Slate Desktop™

Slate Desktop™ – machine translation (MT) fully adapted to your knowledge and style. Includes Slate Corpus™ and Slate Corpus™.

The Slate Desktop™ is an application suite that adds a machine translation provider to your personal computer. The provider runs in the background delivering machine translations to computer-assisted translation tools like memoQ, Trados Studio and others that also run on your PC.

Customers have shared these top benefits when using Slate Desktop™.

  • Productivity: It speeds their work and reduces turnaround time. (see Measuring Productivity)
  • Quality: It uses their word, grammar and translation style, not someone else’s.
  • Lifestyle: It frees their weekends and gives them time to do those little things that make life fun.

“Privacy is a fundamental human right. It has been under attack.”

Tim Cook – Apple’s CEO, CNN Interview June 5, 2018
  • Private and Confidential: It runs on their PC, not the Internet. Prying eyes on the Internet can not access customers’ translations or their work habits.
  • Economic: The one-time affordable price buys a royalty-free license. They never have to pay for machine translation again.
  • Convenient: They work with machine translations in the CATs they already know. There’s no need to learn yet another CAT tool.
“With a translation memory of about 130 thousand segments, Slate Desktop™ in memoQ speeds my work at least 30% and I add terminology on the fly.”
Igor
– English, Russian
How Slate Desktop™ Works

You import your translation memories into Slate Desktop™. It does the rest.

Slate Desktop™ uses mature machine learning. It studies your translation memories for hours to find your translation knowledge and style. It saves what it learned in a translation model that’s fully adapted to your translation memories.

Your Slate Desktop™ model appears in your CAT tool’s machine translation resources. Working in your CAT tool, Slate Desktop™ uses artificial intelligence to render machine translation suggestions with the terminology, knowledge and style it learned from your translation memories.

Your choice of translation memories determines the quality of the machine translations. Translation memories that represent you fully adapt Slate Desktop™ to you and Slate Desktop™ machine translation mimics you.

With Slate Desktop™‘s fully-adapted machine translations, you work with your own words and translation style. You make fewer corrections. Machine translation becomes a more effective work environment. This is the essence of better machine translation.

Application Suite

Slate Desktop™ suite is a collection of applications. Each application performs a specific function. Together as a suite, they increase your productivity to achieve and maintain your competitive edge.

  • Slate Corpus™ application is built-in. It organizes translation memories and converts them to training corpora.
  • Slate Desktop™ dashboard is your control center to build and manage translation engines.
  • Slate Connect™ application is build-in. It runs in the background, quietly delivering machine translations to your computer-assisted translation tool.
  • Slate Toolkit™ is built-in with machine translation tools for phrase-based SMT models.
Dashboard control center

Slate Desktop™ installs everything you need to organize your translation memories, convert them into a training corpus, build translation engines, connect to computer-assisted translation tools and much more.

Installs everything you need
Measuring Productivity

Slate Desktop™ recommends two objective productivity measurements.

  • Percentage of proofreading-only suggestions (no post-editing required)1
  • Percentage of reduction in post-edit work where post-editing is required.2

Google NMT is our productivity baseline because it’s a popular, well-documented resource. To illustrate, let’s compare a typical 10,000-word project with 700-segments.

On average, Google NMT suggests 35 segments of up to 6 words each that are proofreading-only segments. On a word-count basis, that’s only 2% of the 10,000 word-project. Almost any professional could have typed each of these segments in an instant without Google. The other 98% are much longer segments require post-editing to varying degrees.

“Slate Desktop™ speeds up my work by reducing or eliminating draft step in the translation process and sometimes comes up with ‘amazing’ (;-) translations.”
Wim
– French, English, Dutch

1. On average, a customer’s fully-adapted Slate Desktop™ engine suggests 7 to 10 times more proofreading-only segments than Google’s NMT. A customer’s engine typically suggests over 200 segments of up to 20 words each, more than 3,000 words, that require no post-editing. Nearly 30% of the work is reduced to proofreading only.

