.. and welcome to the tutorial:

"Translating with OmegaT"

"The Basics"

First things first:

OmegaT is a free and open CAT-tool.

... and CAT stands for: Computer Assisted Translation

This means that OmegaT can *not* translate any word by itself,

but it does a great job supporting *you*.

Here are the steps for this tutorial:

First we are going to prepare a source document.

Then we switch over to OmegaT

and create an empty project....

where we import the source-document into.

Then we tweak the project a little bit,

just to make life easier (later on).

And finally we are able to translate the text.

And this gonna happen segment by segment.

(but we will use some time-jumping technique)

In the final step we will export the translated segments

into the target document.

And the resulting document should look a lot like the original document.

... apart from the translations of course :-)

So, this is the sourcetext-file here.

Unfortunately it is in a strange closed-source format,

which OmegaT can not process.

Luckily, both LibreOffice and OpenOffice

can import that format with good results.

And that is how it looks like.

As I fancy aircrafts, this tutorial's content is a P-51,

which can be seen here on the right side.

This document itself was created just for this tutorial,

but most of the text and all those pictures

were taken directly from Wikipedia.

As one can see, we have headings here,

and the text contains bold

and now ...

also italic text.

Here is a list with a few items,

and also a small table.

All of those layout-changes have no special meanings,

they were just created to demonstrate

a half-way complex and slightly technical text-document.

Now let us save it in a format that OmegaT can read.

My choice here is the OpenOffice text-document (ODT).

We'll save it ... done.

And we can quit the program.

Here you can see now

the original file and the OpenOffice-file.

Which will be opened now in OmegaT! ^_^

Now lets take a look at OmegaT.

Since each Operating System has a different install-procedure,

I will not cover the installation in this tutorial.

(Sorry for that and good luck - but really,

it is not that difficult :-) )

However,

once you installed the software and started it up for the first time,

you will see this screen.

It is the unaltered Welcome-Screen of OmegaT,

providing some guide here on the left side.

However, nothing was loaded yet, and no text was entered,

so we can not translate yet.

On the left side is the main-window where all the translation will take place,

while on the right side there are the helpers

and tools which will support you.

But before we can do anything useful here, we will need some source text.

So let us create a project and import the source document.

So let us create the new project.

First you will see a lot of options,

but the most important ones are the source language (English)

and the target language (German).

For now I will un-check the "enable sentence level segmenting"

I like the paragraph-segmenting better,

but please try it out.

All the details below we leave untouched,

and now we have an empty project.

It is nothing in there, so we import.

source file:

and as said before - OmegaT can read OpenOffice-Documents.

So let us pick this one.

And "et voilà" - here we go.

As you can see, there is no layout or anything,

we don't need to take care of the layout.

It is just plain text translating.

Interesting though, OmegaT divided our text into 16 segments,

which are paragraphs or sentences.

Okay, I can jump to any segment by double-clicking it.

Now segment number three,

here number five,

I will translate it.

And you can see here the original source-language text disappeared

and was replaced by my translation.

A helper

- which you should use *always* -

is the "mark untranslated segments",

it will color any text blue, which was not translated yet.

This is a great helper, you should be sure to have no blue text

before finishing the project.

But enough of that.

Let us save it and lets quit.

Back at the filesystem-level you will recognize

a newly created directory,

besides the original text-document [DOC] and the converted [ODT].

So, within this directory

we will have the source folder

and here you can find the original text which was imported

and the target folder, which is still empty.

The glossary folder is quite useful,

and I am going to drop some files here,

which will help us later in the translation.

So this folder contains everything that belongs to the project,

even the imported document.

So you can compress (zip) it and send it over to

a friend or colleague,

and [s]he can work on your project.

Back in OmegaT we now reopen our formerly saved P-51 Demo

project, and you can see: it still has 16 segments

and one segment was translated already.

That is also not blue anymore,

this one here.

In order to make it more readable,

we will increase the font-size to 24

And ... I also like to have the translation tips here,

those are markers, which come in handy,

as soon as some glossary item was detected by OmegaT.

... as here!!

It is marked with a blue underlining,

and the glossary-entry ...

is visible in the lower right.

Here.

So.

And you will also notice the markers here.

They look a little bit like HTML-tags,

When I said that you don't need to take care of any layout

I lied.

Because

this is the way OmegaT handles the stuff

when it comes to the layout.

You don't need to take care of tables or stuff like that,

but as long as it's formation was in the text,

you have to use those tags.

You don't need to know what exactly they are,

whether bold or italic,

because OmegaT tracks them.

So you just need to reuse them around the same piece of text

as in the source and everything else will be fine

in the final target document.

Okay,

so basically thats it.

And with that you can work, you can start translating

and ....

don't forget to save often,

but OmegaT autosaves.

While I continue to translate here,

you will do the time-jump. :)

Welcome back!

I'm almost done here.

Now let's take a look at the project.

I will decrease the font size to get a better view.

And you will notice here the blue marker,

showing us that there is still some original text

on no German translation available.

We will ignore this for now,

but as you will see when we create

the translated documents we receive no warning.

So again, please use this one here

to immediately detect any untranslated segments.

But for now we created the translated document.

So let us quit here,

and jump into the project folder.

The "target" directory is the place to go now.

And, et voilà -

there is a OpenOffice document.

And, as you can see,

the layout is almost the same.

We have the picture here on the right.

We have headings, we have the some bold text,

we have the italic number here,

the list and the table.

In the middle we have some English text.

This is the only piece of text

... the spell-checker is not going crazy about.

But nevertheless it is really impressive,

and I liked to work with OmegaT because of that.

And I hope you enjoy it too, and you like it too.