TransRio en Ingles

Last month I listed Language Weaver as a close-second-place to Google in translation quality. I had read that by purchasing Babylon’s software I could get access to the Language Weaver engine. So I tried it out (the software is cheap) and found out that oops, there’s a catch. Just to be sure I traded quick e-mails with both companies; but at least for now, here’s where it’s at. Babylon is limited (probably by contract) to a 300-letter translation block. That’s right, letters, not words. Basically unworkable except to gist a single sentence. Windows Live accepts 500 words, and Google appears to be unlimited.

So Language Weaver is only for big guys. The company is very nice people, though. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language
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(MT = Machine Translation, not Montana.)

I just finished testing six MT products against each other. Skip to the bottom to see my conclusions, or just read along and learn about a very interesting (and soon to be hot) subject.

I’ve followed the progress of machine translation for 15 years; basically I’m fascinated by it. During that time I’ve owned, actively used, and kept upgraded on several desktop MT programs, as well as experimenting with online versions. Many people like to laugh at MT, and some of the translations are pretty funny, or worse, mangled. Professional translators in particular enjoy deriding MT, for obvious reasons. But now, quietly, many of them are incorporating MT into their workflow.

Personally, even in the primitive versions years ago, I have found MT to be extremely useful in my work, like a super-dictionary. Paste in a block of text in the source language, it quickly spits out, at the very least, a big pile of useful words in the target language. For a person like myself with very weak Spanish, it gives a jump-start to anything I’m trying to write.

Well, Folks, fast-forward to 2009. If you’re reading it here first, I’m pleased: MT is at a tipping point where the output is suddenly not just a pile of useful words, but something a person can basically read and understand. And for reasons I’m about to explain, it’s going to get much better, very quickly. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Language,Recommendations
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Knowledge Management at Great Harvest…

Today I’m celebrating! I finally finished the last of my writing projects in English, which means this blog-en-ingles is at a nice pausing point and I’m ready to move into Spanish. I’ll continue to post progress notes here, but I’m done with real composition for the time being.

Please check out my latest effort if you get a chance. I spent some quality time revising and polishing an essay I wrote in 2004 which explains how knowledge management worked at Great Harvest. Thanks especially to my daughter Sally for her careful writing suggestions; I incorporated most of her edits. I also brought the essay up to date, and sprinkled in links to supporting materials where appropriate.

Originally the essay was written to be a chapter in a book about knowledge management. But it’s still valuable to me because it stands as my clearest and most concise description of Great Harvest, how it really worked, and why it was special. The company still deserves to be interesting to other business people today, especially to other franchisors:

I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll translate it into Spanish; for now it’s just background to my resume, a nice sample of how I think. But it feels good to be at this stopping place. Now I can rob text wholesale from the rest of the blog, get it over to a translator, and start building a formal homepage at www.transrio.com.ar… (please don’t look at what’s there now!).

So without further ado, for your reading pleasure:
uploads/2009/01/Knowledge-management-at-Great-Harvest.htm

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Back in June I mentioned a new piece of software I was trying out. It’s turned out to be something I use every day; in fact I realize now that I’ve been subliminally looking for it for years. I hesitate to recommend it outright, it would depend a lot on your own style and needs.

What it has done for me is allow me to contain and corral all general-interest reading such as magazines. I like relaxing with a good article about something that’s truly interesting, but it needs to be on my terms; I hate that feeling of getting stuck in a magazine, or spending more time than I wanted, reading online. With SuperMemo, anything really cool that I stumble across gets clipped, saved, and then seems to crop up magically at just the right time. There’s never any feeling of being hurried, it’s like the “magazine pile” is all under the surface, out of view, and clutter-free. If I see a sentence, paragraph, or quote that “rings” for me, I absentmindedly highlight it with my pen, and it comes back around as a snippet later when I least expect it. The end result is a feeling that my reading material has doubled in quality. It’s all stuff I’ve chosen personally, with the highest priority or highest interestingness always coming up to the surface.

I recently saw this great quote by Albert Einstein: “Reading, (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Recommendations
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Today I added this to the FAQ page:

What does the GC stand for?

Transrio GC is the formal name of the business. GC is Spanish for KM, which is short for Knowledge Management, or Gestion de Conocimiento.

Neither KM nor GC are part of daily business vocabulary, in fact many good business people don’t even know what they mean. But there are KM trade journals and big KM conventions in the United States, with smaller GC conventions in Spain and Latin America. People working in the field get together to compare notes, and vendors show up with expensive KM solutions for sale. Most true KM/GC practitioners work in very-large-enterprise settings, like multinationals or government. This is where a large population of far-flung knowledge workers need to collaborate in a messy complexity of projects, coordinating production and customer relationships, and so knowledge management turns into its own department, with its own lingo and theories.

Formal KM, the kind seen in KM magazines and conventions, doesn’t actually apply well to small-enterprise problems. In smaller businesses KM just happens. It’s either done well, or it’s done poorly, but people don’t think of it much because it’s an integral part of their work. (more…)

Filed by Pete under Knowledge mgt,Progress notes
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In my spare time I’ve been learning an intriguing piece of software called SuperMemo. I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s strangely addicting. It was written by a fellow in Poland, he’s been working hard on this one idea for about 20 years. It’s not related to my business, but it is (obliquely) KM.

Basically it’s learning software. It automates a process he calls “incremental reading.” You import high-quality articles into SuperMemo, then as you read you highlight the best parts. SuperMemo extracts the highlighted sections, saves them, and keeps track of them by a sophisticated algorithm. They seem to disappear, but then they come back to you days or weeks later, just about the time you would normally forget them altogether. The whole idea is spaced repetition of any snippet of knowledge that you would like to retain. You can literally be reading 15 articles in parallel, simultaneously, easily changing their relative priorities depending on your interests, saving only what matters, and SuperMemo organizes it all for optimum retention. Sounds like a hyper way to read, I know… but it’s oddly enjoyable.

SuperMemo is hard to get the hang of, but I think I’m going to like it. I learned about it in Wired, here. Definitely not for everybody. But it isn’t every day that I run across something totally new. Ask me again in a few months; I’ll know by then if it’s a toy, or a real tool.

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