2. On average where post-editing is required, a customer’s Slate Desktop™ engine reduces the post-editing work by 50% compared to Google NMT, largely because the post-editing work drops from 98% to 70% of the project. There’s an additional drop from Slate Desktop™‘s adaptations to render words, grammar and translation style that you, the translator, are predisposed to choose.

These two objective measurements indicate specific, engine-related productivity gains and avoid subjective speculation, personal preferences, habits and other issues that affect your work efficiency.

Machine Translation vs Translation Memories

Your choice of a training corpus is the single, most important factor that determines your machine translation’s productivity characteristics. Fully-adapted machine translation is built from a training corpus that matches your work.

Slate Desktop™ converts translation memories into a training corpus. When the translation memories consists of 3-4 years of segments that you translated, the resulting machine translation is fully adapted to you and it’s more flexible compared to translation memories.

A translation memory with 100,000 segment pairs can offer roughly that many translations. Fragments and sub-segments are overlooked.

Starting with the same 100,000 segment pairs, Slate Desktop™‘s artificial intelligence automatically builds the dictionaries and configures an engine overnight while you sleep. The engine can suggest hundreds of millions of translations and you can use the engine across many CAT tools without additional work.

Some computer-assisted translation tools have advanced segment assembly or fragment matching features. You invest weeks to create dictionaries and configure the feature. The dictionaries work in one CAT tool. Then, you reinvest time to create other dictionaries for another CAT tool.

“Slate Desktop™ gives a whole new dimension to the way I translate. Words I’ve used long ago or in different contexts are popping up in my screen in nearly perfect sentences – and they fit my style.”
Pieter
– English, Dutch
Translation Teams, Agencies and Small LSPs

Slate Desktop™ is machine translation for a single-language vendor (SLV), whether freelancers and translation teams working a single language pair.

The standalone Slate Connect™ application, purchased separately, gives you an inexpensive way to use your Slate Desktop™ machine translation engine on another PC while you travel. Slate Connect™ also opens a unique and affordable business case to share Slate Desktop™ machine translation engines with your colleagues and team members without complicated, expensive web servers.

Multi-language vendors (MLVs) need Slate Desktop Pro™ for machine translation across all language pairs, currently 1,122 pairs.

“There’s good news with Slate Desktop™. You don’t have to use it, but building your own machine translation out of your own work may well provide another tool to improve your quality of life as a translator. If I had paid for the test license, Slate Desktop™ would have paid for itself this week, and that’s not a bad metric in my book.”
Tiago
– English, Portuguese
Redefine What’s Possible

You’re not alone. We made Slate Desktop™ user-friendly and familiar like other applications you already know. Still, everyone needs help sometimes.

Slate Desktop™ defies conventional wisdom about what’s possible with machine translation. That’s why we’re here with you to answer questions and support you with these resources when you need us.

  • 90-page online User’s Manual with illustrated instructions and strategies
  • An illustrated Quick Start Guide to have you working with your first engine within hours
  • Free engine evaluations to coach you through your new experiences
  • Priority technical support via a help desk so your requests don’t fall through the cracks
  • Free maintenance updates and bug fixes via your personal online account dashboard
  • Affordable online CPT training courses to get the most from machine translation (soon?)
Money Back Guarantee

Buy Slate Desktop™, experience great technical support and learn how your translation memories perform as machine translation. If you’re not fully satisfied, uninstall Slate Desktop™ and request a refund within 30 days of your purchase. We will refund your full purchase price immediately – no questions asked.

These features and functions come with Slate Desktop™.

Two Languages

Support for two languages from among the 34 possible languages. Your translation memories and Slate Desktop™ can create engines that translate between the two languages in either direction.

Privacy & Confidentiality

Slate Desktop™ runs on your PC. There’s no the Internet connection. They don’t log your activities like online subscription services. You’re fully in control of confidential work.

