Freelance Translation Engineering Services
I have a great deal of experience with the
technological aspects of translation, and am offering my services to agencies as well as any
translator who wants all the benefits of TM technology but desires to spend
their time translating, rather than dealing with technical details.
I offer:
- Extensive experience in using VBA/Word to mark up
translatable/internal/external text for use in Trados.
- Deep knowledge in support and engineering for ForeignDesk, a suite of powerful translation memory programs which once was proprietary software and now has been made open source. I spent three years working extensively with this software; I can do everything from end-user training to writing custom parsers.
- Knowledge of automated data extraction for many Macintosh-based graphics
applications. I've written AppleScript-based extraction routines for Quark
XPress, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign, as well as scripting
manipulation of extracted data in BBEdit. (I also have a great deal of
experience doing production work in desktop publishing
packages - including FrameMaker, Quark, PageMaker and LaTeX: please
see my multi-lingual
publishing page for details.)
- Excellent knowledge of writing project-specific macros to manipulate data
in MS Word and MS Excel.
- General knowledge of TM technologies and packages. Even if I've not
used a TM tool, I'm a quick study and can probably learn enough to help with
the package you use.
- Experience with configuring and managing Trados-based tools such as
WinAlign, MultiTerm and S-Tagger.
- Solid experience in providing both documentation and end-user support.
- A real and demonstrable aptitude for learning new tools, and designing
ways to make them work together in a seamless workflow.
Some of the more interesting projects I've done in the past:
- I have written hundreds of data parsers - both for ForeignDesk and for Microsoft-Word based (Trados) solutions.
- Was localization engineer for a half-year contract for a massive French-language java port.
- Designed and localized production of webpages from FrameMaker, including
localizing client's ASP pages so that they'd work with non-English languages
- Used ResEdit to design a MacThai keyboard schema for a client's font that
used a custom (and highly irregular) encoding
- Have done emergency repair on many projects which had been damaged in
Trados due to faulty engineering or confusion about Word versions to be used
- Developed a workable encoding for Cyrillic-based Kazakh for a client with
proprietary fonts, and implemented it via Fontographer
- Designed a workable methodology for making Rubi importable in Japanese
Quark 4 XPress Tags
- Developed and documented an automated AppleScript workflow to convert 20-language documents in proprietarily-coded fonts in Quark 5 into tagged unicode text to be imported into InDesign.
- Wrote routines to extract appropriate data from Japanese Quark-based
catalogue pages and render it into XML
My interests are wide-ranging, and I'm can be of use working on almost any
project that involves language issues and needs technical help. I am open to working either with agencies or with consortia of translators. For more information, for
references, or to discuss possibilities, please don't hesitate to contact
me!
Craig W. Johnson
Last updated: Thursday, October 12, 2017