Frequently Asked Questions
- General Lingotek Questions
- How to Get Started Questions
- Technical Questions
- Security Questions
- Registration and Licensing Questions
General Lingotek Questions
Q. What is
Lingotek?
A. Lingotek is a new online
translation research tool for language professionals.
Lingotek is a Language Search Engine - the only tool of its
kind.
Q. What is
Language Search Engine?
A. Lingotek is a global
web 2.0 collaborative service that enhances translator's
efficiency by quickly finding meaning-based translated
material for reuse.
Q. Is Lingotek
intended to replace traditional translation memory
tools?
A. Lingotek extends the concept of
content reuse well beyond what traditional translation memory
(TM) is capable of. Lingotek may be used where TM will not
work or may replace TM as a higher value, more affordable
solution. TM memory files/content can be imported into
Lingotek and thus leveraged through this new model of content
reuse
Q. Why is
Lingotek unique?
A. Lingotek is unique because
of the following capabilities:
- No software to install, configure or maintain - completely web based!
- Stop burning CDs, e-mailing and faxing
- Finally, a secure, controlled translation process
- Reuse through instant, meaning-based searching
- Global dynamic source of multi-lingual content
- Automatic on-the-fly collaboration of entire projects
- Multiple translators on the same project
- Start translation and reviews almost simultaneously
- Features you want delivered faster
- Use Lingotek technology to gain new customers
Q. If not money, what's
in it for Lingotek?
A.
We also sell private server versions of our technology to organizations
that want to search their own data. We make between $1 million
and $750,000 for each of these servers. Selling the $30/month
or $300/year subscriptions were costing us as much to market as we were
making. That means no margin, no profit. We would rather
give the online public version away free, become better known and concentrate
our sales efforts on the higher end sales where there is a margin and
profit.
Q. How can Lingotek
afford it?
A.
First we are well funded. We have two Venture Capital firms behind us,
Flywheel Ventures and Canopy Ventures. Second we make enough off
of the private server sales to cover all our expenses and make a profit.
Time is actually a bigger factor than money. We want to change
the industry. We can do that faster with free than with monthly
paying subscriptions.
Q. Will my TM's or
my documents remain private and safe? How can I be sure?
A.
Yes. In LingoDex you have the option to make your data either private
or public. When you choose private not even other people in your own
company can see it unless you grant them access. Ultimately you don't
have to take our word for it you can test it for yourself. Put
a translation memory into a Closed TM Vault and then start a new document
translation closely related to that memory, but don't allow that Closed
TM Vault to be searched with that document. Run the tool and see if
you get any hits from it. You won't. Bottom line, we know if we ever
compromised your data you would never use our software and you will
tell everyone else. We loose big time if your document security
is not real solid.
Q. Will Lingotek be
around, or will you shut down and I loose my investment (time)?
A.
There is no way we can predict the future and tell you we will be here.
For that reason we built the system so that everything you put into
it can be exported into standard TMX 1.3 and XLIFF 1.1.
The real question is if Lingotek goes away, will I have my data to use
in any other system? The answer to that question is yes.
Q. Is it free forever,
or are you just getting me hooked so you can charge me later?
A.
It will be free forever. We have already come to the conclusion
that we don't make a profit on it charging so why make you pay.
Q. Are you going to
sell advertising on my translation page?
A.
We don't have any plans to do so.
Q. Will there be any
customer service? How?
A.
Free is free. You get what you pay for. We are not going to guarantee
excellent customer service when we don't charge for it. Having
said that we plan on starting some user forums where users can post
questions and answer each others questions. We will monitor these
forums and participate as needed. Initially that means we will
have to have technical support staff dedicated to that forum. When the
community builds around this we hope that the users will help each other
out. We will have two other forums also. One will be a bug
forum, where users can report problems. We will monitor this closely
and fix them quickly. The second will be a new ideas forum where
users can post comments on new features and suggested enhancements to
the software. We will monitor this one closely also.
Q. Will you continue
to add features? How will you determine which features to add?
How will you broadcast the new features so we know what they are?
A.
This is really multiple questions. First, yes we will continue to add
new features. The ideas for these features will come from the
users who offer suggestions to our new ideas forum. And last we
always put in the tool a menu item on top that lists new features. We
also label them in the user interface for a period of time.
