Heartsome Suite Goes Open Source

First the bad news...

Citing financial difficulties, Heartsome Technologies Ltd. ceased its operations as of July 31, 2014. Heartsome was the developer of Heartsome Suite, one of the few cross-platform CAT tools.

... then the good news

Fortunately, Heartsome shared its translation suite, i.e., Translation Studio 8.0 and TMX Editor 8.0, to the public. They are now available for free as open source at GitHub.

This is good news, especially for non-Windows tanslators, since their translation arsenal is few and far between. As a Mac-addict, I am hooked up to my svelte MBP and always reluctant to switch to Windows PC, just to use a CAT tool. Therefore, I rely heavily on OmegaT, and occasionally LF Aligner, for translation.

The followings are features of Heartsome Suite that I found most useful so far:

• MT pre-translate. In addition to supporting machine translation from Google Translate API v2 and Bing Translator, Translation Studio 8.0 can also use it to pre-translate all the segments in the selected XLIFF. This pre-translation avoids reaccessing MT API, thus reducing fees and waiting time.
• Better XLIFF support. As I've mentioned above, OmegaT is my main tool for translation. It is due to the fact that it can handle most, if not all, common translation file formats. However, I discovered that Translation Studio 8.0 has the upper hand when handling SDLXLIFF, XLIFF file format of SDL Trados Studio.
• Portability. One of the main reasons of my using OmegaT is its portability. A portable application is a program that can run on a compatible computer without having to install it first. I found that the Heartsome Suite is also portable.
• TM maintenance. As OmegaT is not designed to edit translation memory, the TMX Editor 8.0 is a very much welcomed addition .

Try it out

If you want to take it for a spin, just download Translation Studio 8.0 and/or TMX Editor 8.0, and read the Translation Studio 8.0 and/or TMX Editor 8.0 manuals to start. For those visual learners, you can also watch the videos below.

Photo by jakob fenger is licensed under CC BY 2.0.