Build Engines (Models)

Organize Translation Memories

Tools that organize an inventory of translation memories by client, subject matter and project type. More tools prepare translation memories as training corpus to build translation engines.

Build Customized Engines

Tools that build custom machine translation engines.

Evaluate Engines

Tools to evaluate engines and estimate how they will perform as you work.

Weighted Updates

Tools to update Slate Desktop™ engines with new translation memories and optionally prioritize the influence of some segments over others.

Translation Service Provider

Pre-Translate Files

Tools that pre-translate source segments and save TMX and XLIFF files to include in any CAT tool project.

Supported CAT Tools

Slate Desktop™ engines connect with these popular CAT tools.

Forced Terminology

Add global or per engine or per language source-target terminology files that Slate Desktop™ engines use to force translations of known source language terms.

Terminology On-The-Fly

Add new source-target terminology with just a couple of keystrokes while working. The engine adapts and enforces the new pair in the next segment.

Support Utilities

Deploy Engines

Tools that copy engines to another work environment.

Backup & Restore

Tools that backup and restore both the engines and the translation memories that created them.

Sample Translation Memories

Sample translation memories and other files to help you practice and learn.

You need to provide the following before working with Slate Desktop™.

Hardware System Requirements
  • Intel Core i3 (i7 recommended) or AMD Athlon 64 CPU (4-core x86-64, 2.4 GHz or faster)
  • 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)
  • 2 GB of free hard drive space for installation
  • 250 GB (or more) free space on a high-performance drive is ideal after installation
Windows Operating System (Option)
  • Windows 7 64-bit Edition with Service Pack 1
  • Windows 8 or 8.1 64-bit Edition
  • Windows 10 64-bit Edition
  • 32-bit Editions not supported
Linux Operating System (Option)
  • Linux, x86_64 kernel version 3.2+
  • Ubuntu 16.04 or newer (other Debian-based on request)
  • CentOS/RHEL-based (other RPM-based on request)
MacOS Operating System (Option)
  • To be determined, currently unsupported
Translation Memories (corpus)

Personalized engines

  • 70,000 to 150,000 sentence segments
  • One full-time translator’s work for 3 to 4 years

Customized engines

  • 200,000 to 500,000 sentence segments
  • Support a team of translators
  • No upper limit number of segments
  • Too many segments risks degrading the engine
File Types

Slate Desktop™ reads and writes these standards-based localization file types:

  • Text files with UTF-8 character encoding, Linux or Windows new line separators
  • Tab-delimited files are specialized Text file (as above) with one tab per line. Text left of the tab is the source language. Text right of the tab is target language.
  • TMX – translation memory exchange up to version 1.4b
  • XLIFF – XML Localization Interchange File Format version 1.2 (.xlf, .xliff, .sdlxliff, .mxliff, .mqxliff)
  • Gettext .po and .mo files

You can work with file types through your computer-assisted translation (CAT), such as .docx, .xlsx, etc.

Specialization

Specializations such as financial & regulatory reports, clinical trials & pharmaceuticals, technical manuals, legal contracts, etc. create consistent and accurate translations. These translation memories yield better custom machine translation.

The installer installs and manages the following required dependencies.

GNU Utilities

The GNU Utilities are essential open source utilities that the Slate Toolkit™ needs to create models. The MS Windows package installs and updates them but we do not maintain them.

Perl Scripting Runtime

Perl 64-bit version 5.28 or newer is a free open source scripting runtime environment.

Python Scripting Runtime

Python 64-bit version 3.72 or newer is a free open source scripting runtime environment. Required dependency libraries include: pip, pywin32, six, numpy, nltk, lxml, regex, polib, jieba, PyArabic, tinysegmenter3, hazm, wxPython

License and support included with your purchase of Slate Desktop™.

End User License Agreement

A one-time payment, royalty-free end-user license agreement (EULA) to use the software on your machine in perpetuity without subscriptions or usage fees.

