & open source OCR stuff for GNU/Linux. The KDE scanner program Kooka apparently supports the free OCR engines GOCR and OCRAD and the non-free KADMOS, but unfortunately not Tesseract, which according to the reviews I find seems to have the best performance :-/
Absolutely……. we should care about open source software………
And really it can help as a translator and specific FOSS programs….This is really intresting…….
Nice podcast! It’s always useful to have some insight on open source software. Hope the industry looks to it more seriously in the coming, because at the moment it relies solely on the big players.