By Bridget Hylak, Administrator, Language Technology Division
About the Inaugural ATA TEKTalks Presenter, Yves Champollion
Yves Champollion was born 1956 in Paris, France. He is related to the early nineteenth-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, whose contributions to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics were instrumental to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.
Yves freelanced as a translator between 1982 and 1995, when he translated and published the French versions of several popular best-selling science books, including Darwin On Trial by P.E. Johnson. From 1996 to 1999, he was a project manager and consultant for large translation projects at world-class translation agencies (Translatel, Linguex…), which led to his involvement in projects for SAP R/3 & R/4, Siemens, Alcatel, Microsoft, IBM, ABB and Ford, to name a few.
Starting in 2000, he developed the Wordfast and PlusTools suite of Computer-Assisted Translation tools, a popular product among translation agencies and freelance translators, with over 55,000 paid licenses in use as of 2019.
Widely travelled, in addition to French, German, English, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and some Japanese, Yves has also had time to get acquainted with Shangana, a language spoken in Mozambique, where he sponsors a secondary school. Lastly, he is an enthusiastic conference speaker, having delivered countless keynote addresses and lectures throughout his career, and particularly since he launched the Wordfast line of products for the translation industry.
Wordfast in a nutshell
Champollion highlighted some of Wordfast’s unique advantages, such as the fact that the tool is platform independent (Mac, PC, Linux or beyond are all fine!); prices are reasonable for independent contractors (including a free version with great functionality)l tight-knit community and support, efficient and friendly operation. Wordfast clients know all of these things to be true, and linguists with a few decades under their belt attest to the “alleluia” moment that silently went up to the heavens when Wordfast knocked down the doors for Mac users (no Parallels or other hardware virtualization tools required!) at an affordable price. That was a historic moment in our industry that many are grateful for to this day. Indeed, altruism and a “by linguists, for linguists” mentality have seemed to drive the company under Champollion’s leadership from the start.
About 10 minutes of Q&A at the end of Champollion’s interview, moderated by LTD Administrator Bridget Hylak and Assistant Administrator Daniel Sebesta, and expertly co-moderated by Dmitry Beschetny of the Professional Development Committee, brought a few thought-provoking issues to the table. With the time constraints, not all of the questions were initially answered, but thankfully Yves was kind enough to provide more answers to the questions via email post-session. A summary of the Q&A is provided below.
- All Wordfast products come with a free trial. For more information see www.wordfast.com, click on Products, then Download.
- For Mac users, no additional software downloads, tweaks, or else are required. Wordfast Pro, Wordfast Classic, Wordfast Anywhere operation on a Mac are identical to Windows operating systems.
- To see a sample of Wordfast in word, head to YouTube, look for the “Wordfast TM – YouTube” channel and review the hands-on demo videos for either beginners or advanced users.
- For LSPs working with many translators and requiring shared TMs, the suggested approach is to use Wordfast Anywhere and/or Wordfast server in order to share assets across the board. Local users will need to install the “client” software, Wordfast Pro, or Wordfast Classic and connect from there to your respective server. All products are encrypted end-to-end, so there is no need to worry about unsecure data. Even the free version of Wordfast Anywhere comes with encryption, not to mention the classic commercial solutions.
>> You can view this ATA TEKTalk here (free for ATA members; $25 for non-members).