Multiple Platforms

Install and activate on any supported operating systems. Today’s support includes MS Windows and Linux. MacOS is planned.

Single Activation

Install, activate and work on one machine. Build engines and work on the same computer.

Maintenance Updates

Maintenance updates are published occasionally with new languages, enhanced features and bug fixes.

Technical Support

Access to priority technical support during the period between major version updates via our online support portal, https://www.slate.rocks/support/.

Money-Back Guarantee

Buy Slate Desktop™, experience great technical support and learn how your translation memories perform as machine translation. If you’re not fully satisfied, uninstall Slate Desktop™ and request a refund within 30 days of your purchase. We will refund your full purchase price immediately – no questions asked.

Expert Review

We’ll help you understand how your first engine performs. Send us the automated evaluation report. We’ll review the performance with you.

Slate Desktop™ distributes these components under their respective open source licenses.

Slate Toolkit™

Slate Toolkit™ – open source phrase-based SMT tools that are at the heart of our Slate Desktop™ products.

Update 1.6.8

July 20, 2019

  • Fixed installer falsely detecting Python installation on Windows 10 updates
  • Fixed crash from Chinese jieba tokenizer logging after Windows 10 updates
Update 1.6.7

June 8, 2019

  • Fixed Windows Explorer custom file association to import/delete engines
  • Disabled tmx export to avoid edge case illegal XML characters
  • Added autohotkey script
  • Added split-tmx.py
  • Custom support for normal-cased translation model
Update 1.6.6

April 3, 2019

  • Fixed edge-case crash near end of build
Update 1.6.5

Mar 14, 2019

  • Added Persian language support (fa, fa-ir)
  • Updated Python dependency libraries
  • Removed a Perl dependency library
Update 1.6.4

Jan 6, 2019

  • New support for Trados Studio 2019 plugin
  • Perl 5.28.1.1 for new installations
  • Python 3.7.2 for new installations
  • Python libraries version bumps
  • Installer support for UNC paths
  • Installer UI enhancements
  • Various bugfixes
  • Tidy code & consistency tweaks
Update 1.6.3

Dec 14, 2018

  • Python 3.7.1 for new installations
  • Optimize Python library installations
  • Install Microsoft foundation classes if missing
  • Improve temp folder configuration
  • improved curate absolute long segments
  • tmx curate update. append-creationdate adds -yyyymm to label1 value
  • bugfix write-txt plugin that accumulated temp source files
  • bugfix screen scraper skipped terminate subprocess on error
  • bugfix mert loop to address edge-case terminations
  • bugfix TMX read namespace for xpath
  • bugfix error handler in TMX reader
Update 1.6.2

Sept 30, 2018

  • installer update supporting change to UTF-8 setup.ini file
  • installer update windows pip from wheel
  • updated windows shell scripts
  • engine summary display update
  • revert to use Python 2.x’s ‘IOError:’ error type
  • add ‘apt install build-essential’
Update 1.6.1

Aug 31, 3018

  • Fixed Linux copystat() error
  • Fixed edge-case race screen scraper failure at end of subprocess
Update 1.6.0

Aug 17, 2018

  • Version bump to 1.6.0
  • Changed to Python 3.7 as default installation version
  • Python 3.x support bugfixes
  • Improved forced terminology file creation when building engines
  • Improved evaluation scoring and summary reporting
  • Improved handling TMs with predominantly short segment lengths, less than 7 words – can improve engine quality
  • Improved weighted/prioritized TM processing when building engines
  • Improved all uppercase segments when building engines
  • Bugfix loss of short segments when cleaning – can improve engine quality
  • Bugfix creating size files for future GUI update
  • Bugfix in regex support
  • Various optimizations and refactoring source code
Update 1.5.2

May 24, 2018

  • fixed custom file association setup to reduce overhead of Windows Defender
  • fixed moses demo scripts sample data layout
  • fixed trial edition installer support for –setup
  • fixed edge case error cleaning/reorganizing functions
Update 1.5.1

