LangFM podcast episode featuring Interpreters' Help

Yann and I (Benoit), the two creators of Interpreters' Help, were the hosts on an episode of Alexander Drechsel's podcast! Listen to it if you want to learn more about us and the project! 
Alexander Drechsel's podcast: http://www.adrechsel.de/podcast

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

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.

Introducing Interpreters’ Help, terminology software

Hello, my name is Benoit Werner. I’m happy to start this blog.

I would like to introduce the solution for interpreters that I created with my friend Yann Plancqueel and my sister Céline Corsini.

Yann and I are both programmers and my sister is a conference interpreter.

A few years back, she asked if I could develop a piece of software that would allow quick terminology search while in the booth. She also had 2 constraints: the software needed to work on Mac and it had to work offline because she didn’t always have access to the Internet in the booth.

I started thinking about how I could build the software but I never had time to actually do it. Last year, in-between projects, I had some free time that allowed me to work on this task.

I checked existing solutions on the market and I noticed that most of them were Windows based. Which makes sense as most interpreters are using Windows. But at the same time, many are shifting to Apple’s Mac or iPad.

And what surprised me is that the existing Windows solutions claim to work on Mac. Taking a closer look, I figured it requires buying a virtual machine and running Windows on your Mac. Unfortunately, this is not user friendly and people who are using the software like that constantly complain about various problems.

Another issue I thought about was where to store the database of glossaries, because if it is on the interpreter’s computer, in the event of the disk crashing, everything is lost. And many interpreters build up their glossaries since college and have hundreds of them.

Some existing solutions on the market address this issue by recommending storing the database on Dropbox. Again, this is not a bulletproof solution, because a file on Dropbox can easily be deleted or an account can be closed without remembering that the file was there.

And this is not user friendly either.

So, with my friend Yann, we tried to find a solution to fix all these issues, a solution that would also take advantage of all mobile capabilities of today that were not available a few years back. And that’s how Interpreters’ Help was born.

We decided to build a web-based tool to create/update/store/search interpreters’ glossaries. The glossaries are stored and automatically backed up on the cloud.

To access glossaries from the booth without Internet, which according to interpreters we have talked to is not so much of an issue anymore, we created a native Mac application that synchronizes automatically the glossaries on the desktop. As of today, we don’t have a Windows application, but if there is demand, we will rapidly release one.

We also plan to make a native iPad and Android version if there is demand for it.

Being a web-based application gives us the possibility to go a step further and allows collaboration on glossaries and also sharing.

We would greatly appreciate if you could give it a try and help us improve the idea. We are not charging anything for now and we don’t ask for credit card information upon registration.

We are actually still trying to figure out a fair business model that could allow us to continue working on the software without worrying about the money. If you have ideas for us, please don't hesitate to share.

The site: http://www.interpretershelp.com