Q. Will you continue
to fix bugs?
A.
Yes.
Q. Will it be like
"free-ware" or "Open Office" where you fix or enhance it in
your free time, or will you still have a full time development staff?
A.
It is neither free-ware or Open Office. It is just a free service
with software. It will continue to have a full time dedicated development
staff. Actually the things we put in the free public version go
on our private servers also.
Q. Will the servers
be secure and available (back-ups, redundancy, etc.)?
A.
Yes and yes. The servers are hosted in secure facilities.
These facilities are not at our company headquarters. They are in an
installation where many of the world's banks house their servers.
Frankly if someone breaks into one of these facilities I don't think
they will be after your translation as much as someone else's money.
As far as backups and redundancy go we mirror everything and have a
triple redundancy built in. Each server has 45 hard drives and
16 processors. We only need 15 hard drives and 4 processors to handle
the load on a single server. The others are backups in case of
a failure. We could literally loose 15 hard drives at the same
time and not loose a bit of your data or go down. When a hard
drive does go down our engineers are immediately alerted and can hot
swap in a new one while the system continues to run. Ok. Too much
technical data, but I hope that answers your question.
Q. Where will I get
training? Will Lingotek still provide it? At no charge?
A.
Training will be provided online for free. We continue to develop
better training. Over time we expect to select some users to provide
training session in local areas and at conferences. These individuals
will keep all proceeds from the training and will be certified by Lingotek
as to their quality.
Q. Do I get the whole
thing, or just a dumbed down version?
A.
You get the whole thing. We will also be adding additional features
as they are suggested by users of the system.
Q. What will those
who pay get (private servers) that the free version won't have?
A.
The private servers will have the ability to integrate with other systems
like Idiom World Server, Beetext, Plunet and other systems.
Q. Will we still see
Lingotek at trade-shows and expos?
A.
If we are invited. We don't intend to set up booths and pay
to be sponsors since we are not charging anyone for the software or
service. We will select a number of shows that we will be willing
to provide training sessions at and answer questions for potential new
users. It will depend on the trade show if they want us to provide this
kind of session or not. Even though we are giving the product away for
free they may still want to classify us as a vendor and may limit our
ability to present at their trade shows as they have done in the past.
Q. What is
meaning-based searching?
A. Words are defined by
the company they keep. Every word has at least one definition
and when used in conjunction with other words there are a
near infinite number of meanings possible to create. Searches
that use computer systems based on new linguistic search
algorithms; look at the context of a paragraph; can find all
combinations of words in the paragraph with the same meaning,
in the same context, are meaning-based searches instead of
traditional searches. These meaning-based searches are the
core of the new Language Search Engine (LSE)
technology.
Q. In what
languages will Lingotek translate to and
from?
A. Lingotek is a universal Language Search
Engine. In other words, it has the ability to work with all
the languages displayed in your browser.
How to Get Started Questions
Q. How do I get
content into the Lingotek TM Vault?
A. There are two
ways to upload content into the Lingotek tool. The easiest
way is simply by starting a project using the
"Add New Project" drop-down
button. Make sure you specify the type of index you want to
use, and to "commit" the
translated material to either a Open or Closed TM Vault. As soon as
any translated material is
"committed" to a Lingotek
index, you and the users who have access to that particular
project are able to search against this content.
Another way to get content into the Lingotek index is to
import existing "translation
memories" (TMX files) and multilingual documents.
Translation memories can be imported directly, if they are
standard TMX files. Multilingual documents can be quickly
aligned, at a paragraph level, and imported into Lingotek
using LingoAlign. XLIFF is the resulting output file format
of LingoAlign, and XLIFF can be imported directly into
Lingotek.
Note: Lingotek subscribers have access to the content
published in the public index by all users, companies, and
organizations contributing to this public index. This
"architecture of participation"
means the service gets better as more people use
it.
Technical Questions
Q. What is the
difference between the Open TM Vault and Closed
TM Vaults?
A. Users of Lingotek have the option of
storing their documents in two categories of TM Vaults: Open and
Closed. Open: Lingotek embraces the power of the web to
harness collective translation intelligence through the Open
TM Vault. This extends the traditional concept of content reuse
from what has been generated by you or in your company to
what has been generated in a global social network and
submitted to the Open TM Vault. The content of the Open TM Vault is free
and any Lingotek subscriber can access and contribute to this
ever-growing, dynamic TM Vault.
