We are very excited to bring to our readers another new interview with one of our KantanMT Feature Developers. This time we interviewed Seosamh Ó Cinnéide, following the launch of KantanOfficeMT™. Seosamh is an Associate Software Development Engineer at KantanMT, and we asked him a few questions to find out more about the features and benefits of using KantanOfficeMT.
KantanMT: As a Developer, you work on different projects like KantanOfficeMT, could you give us a gist of what this new feature is all about?
Seosamh: KantanOfficeMT is all about making it easy and convenient for our clients to translate text, using the KantanMT engines through our API. Once KantanOfficeMT is set up in MS Office, our clients will be able to translate any sentence or paragraph in their documents.
KantanOfficeMT is a part of the KantanWidgets™ Suite of Productivity Apps. KantanOfficeMT is a Microsoft (MS) Office and Internet-based plug-in, which is used to easily create multilingual content directly in Office documents.
KantanMT: Can you tell us a bit more about setting up KantanOfficeMT?
Seosamh: To start using KantanOfficeMT, clients will need an API enabled KantanMT account. To set up the engines for this tool, they need to set the alias of that engine to ‘KantanTranslate’.
Just to give a quick background about profile aliases; they are a group of KantanMT engines or profiles for the same domain that are grouped together. For example, if a client has 10 profiles, some of which relate to medical domain, and they want to group the profiles by categories, they can group the profiles and give them the alias ‘medical’.
Basically, profile aliases will simplify the user experience by cutting down on the time required to specify the use of a particular engine.
Now, to simplify the explanation, I will list the tasks to be performed to use KantanOfficeMT:
- Ensure you have an API enabled KantanMT account.
- Set up the relevant engines with the ‘KantanTranslate’ alias.
- Copy your API token.
- Open the MS Office document you want to translate.
- Select the text you want to translate and right-click. The Research pane appears.
- Click Research options. The Research Options pop-up appears.
- Click Add Services. The Add Services pop-up appears.
- On the Add Services pop-up, in the Address field, type kantanmt.com/KantanOfficeMT.php?token=[API Token], with your API token number at the end, and click Add. The Set Up window appears.
- Click Continue. You will see the list of language pairs in your KantanTranslate alias.
- Click OK.
You are now ready to translate!
KantanMT: Does KantanOfficeMT work for the complete MS Office suite? Is it compatible with the older version of Office?
Seosamh: Yes, because KantanOfficeMT is what Microsoft calls a “Research Service.” It will work with all of the Core MS Office suite on Windows, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook; and it also works on Publisher and OneNote, all the way back to 2003!
KantanMT: Do our users need to set up MS Office differently in order to use KantanOfficeMT?
Seosamh: KantanOfficeMT can be added to MS Office at any time and once you set it up in one MS Office program, it is available in all the installed MS Office programs.
KantanMT: What was your reason behind creating this tool?
Seosamh: In the development team, we are always looking for ways to improve our offering to our clients. We already have connectors to many professional translation tools. So, it made sense to provide a way to get our translations in the world’s leading productivity suite.
KantanMT: You said that our clients need to have some translation engines on the KantanMT platform. Does this mean that if our clients do not have the right training material, KantanOfficeMT would not work effectively? If so, what does this mean for our clients or how can they fix this?
Seosamh: The best translations output is achieved when our clients have the right, in-domain training material for their engines. But for those who don’t, they can still get excellent translation by using KantanFleet engines or by using the training material we provide through KantanLibrary!
KantanFleet is a set of pre-built, domain specific Custom Machine Translation engines, which will allow clients to quickly begin new translation jobs, even if they have little to no training data. KantanFleet engines support 22+ languages and are available in five main domains: Automotive, Financial, Legal, IT and Medical.
Watch the KantanFleet and KantanLibrary videos below:
KantanMT: Can all our clients use this product right away?
Seosamh: Yes! This is available now to any of our clients who have access to the API!
KantanMT: What kind of translation job is KantanOfficeMT best suited for?
Seosamh: KantanOfficeMT is best suited for quickly translating single sentences or short paragraphs. It is extremely suitable for big organisations to translate segments of texts within the document. Let’s say a client has a presentation to pitch for product to a Spanish audience. They can simply repurpose the presentation prepared in English, use KantanOfficeMT to translate some of the texts, edit them, and voila! They are ready.
KantanMT: Is there anything else our users should know about KantanOfficeMT?
Only that as with all our translations it’s 100% confidential and secure.
KantanMT Note: The launch of KantanOfficeMT follows the announcement of KantanTranslate, and KantanSnippet which are also features of the Suite of Productivity Apps from the KantanMT family.
About Seosamh Ó Cinnéide
Seosamh Ó Cinnéide is an Associate Software Developer at KantanMT. He studied PPES (Philosophy, Political Science, Economics and Sociology) from Trinity College Dublin, and is presently completing an ICT Associate Professional from FIT. He is fluent in Irish and English. He has previously worked as a freelance developing websites.
At KantanMT he is working on developing and improving and expanding the range of KantanMT Connectors making use of the KantanMT API so that the power of KantanMT can be used directly within the Translation Management Systems that our clients use. He works in the Software Development Department at KantanMT reporting to Marek Mazur, Software Development Manager.