Apr 6, 2018

  • Preparation support for version 2.x
  • Tweak Slate Connect™or to run in background without opening terminal window
  • add watchdog timer shuts down Slate Connect™or when unused for 20 minutes
  • Temporarily removed logging (to be re-added)
  • Edge case bugfix for Unicode SEP characters
  • Edge-case bugfix for Python 3 file sizes
Update 1.5.0

Mar 6, 2018

  • Support for Python 2.7 and Python 3.6
  • Updated to latest Python libraries on 2.7 and 3.6.
  • Installs Python 3.6 for new installations.
  • Uses Python 2.7 on updates.
  • Edge-case installer fixes.
  • No functional Slate changes.
  • Removed expired installer code signing certificate.
Update 1.4.11

Feb 11, 2018

  • Linux version – added basic neural network probabilistic language model (NPLM) support
  • Linux version – added basic neural network bilingual language model (BLM) support
  • Windows & Linux versions – minimal tweaks to progress display
  • Tweaks to demo shell (Bash and Batch) scripts
Update 1.4.10

Jan 11, 2018

  • optimize performance by excluding Slate processing from Windows Defender bottleneck
  • cross-compiler, cross-platform binaries updated and optimized
  • updated demo shell (Bash and Batch) scripts for macOS and consistency
  • edge-case error trap
  • various preparation updates for macOS and Moses 4
Update 1.4.9

Dec 21, 2017

  • MAJOR BUGFIX: The Windows 10 1709 update caused an open source component fail, truncating one of an engine’s databases without warning. This problem may have also manifest itself in larger engines before this update, causing poor translation output quality. Everyone should download this update and rebuild their engines using the “Base on engine…” feature to make sure your new engine has the same TMs as the older engine.
Update 1.4.8

Dec 14, 2017

  • UPDATED SDL Trados Studio plugin: Fix bugs from Trados and Windows updates
  • UPDATED SDL Trados Studio plugin: Added option to remove the ‘AT’ flag
  • UPDATED SDL Trados Studio plugin: Signed by SDL
  • mydutchpal.com support for en-nl and nl-en
  • update BUILDS manifests for birds example
  • improved formatting/display of progress during MERT
  • consistent creation of .json manifest files
  • optimize progressbar updates during train-tm
  • update branding URL references to https://www.slate.rocks
  • add simple exclude option to corpustypes
  • update cleaning to extract short terminology segments
  • consistent script processing between command-line and GUI
  • updated scrub-tm to save dupe pairs in tm-DUPE tree
  • updated scrub-tm to save identical in tm-SAME tree
  • clean exit GUI
  • Added instructions to setup and configure CafeTran MT plugin
Update 1.4.7

Oct 26, 2017

  • Attempt to fix edge-case connector error on some localized Windows systems
Update 1.4.6

Oct 23, 2017

  • fixed windows setWindowsACL of folders/files errors
  • cleaned __slate_prefix__ global variables
  • refactored command-line executables for consistency
  • added adaptive support to `xslate` executable
  • added mydutchpal.com `xslate` graph to MT connector
  • move set_up() out of highlevel to setup.py module
  • always add Python prefix to beginning of path
  • buggix edge case for clean-tm RATIO tree
  • added option to continue batch queue if an input file fails
  • changed slate-daemon* to xslate-daemon*
  • bugfix installing Perl Date::Format module
  • improved Windows file association to support delete-engine from double-click
  • replaced windows batch files with mklink symlinks
Update 1.4.5

Sep 28, 2017

  • reverse edge-case unknown train-model.perl errors
  • full support for Fedora, Redhat, CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian Linux
Update 1.4.4

Sep 23, 2017

  • bugfixes regression tests for Linux version
  • release Slate Connect™
Update 1.4.3

Sep 14, 2017

  • bugfix for edge-case unknown train-model.perl errors
  • Added Croatian language support
Update 1.4.2

