Introducing paying plans

We are reaching the end of our beta period.

Many thanks to all of you who have used Interpreters’ Help, sent us feedback, and helped us to develop and improve it.

Now, to keep the project alive and to provide the features you asked for – in order to take it to the next level – we need to monetize it.

We have come up with four different plans we hope you will find fair. We have done our best to keep our prices as low as possible to ensure that people continue to use Interpreters’ Help and that we are able to continue to develop it more freely.

Our paying plans allow you to:

• create a certain amount (quota) of “private glossaries” limited to 3000 lines each
• upload and store files (glossary imports, assignment material, or any other files you wish to store on our cloud)
• include your profile in our Interpreters’ Directory (starting with the Medium plan)

Without a paying subscription, your “private glossaries” become read-only, which means you cannot edit them or give permission to edit them to anyone else.

The BoothMate app is still available for free since it is read-only. You may also continue to manage assignments and clients free of charge.

Finally, you will continue to have full control over your data since you can download an Excel version of your glossaries anytime.

Users of the beta version: What if you already created many glossaries and uploaded a lot of files?

If you’ve already been using Interpreters’ Help, all of your glossaries, and any files you uploaded up until now are exempted from the quota. This means that even if you already have 200 glossaries, you can start with the Micro plan, which allows for 10 glossaries; those you created previously won’t count towards this limit. They will, however, be read-only, and you will need a subscription in order to be able to edit them.

Also, all beta users can include their profile in the Interpreters’ Directory for a full year free of charge without subscribing to a paying plan.

Free public use

You can continue to create and edit "public glossaries" completely free of charge.

Note, however, that we have added a size limit for glossaries you create for free on Interpreters’ Help: they can only have up to 500 lines.


We hope you will continue to use and support Interpreters’ Help!
By subscribing to a paying plan, you will support the development of new tools for all interpreters while also giving yourself an incentive to manage your glossaries online and improve your workflow.

Plans and pricing: https://interpretershelp.com/pricing

Help page on subscriptions: https://interpretershelp.com/help/subscription

Interpreters’ glossaries best practices

This is a follow up post to the previous one, in which I asked your thoughts on what are good practices when building a glossary.

This time I’m going to tell you what we, at Interpreters’ Help, believe is good practice. This is also what is taught at certain schools.

A good glossary has:

- A precise name in opposition to broad one

- A short description

- No more than 300 lines

- Short cell content (no more than 10 words)

Applied to Interpreters’ Help:

- It has relevant tags

- Use columns already available in the list whenever possible, as it provides coherence between your different glossaries

To the question: is it better to have one big glossary or a lot of small ones ?

We think it’s better to have a lot of small glossaries and we have built Interpreters’ Help around that idea.

While only one glossary has the advantage of having everything in one place, it has also downsides:

- if you lose it, you lose everything

- A big file means a slower search, more noise in the search results, more doubles

- It acts rather like a database, it looses the specificity

Having multiple glossaries makes it easier to keep a history of glossaries for a specific assignment, makes it easier to reuse and to collaborate on.

On Interpreters’ Help, we currently have two tools that let you search through all your glossaries, select or deselect a glossary really quickly to be or not added in your search.

• « BoothMate » a dedicated Mac OSX that let you search without the need of an Internet connection.
• « Global search » which is an online search (it’s currently in beta, available here: https://interpretershelp.com/global_search when signed in)

Here is an article from AIIC on the subject: http://aiic.net/page/7151/a-survey-of-glossary-practice-of-conference-interpreters

Glossaries best practices

Hi folks! Today a blog post asking for your input: in order to improve Interpreters’ Help and to understand better how most interpreters work, I would like you to tell me what good practices are - in your opinion - when creating a glossary.

What is a ‘good' glossary, efficient to memorize, look up in the booth, or archive for later use?

• How many lines should a glossary have? What’s the top limit?
• How many words/characters should a cell have? What’s the top limit?
• Should a glossary have a description? How long?
• How do you efficiently name a glossary?
• Should a glossary have tags?
• If yes, what’s the best way to manage tags?
• Is it better to have one big glossary or a lot of small ones?

Please comment on this post, let us know if there are online resources answering some of these questions. What is taught in interpreting schools on that topic?

On Interpreters’ Help, we see all sorts of glossaries: from 40 lines with 1 or 2 terms per cell to 10 000 lines with cells having paragraphs of text.

The latter type represents a big challenge in terms of performance, and to be able to accept these glossaries we have to make concessions to the users' experience because we have to design the search page a certain way.

Thanks in advance!

Benoît Werner
Interpreters' Help co-founder

New year, new Interpreters’ Help!

Happy New Year 2015!

Over the past 8 months, we have been working on revamping Interpreters’Help.

We have taken into account the feedback we have received, (thank you so much for that) and we have tried to compile your wishes in a new website, with an improved design.

Without further ado, let’s see what’s new.

The new Interpreters’ Help aims to be more social. You now have a public profile page with all the info you want to share e.g. your city, biography, education, language combination, website, etc… 

It also features the glossaries you share publicly.

You can interact with other members by following them, for example if you like their glossaries.

You can also message them and grow your network.

Introducing "Glossary Farm"

"Glossary Farm" is composed of glossaries shared publicly by members. You can easily search for public glossaries on any topic. You can interact by starring a glossary or following his author.

If you are a member, you can copy a public glossary to your own account and use it privately and edit it for your own use.

Many of you mentioned they like the idea of sharing glossaries for 2 major reasons: 

• to be able to use glossaries made by others and save on prep time 
• because they put so much work into their glossaries, they sometimes feel frustrated that they might use them only once. 

Now there is a place to share glossaries on the web, to search for them even without an account on the website. Check it out.

The glossary page

We have focused most of our work on the page that shows your glossary.

All interactions with the glossary are made from this page:

Edit terms with a double-click (no separate page anymore).

You can now 

• create a custom labelled column 
• reorder columns 
• add a short description to a glossary.

Themes have been replaced by tags.

Search

The design has been improved with a bigger search input.
Search is not case or accent sensitive.

It now supports substitutions like:

à, á, â, å	a
ä, æ	ae
ç	c
é, è, ê, ë	e
í, î, ï	i
ó, ô, ø	o
ö	oe
œ	oe
ú, û	u
ü	ue
ß	ss

Contact us if you’d like more substitutions.

Import terms from file

The glossary importer has been completely rewritten. 

To import a glossary, use the "Import terms" button, on the glossary page.

• You can import terms from multiple files.
• You can see an history of imported files.
• We securely store the files in your account so that you can retrieve them later.
• You can revert an import.

Learn more

Organize a team for an assignment, share info and material

You can now create an assignment, fill all the information about it, attach glossaries, attach files and share it with other members, "the team". The team can comment on the assignment.

Learn more

What’s next on our roadmap

- We are working on a "BoothMode" page that will allow you to perform term search on all your glossaries the same way BoothMate does.

- "Public glossaries contribution": a way for anyone to help improve public glossaries.

- BoothMate for iOS (iPad version of BoothMate) 

- Glossary learning mode (on iPad, iPhone)

We need your input and your opinion to optimize the software for you. Don’t hesitate to send us feedback.