Anyone with first-hand Multiterm Extract experience?
Thread poster: Gyula Erdesz
Gyula Erdesz
Gyula Erdesz
Hungary
Local time: 15:32
Member (2009)
English to Hungarian
+ ...
Feb 4, 2012

Dear Colleagues,

I am considering buying SDL's Multiter Extract. Before the purchase I sniffed around to gather information from existing users. But I could find hardly any colleagues with first-hand experience with the sw.

Could you please share your experience? How effective is MT Extract with agglutinative lagnuages like Hungarian, Finnish or Turkish? How exact is the software? I mean how many useless hits it delivers? How much post editing the original Multiterm Ext
... See more
Dear Colleagues,

I am considering buying SDL's Multiter Extract. Before the purchase I sniffed around to gather information from existing users. But I could find hardly any colleagues with first-hand experience with the sw.

Could you please share your experience? How effective is MT Extract with agglutinative lagnuages like Hungarian, Finnish or Turkish? How exact is the software? I mean how many useless hits it delivers? How much post editing the original Multiterm Extract termlist needs to be a proper Multiterm glossary?

Any feedbacks are highly welcome and appreciated.

Regards,

Gyula
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Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL
Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:32
Member (2006)
English to Polish
+ ...
SITE LOCALIZER
I'm also very interested in answers Feb 4, 2012

I have been thinking about buying this program for quite a while. I think that it is shame that there is no trial version which would allow to see how effective is this program. After all the program is rather expensive and most prospective users would like to be able to try it before buying.

Best Regards
Stanislaw


 
Gyula Erdesz
Gyula Erdesz
Hungary
Local time: 15:32
Member (2009)
English to Hungarian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
There is a trial version but... Feb 4, 2012

Stanislaw Czech wrote:

I think that it is shame that there is no trial version which would allow to see how effective is this program.



Dear Stanislaw,

As a matter of fact, there is a trial version of MT Extract inclued in Multiterm 2009 install pack (but for some reasons it was left out from Multiterm 2011). You can select it during the installation process. My main problem is that this trial version is not really convincing, especially compared with memoQ new term extracting module (which is free, on the top of it all!). Yesterday I imported a TMX with 200.000 segments into MT Extract, and after processing I got a term list with only 80 possible term pairs, which was quite a disappointment.

Perhaps the number of term pairs is limited in the trial version. Perhaps. But I found no such information on the Internet.

I think I will contact the local reseller of SDL and ask them directly.

Regards,

Gyula

[Módosítva: 2012-02-04 16:33 GMT]


 
Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL
Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:32
Member (2006)
English to Polish
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I was thinking about a fully functional trial version Feb 4, 2012

Showing not just the interface but how the program really works. Some time ago I have contacted SDL's support but they said that they don't have anything like that.

Best Regards
Stanislaw


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:32
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
SynchroTerm 2011 Feb 4, 2012

I recommend taking a look at SynchroTerm 2011 instead:

http://terminotix.com/docs/factsheet_synchroterm_en.pdf +
http://terminotix.com/index.asp?name=SynchroTerm&content=item&brand=4&item=7&lang=en


 
Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL
Stanislaw Czech, MCIL CL  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:32
Member (2006)
English to Polish
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Looks very interesting Feb 4, 2012



Pity that they too don't offer any trial version.

BR
S


 
Michael Beijer
Michael Beijer  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 14:32
Member (2009)
Dutch to English
+ ...
@Stanislaw Feb 4, 2012

I would suggest sending them an email and just asking. My experience with Terminotix is that if you are interested in testing something they are quite willing to help out if they can...

 
Dominique Pivard
Dominique Pivard  Identity Verified
Local time: 16:32
Finnish to French
I'd give up Feb 4, 2012

Gyula Erdész wrote:
How effective is MT Extract with agglutinative languages like Hungarian, Finnish or Turkish? How exact is the software?

I evaluated SDL PhraseFinder and Trados TermExtract (as I think it was called at the time), back in 2005, just before SDL acquired Trados. PhraseFinder worked reasonably well with English and French, but only supported a limited number of languages (about seven, if memory serves). Trados wouldn't give me access to a trial version of TermExtract (some things don't change), but their representative did admit no good results were to be expected with Finnish.

