Preface - Who, What, Why, and Where

Who:

This list of articles is written and maintained primarily by Chris Moore of Fruit in Season with contributions from other people interested in AppleTrans.

What:

AppleTrans is a piece of software made available by Apple to assist translators. The software appears to be maintained by hiruneko (link to his blog related to AppleTrans with tutorials on advanced topics).

Why:

AppleTrans is an application intended to assist professional translators in the work of translation. Some of its main features are:

• Translation memory: tracks your translations and shows you things you've already translated that are related to the portion you are currently working on to ensure consistency throughout a document.
• Works with rich text without codes and tags. Other similar pieces of software often force translators to look at tags and codes that break up the flow of a text with styles. AppleTrans does not impose this extra burden on the translator.
• Native mac application: works, looks, and feels the way a mac application should. Uses Apple's built in components and interacts well with the system including applescripting and services. Similar apps for the mac are often built in Java and don't meet most mac user's expectations of software quality.
• Free. Not open source, but made freely available to use. Similar applications can cost over $200 for a single license.

On the other hand:

• Despite meeting a large number of "mac-like" conventions, much of the interface is unlabeled, and many of the most important features are hidden behind key and click combinations that are not clearly documented in a single location. Thus, this set of pages hopes to stand as a guide for those interested in the feature set, but get lost in trying to actually use AppleTrans to do the work as advertised.

Where:

AppleTrans is available here.