Closed: Lingotek gives its users the ability to create one or
multiple Closed TM Vaults. The data is accessible only by the owner
and anyone he or she grants access rights to.
Note: The tool will always search both TM Vault categories,
Open and Closed, but grant access only to Closed TM Vaults that
the owner of the Vaults has allowed you to search.
Q. Is it safe to
use the Open TM Vault?
A. All documents indexed within
Lingotek's TM Vaults are intentionally fragmented and given unique
ID's that only the original document owner, who has the final
XLIFF file can see. If Lingotek, the company, were to be
subpoenaed to provide a document to the government, they
would not be able to do it. A person could not rebuild any
documents from the TM Vaults even if they had direct access to
Lingotek's secure servers. (See Security Questions
below.)
Q. Will bad
translations from the Open TM Vault show up in my
work?
A. Like other search engines, Lingotek
uses a system that is intelligent and will always rank the
best translations on the very top. The editing panel will
automatically pull only translation paragraphs that match the
original document 100%; otherwise it is up to the translator
to make the final decision on what to move to the editing
panel. Experience has shown time and again that regardless of
the amount of content available on the Open and Closed TM Vaults,
the translations ranked the highest are usually the ones that
most closely match the project at hand based on context,
terminology, and style.
Q. What is
XLIFF?
A. XLIFF is a XML file format. It is a
standard for organizing and holding multilingual documents
and was developed by the OASIS Consortium (http://www.oasis-open.org
Q. What is
LingoAlign?
A. LingoAlign is a text alignment tool that subscribers to
Lingotek can use to align existing translations of source and
target documents. Once aligned, this content can be loaded
into Lingotek for reuse. LingoAligntakes two separate documents containing text in two
different languages and aligns them paragraph by paragraph.
The resulting output is a file (XLIFF) of source paragraphs
with each translated paragraph contained in a single
Translation Unit.
Security Questions
Q. Is it safe to
have my information stored in an environment like
Lingotek?
A. Yes. Your documents are even more
secure if you consider how documents are managed in the
industry right now. Lingotek stores source and target
documents as unlinked paragraphs to strengthen security;
documents are not searchable or viewable in Lingotek except
by those who own the document. People who have been granted
access to the TM Vaults can never view the whole documents. They
only see paragraphs from documents if they relate to what is
being translated. Furthermore, if a document owner saves the
paragraphs to a Closed TM Vault, the source and target document
paragraphs are searchable and viewable only to the document
owner and those he or she has granted access rights. This
capability keeps you in control and secure while increasing
flexibility. Only the original document owner who put the
document into Lingotek has the whole document and the
translation when it is done. The translators and reviewers do
not have full copies of your content on their machines when
they are done.
Q. From a
language company perspective, how can we be sure that
non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements are not
breeched by contract translators using Lingotek?
A. Currently in the industry if you need sensitive
information translated you have to trust that all translators
and reviewers that see the document will keep the information
confidential and not misuse it. With Lingotek, translators no
longer receive full copies of any documents they translate.
They are granted access to the information they need to do
the job and translate the file remotely, online over secure
servers. Their translations are loaded back onto the secure
servers where you as the document owner are the only person
who has access to the full file. Likewise they cannot pass
the job off to someone else without you setting it up for
them. The system will not allow it. Only the document owner
or language company project manager who put the data into the
system can grant a person access for translation and review.
When you are done with a project you have on Lingotek a
complete record of who has seen the content. If there were
ever a breach of confidential information you know where to
go.
Registration and Licensing Questions
Q. What happens
to my documents, TM's, and content if I decide to cancel my
subscription?
A. Naturally, by canceling your
subscription you lose access to all the tool's features and
benefits, but data portability is not a problem with
Lingotek. By using the industry standard file format, XLIFF,
you can port your content to any other tool. The ability to
transfer documents and TM's from this system to another is
guaranteed. The output of every project translated with the
help of Lingotek is a zip file downloaded into a computer
folder of your preference, containing three files:
- File to be translated in the source language and original format
- Translated file in the target language and original format
- Industry Standard XLIFF file (see question: "What is XLIFF?)