Since moving to Canada, I've had to hang up my proverbial shingle as a freelance web developer. Despite having a steady client, I decided a couple years back that it would be a good idea to have a Yellow Pages (a.k.a. Pages Jaunes) listing. The calls are usually interesting. (Well, not the run-of-the-mill cold-calls from people who have obviously done ZERO research. I mean...dudes. It's pronounced "grahnd deeg," m'kay? kthxbi) Last Friday was definitely the most so, with someone looking for translation software. The catch was that it needed to work within formatted documents like Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint.
In other words, Google Translate wouldn't cut it.
As a favour, I contacted a couple folks I know who do a lot of bilingual writing, but aren't themselves translators. They generously shared with me the benefit of their experiences. (You know who you are. Thanks again, ladies!)
Hopefully those helped out my caller of last week. But I couldn't fail to appreciate a bit of irony in how the "silo-ing" of the big players sustains cottage industries. In this case, Google has its translation feature and Google Docs. But Microsoft is still the gatekeeper when it comes to business documents (particularly when you're leery of entrusting the corporate crown jewels to the cloud servers of a company that's getting stalkier by the day).
Grethor will open a Disneyland before we see Microsoft and Google collaborate on anything that important. Thus, a small company that's just interested in making a living can duct tape over the problem of converting human languages back and forth within a crust of proprietary gibberish markup. Not unlike birds cleaning the teeth of crocodiles. (The crocodiles, naturally, being smarter than corporate behemoths because they know a win-win situation when they see one and cooperatively keep their jaws open rather than trying to eat said birds.)
Similarly, I'll be spending another day tomorrow cranking out "duct-tape" code meant to work around the differences between the reality distortion fields created by the Microsoftverse and the Googleverse. The Handyman's Secret Weapon is not unknown in the programming world. And for much the same reasons--trust me, Red Green would totally have my back on this.