Sep 02, 2017

  • EULA updates
  • Trados Studio connector README udpate
  • branding updates to Slate/Slate Rocks
  • OS path consistency updates
  • edge-case bugfix installer %COMSPEC% update
  • edge-case bugfix character encoding error with wx GUI display updates.
Update 1.4.1

Jul 10, 2017

  • Jul 10, 2017Updates to use secure socket (https) with the license authentication server.
    IMPORTANT: THIS UPDATE DEPRECATES ALL PREVIOUS INSTALLERS. YOU MUST UPDATE TO THIS INSTALLER TO ACCESS OUR NEW HTTPS SECURED WEBSITE.
  • Bugfix: installer failed to update when activation count was at max. – fixed.
  • Branding updates
Update 1.4.0

Jun 20, 2017

  • Bugfix “translate file” button was case-sensitive with file extension (.txt was ok but .TXT failed). Fixed.
  • Copyright and branding updates.
  • Major packaging update to support upcoming “starter” and other editions.
  • User-choice component selection during installations
  • Modular installer packaging. Now users download small (10 MB) executable and the installer downloads only the components that the user selects.
Update 1.3.10

Apr 27, 2017

  • Removed aggressive cleanup of backed up changes from installer that deleted a terminology.tab file.
  • Implemented a less aggressive cleanup of backed up changes in the installer.
  • Added protection to block reusing engine names that were deleted.
Update 1.3.9

Apr 11, 2017

  • Bugfix/work-around UTF-8 character decoding error with unidentified illegal UTF-8 characters. The work-around uses a nuclear option to ignore the error and drop the illegal character.
Update 1.3.8

Mar 17, 2017

  • Added extra error trap to Moses’ train-model.perl processing to terminate processing when open source MGIZA++ fails to report the error.
  • Refined error handling logic where a secondary error masked the original fatal error.
  • New vocabulary logs under the BUILDS\lm and BUILDS\tm subfolders. Previous vocabulary files were a simple list of vocabulary. The new format is a tab-delimited file with vocabulary in the left column and the count in the right column.
Update 1.3.7

Mar 10, 2017

  • bugfix – the change from processing with memory buffers to on-disk allows processing of huge data files, but created a bug. If there were HTML escape codes for newline and line separator characters, the ‘scrub-tm’ graph converted them to unicode characters in the text. Processing on-disk meant these changes shifted the number of lines and broke source-target alignment. This fix converts newline and separators to spaces that preserve alignment. This restores the functionality that was used in the in-memory buffer processing.
Update 1.3.6

Mar 8, 2017

  • bugfix `merge-original` functionality in writer-xlf.py. This bug caused SD to create a new XLIFF output file instead of merging translations into the original input XLIFF file. Fixed.
Update 1.3.5

Mar 3, 2017

  • Bugfix – failure to translate mqxliff files from the Dashboard’s “Translate a File” button – fixed
  • Bugfix – removed UI enhancement that displayed progress bars for filter chains per TM file processed. When processing large numbers of TMs (sets of over 1,200 files), Slate Desktop™ crashed and disappeared — fixed.
  • Bugfix – target language exceptions not saved in workbench tree for use in language model — fixed.
  • Enhancement – ratio exceptions saved in new ‘tm-RATIO’ tree under ready-workbench for detailed review.
  • Quality enhancement – removed conservative configuration settings that reduced hardware requirements for early users, but potentially also reduced the quality of some engines. These restored configuration values consume slightly more hardware resources but based on actual customer reports about their hardware, most users will not notice the difference. These updates change does not affect current engines, but potentially improves the quality of new engines
Update 1.3.4

Feb 15, 2017

  • Bugfix – the overhaul that enabled huge TM files created a “too many files open” error when processing hundreds of normal-sized TMs. This update fixes that bug such that one huge TM and many average sized TMs process equally. If you’re merging hundreds of TMs into one engine, you need this update.
Update 1.3.3

