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Featured application: OpenOffice.org
The free (in terms of cost and source code) office suite OpenOffice.org is a great “gateway” application for translators who would like to get started in open source. Located online at the website of the same name, OO.o is, for all tasks not requiring Word macros, better than 90% compatible with Microsoft Office; this is especially true when a document is created with MSWord, then opened and edited in OO.o. In my first year of freelancing, I used OO.o's “Save as MSWord” function exclusively, and no client ever noticed that I wasn't actually using MSWord. The suite, including applications for word processing, presentations and spreadsheets, is available for Linux, Macintosh and Windows, and requires minimal (or no) retraining if the user is already proficient in the corresponding proprietary applications. For the translator, OO.o offers some language-specific advantages, such as localizations not yet on proprietary vendors' radar screens: Slovenian, Welsh, Lithuanian, Zulu, Basque, Estonian, and the list goes on, at http://l10n.openoffice.org/languages.html For translation memory users, be aware that as of yet, the most common translation memory programs are not able to handle OO.o files directly, since they depend on Word macros. However, it is possible to either save OO.o files in Word format, then open them in MSWord, or to use the OO.o-compatible, and free, translation memory tool OmegaT, located at http://www.omegat.org and also running on Linux, Macintosh or Windows.
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for non-commercial use with attribution to the author Copyright 2005 by Corinne McKay
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