I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom Johnson

This article is a guest post by Daniel Ng. Daniel is part of a small team with an in-house translator. They translate their own English Flare help projects to Simplified Chinese with Madcap Lingo and have been using Madcap Lingo since version 1.

Madcap Lingo -- A Fully Integrated Translation Memory and Authoring Solution

Madcap Lingo is Madcap’s offering in the XML-based translation authoring solution space. As a translation memory system, Madcap Lingo helps translators speed up and simplify the translation process of Madcap Flare/Blaze projects into another language. Established translation tools include SDL Trados, Transit, Wordfast, and Alchemy Catalyst. Measured against these, Lingo is relatively young.

Translations are stored in a SQL Server Express database. Translation memory goes beyond saving time; it improves accuracy of future translations by retaining a history of used segments. The more you translate with translation memory, the easier and better it becomes progressively. If you have been doing regular translation work of your Flare/Blaze documentation or outsourced translation work, you owe it to yourself to give Madcap Lingo a try at least.

Version 1, released in late 2007, was notable for its Google translate integration, the ability to translate strings/callouts embedded in Capture screenshots, “diffing” of past projects, and simplified translation tracking. Read the rest of this entry »

Madcap Flare

Madcap Software is preparing to release Flare 4 shortly (an exact date hasn’t been announced). Being the cool people they are, they gave me a free copy of Flare 4 to give away. Flare costs around $899, so this is a deal.
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Madcap Flare is one of the most advanced, functionally robust online help tools for technical writers who want to single source their content. When you use Flare to create an actual project (rather than just experimenting with a trial version), you come to know the ins and outs, the major benefits and the quirks, its usability and learning curve, the things you love and the things you hate.

I just finished converting a help file (which I originally created using RoboHelp 7) into Flare, using version Flare 3.01. I also added quite a bit of content and other enhancements to the help. While working with Flare for about a month, I took careful note of all the things I liked and disliked about Flare. This post is a compilation of my notes.

I also rated the importance of each item on a scale of 1 to 5. In my system, 5 is extremely important, and 1 is relatively trivial. I arranged the numbers in general order of importance. Here are my lists.
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