Feb 8, 2017

  • Fixed math calculation for invalid, edge-case data
  • Improved resume-after-error support
Update 1.3.2

Feb 8, 2017

  • New Korean language support
  • New Hindi language support
Update 1.3.1

Feb 6, 2017

  • Added new evaluation report metrics to the engine details
    (i) Report additional BLEU calculated without BLEU 1.0 segments. This indicates the amount of work necessary to edit non-correct segments
    (ii) Report average edit-distance per non-correct segment. It’s another indicator of the amount of work necessary to edit non-correct segments.
Update 1.3.0

Feb 03, 2017

  • scrapped SoMaJo German tokenizer
  • reverted to Moses built-in tokenizer
  • supplemented tokenizer with true unsupervised compound splitting for any language – ask us if you want to build a custom compound splitting dictionary for your language.
  • ships with German compound splitting dictionary (136,450 unique word lexicon with 3 or more instances in EuroParl German corpus)

WARNING TO ALL GERMAN USERS:

This update requires that you rebuild all of your engines. Please plan carefully and apply this update only when you have time to rebuild all of your engines. Please contact us for instructions if you need to gradually migrate engines over time.

Update 1.2.9

Jan 31, 2017

  • major code refactoring for cleanup and consistency
  • migrated to consistent internal object model
  • clean/remove legacy files/code
  • migrated to file-based corpus processing – eliminate need to chunk huge files
Update 1.2.8

Jan 22, 2017

  • installer update to force deep cleaning during update
Update 1.2.7

Jan 20, 2017

  • bugfix xslate graph URL escape for source language
  • bugfix error when restoring archive and importing engine
  • bugfix engine details sometimes not displayed
  • faster scrub-tm performance
  • better error reporting with malformed XML
  • updated evaluation report to save tokenized source with retoken markers
Update 1.2.6

Jan 9, 2017

  • Significant code refactoring. reorganized source code libraries in preparation to add new features
  • No functional difference. All works the same as before. No practical reason to apply this update
Update 1.2.5

Dec 28, 2016

  • Bugfix optimized MT connector daemon failed on some systems.
  • added –content command-line argument to xslate to show translated content instead of file path to file with content.
  • Updated evaluation report to show BLEU 1.0 instead of 0.0* for exact match segments shorter than 4 words.
Update 1.2.4

Dec 20, 2016

  • Bugfix optimized MT connector daemon auto-launch error on localized version of Windows
  • Bugfix data buffering problem with optimized MT connector that cause no input to the CAT.
  • Changed to the optimized daemon as the default for all MT connectors.
  • RELEASED Linux update with all functionality now parallel to the current Windows version.

Thank you Igor for letting me use your Russian Windows system to troubleshoot the bug. I couldn’t have done it so quickly and painlessly without you.

Also, see Igor’s performance report for the optimized MT connector daemon. It looks like there’s an average 2 second per segment speed improvement with the new connector. Again, thanks Igor for sharing!

Update 1.2.3

Dec 8, 2016

  •     Bugfix installer failure to recognize/authenticate valid license key
Update 1.2.2

Dec 5, 2016

  • Bugfix for German compound splitting tokenizer
  • New icons
Update 1.2.1

Dec 3, 2016

  • Improved auto-start for MT connector optimized daemon
  • Support additional features with daemon
Update 1.2.0

Nov 30, 2016

  • Optimize MT connector daemon
  • Support for TM weighting
  • New German compound splitting tokenizer
  • Added Slate Desktop™ version to engine description
  • Vocabulary files to builds – see what vocabulary is in you corpus builds
    (BUILDS\lm\$BUILDAME and BUILDS\tm\$LANGS-$BUILDNAME)
  • Allow dots in labels
  • Various bugfixes
Update 1.1.12

Oct 23, 2016 (documented Dec 4, 2016)

  • Automatic terminology file added to Engine
  • Curate TUs in your TMX
  • Regex replacement support for corpus preparation
  • Various bugfixes
Update 1.1.11