In their current product description (http://www.sdl.com/en/products-and-solutions/our-products/ ), they say "SDL MultiTerm Extract with SDL PhraseFinder now included." I guess PhraseFinder is still the better product (compared to the old Trados counterpart), but I doubt it supports agglutinative languages any better than back in 2005.

Although I have a memoQ license and memoQ now includes a terminology extraction feature, I haven't bothered to try it yet. Maybe you should give it a try: after all, Kilgray is a Hungarian company, maybe they were able to use their knowledge of the language when designing the feature?


 
Dominique Pivard
Dominique Pivard  Identity Verified
Local time: 16:32
Finnish to French
Did you ask them? Feb 4, 2012

Stanislaw Czech wrote:
Pity that they too don't offer any trial version.

With Terminotix, you usually have to ask for a trial by e-mail: have you tried that? I have the same experience as Michael: once you ask them, they will give you access to a trial version.


 
Gyula Erdesz
Gyula Erdesz
Hungary
Local time: 15:32
Member (2009)
English to Hungarian
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Synchroterm Feb 5, 2012




Thank you Michael, I will surely give this software a try.

Gyula


[Módosítva: 2012-02-05 09:07 GMT]


 
Grzegorz Gryc
Grzegorz Gryc  Identity Verified
Local time: 15:32
French to Polish
+ ...
Varia... Multiterm limitations... Feb 6, 2012

[quote]Dominique Pivard wrote:

[quote]I evaluated SDL PhraseFinder and Trados TermExtract (as I think it was called at the time), [quote]
The name changes every few years, in 2001 it was called ExtraTerm...
No matter, very few changes were introduced in Multiterm, so a version like 2006 or 2007 is almost identical to 2009 and probably 2011.
The upgrade price is just an extortion.

back in 2005, just before SDL acquired Trados. PhraseFinder worked reasonably well with English and French, but only supported a limited number of languages (about seven, if memory serves). Trados wouldn't give me access to a trial version of TermExtract (some things don't change),

The trial was included in the standard Multiterm setup file 'til the version 2009.
I don't remember the exact limitations but it was impossible to save the results.

but their representative did admit no good results were to be expected with Finnish.

Generally, Multiterm is frankly bad for agglutinative languages like Finnish or Hungarian and for many languages with postponed article like the Scandinavian languages, e.g. in SV, for bil (car), the plural with definite article bilerna will never be recognized unless you add the plural bilerin the entry.
I.e. if the word spotted in the text is slightly above 50% longer than the glossary entry, it will not be recognized because of Multiterm word algorithm limitations.
Multiterm was created by Germans and it's tuned for languages like German or English but fails for many other ones.
Multiterm Extract inheritates these weaknesses.

In their current product description (http://www.sdl.com/en/products-and-solutions/our-products/ ), they say "SDL MultiTerm Extract with SDL PhraseFinder now included." I guess PhraseFinder is still the better product (compared to the old Trados counterpart), but I doubt it supports agglutinative languages any better than back in 2005.

It's basically the same than in 2005.
The strength of PhraseFinder is its linguistic approach but it works only for pairs EN to/from DE, FR, ES, IT, NT and PT (only these language models were implemented).
So, it's almost unusable for other languages..

Although I have a memoQ license and memoQ now includes a terminology extraction feature, I haven't bothered to try it yet. Maybe you should give it a try: after all, Kilgray is a Hungarian company, maybe they were able to use their knowledge of the language when designing the feature?

As memoQ doesn't have fuzzy matching engine for terminology, the different forms of one word will not be grouped automatically but even in this case, it's enough for simple purposes if one knows how to tune in the memoQ terminology recognition.
And memoQ is far faster than Multiterm Extract, which is terribly slow for bigger data amounts.
Forget about large TMs.
And, generally, the work in Multiterm Extract is very slow.
It may be good for a terminologist but it's far too slow for a typical translator.
One must have a lot of time and few deadlines...

BTW, simple multilingual terminology extraction modules similar to memoQ are also available from eternity in DVX and Wordfast Classic.
Although I have a ME 2009 license (I didn't upgrade, it makes few sense), I use mainly the DVX monolingual module (called Lexicon), it's simply faster and it's really OK for most cases...

Catspeed
GG


 


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