Sep 21, 2016

  • Added “birds” examples and changes to allow generating an engine with only 10 sentences in the parallel training data.
  • Preparations for Optimized CAT MT connectors.
Update 1.1.10

Sep 14, 2016

  • Added terminology file support to evaluation of new engines.
  • Fixed error with UTF-8/ASCII characters in displays.
  • Some optimization updates.
Update 1.1.9

Aug 10, 2016

  • Moved management functions from the GUI to graphs. Changes shouldn’t affect users.
  • Resume failed engine generation. You can fix the problem and SD will to resume and continue at the point of failure.
  • Preparations to optimize CAT MT connectors
Update 1.1.8

Jul 31, 2016

  • Affects legacy DoMT customers. With this update, DoMT customers can use these instructions to convert their old BUILD sets to generate a new Slate Desktop™ engine.
Update 1.1.7

July 27, 2016

Fixes a bug in the conversion from legacy engine configurations to the new configuration.

When you apply this update to 1.1.5 or before, you will not have any problems. If you applied 1.1.6, your engine configurations are corrupted and need to  be fixed. Unfortunately, the legacy configuration files were deleted and can not be used for a fix. There are 2 options:

  1. If you have an export package of that engine, simply import the engine over your existing engine. The import process will convert the old configuration file from that package and you’re ready.
  2. If you do not have an export package, please contact me directly and we will manually convert your engine configurations for you. For us to fix the configuration files, we need you to send the following:
        (a) go to C:\xslate\User\graphs
        (b) zip all of your engine folders. They start with “xslate-” these files only contain configuration settings, not any data
        (c) Forward the zip file(s) to us. We’ll repair the corruption and send back to you
Update 1.1.6

Jul 25, 2016

Fixes 1.1.1 to 1.1.5 fixed several minor bugs. This 1.1.6 update adds some new features:

  • Linux installer bugfixes (non-English localizated folder names caused problems. This is a work-around, not a true fix. If you’re installing on non-English Ubuntu, please contact us.)
  • Better terminology support:
        (a) target terms output with same casing as in the terminology file
        (b) engine-specific terminology files
  • New encapsulated engine configurations. This enables better terminology support above.
        (a) The installer converts your legacy engine configuration formats to the new format. If you experience problems, please let me know right away.
        (b) When you import existing engines packages, the process automatically converts to the new engine configuration format.
Update 1.1.0

Jul 25, 2016

Fixes that require you to regenerate your engines. Note that your current engines will run without rebuilding but these changes might degrade quality if you don’t regenerate:

  • Fixed tokenizer escaping error that caused punctuation and symbol errors (most prominent in French text)
  • Fixed tokenizer unescape error that caused %(#93)s and %(#91)s to leak

Other fixes/updates

  • New GUI look.
  • Split engine build process and added UI pages for each.
  • New page to add TMs to SD’s inventory.
  • New page to select TMs from inventory to generate an engine.
  • UI remember the most recently entered language pair and file labels (no need to retype).
  • Added backup for engines & TM inventory – Saves more than “export” feature.
  • Support to delete inventory files.
  • Added Base on engine button to use existing engine as template for new engine.
  • Single, shared error box for text input fields (cleaner UI).
  • Auto-select an engine in the dashboard list after generation is complete.
  • Enhanced the Engine Details panel.
  • Extended keyboard control through added menus with shortcuts.
  • Fixed Error running msiexec /package installer problem.
  • Various other installer updates and fixes, including updating to InstallBuilder 16.4.0.
  • Prevent Windows suspend mode while generating engines and batch translating files (Windows shouldn’t sleep).
  • Installer associates Slate Desktop™ icons to identify files in Windows Explorer.
  • Added uppercase feature. When source segment is all uppercase text, SD sets target segment to uppercase.
  • Tuned preparation to stop removing TUs with only one token.
  • UI remembers the languages and labels from the last session and between new pages.
Update 1.0.9

Feb 18, 2016

  • Now available.